The Wind through the Keyhole: A Dark Tower Novel (The Dark Tower Book 8) by Stephen King (EPUB)

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Ebook Info

  • Published: 2012
  • Number of pages: 321 pages
  • Format: EPUB
  • File Size: 0.00 MB
  • Authors: Stephen King

Description

For readers new to The Dark Tower, The Wind Through the Keyhole is a stand-alone novel, and a wonderful introduction to the series. The Dark Tower is now a major motion picture starring Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba.The No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller The Wind through the Keyhole is a perfect bridge between the fourth and fifth novels in Stephen King’s epic masterpiece. A story within a story which features both the younger and older gunslinger, it is also a wonderful introduction to The Dark Tower series.As Roland Deschain, and his ka-tet leave the Emerald city, a ferocious storm halts their progress along the Path of the Beam. While they shelter from the starkblast, Roland tells a story about his younger days, when he was sent by his father to investigate evidence of a murderous shape-changer. At the scene of the crime he had tried to comfort a terrified young boy called Bill Streeter by reciting a story from The Magic Tales of the Eld that his mother used to read to him at bedtime, ‘The Wind through the Keyhole’. ‘A person’s never too old for stories,’ he said to Bill. ‘Man and boy, girl and woman, we live for them.’ And stories like these, they live for us.JOIN THE QUEST FOR THE DARK TOWER…THE DARK TOWER SERIES:THE DARK TOWER I: THE GUNSLINGER THE DARK TOWER II: THE DRAWING OF THE THREE THE DARK TOWER III: THE WASTE LANDS THE DARK TOWER IV: WIZARD AND GLASS THE DARK TOWER V: WOLVES OF THE CALLA THE DARK TOWER VI: SONG OF SUSANNAH THE DARK TOWER VII: THE DARK TOWERTHE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE: A DARK TOWER NOVEL

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I’ll start out by stating the one and only flaw with this book. That is if you haven’t read the other dark tower novels, or at least the first four, you may not fully understand this book or it’s writing style so I encourage you to read the other books first before reading this.As for this book, it starts off after the end of Wizard and glass, with Roland giving a story from his past when he was a young gunslinger in a nearby town from Gilead to deal with a “Skin-Man” creature terrorizing and slaughtering the community. But halfway into that story he begins telling another story, more of a fairy tale, about a young boy on a quest to save his mother from his abusive step father.I don’t really want to go further into it, but the gist is basically a story within a story, so it may throw some off a bit but trust me, the wind through the keyhole is very engaging, never boring, and in my opinion one of the best editions of the series. I’ve read the other dark tower novels and are my favorite of King’s works. This was a great read and made it blast to be able to relive Roland and all the other characters in the series.Highly recommended for Dark Tower fans and newcomers alike.

⭐Part of The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King.Highly Recommended!!!!!!! Too bad I could not give 10 stars.#1 The Gunslinger – Introduction to the last Gunslinger, Roland. This book was wonderful. It introduces you to some of the characters of the series and gives you the Gunslinger’s quest.#2 – The Drawing of the Three – Roland pulls future Gunslingers, Jake, Eddie, and Suzannah from our world over to his. I really enjoyed how this was done. The characters are very likeable (especially OY)#3 – The Wastelands – The Gunslingers make continue on their way. Blaine really is a pain.#4 – Wizard and Glass – Roland tells them the story of Susan, The girl at the window. A very sad thing that happened to him in childhood. A beautiful story.#5 – Wolves of the Calla – The gunslingers help a town that is about to have their children taken. Jake makes a friend his own age. A character from another King book is met. This book was well put together.#6 – Song of Suzannah – This one tells of something that Suzannah is going through.#7 – The Dark Tower – The quest is finally over. The tower is reached. But who will make it there? Believe it or not this book made me cry.#* – The Wind Through the Keyhole – This story takes place between some of the other books. It is Roland and his gang taking refuge from a storm and Roland telling stories to pass the time. The stories are beautifully written.All of the stories in this series are exceptional. I love how they flow together. It really does seem like one continuous book.

⭐By chance, I had just finished “The Dark Tower,” the seventh and final book of King’s magnum opus, “The Dark Tower Saga.” He has also published a short story, “The Sisters of Eluria,” which can be found in “Just After Sunset,” as well as this volume to supplement the Dark Tower tale. This novel takes us back to the sometimes rich, sometimes barren landscapes of Mid-World, as Roland and his friends take shelter from a storm, and he regales them with one of his fabulous tales from his youth. It is a must read for Dark Tower fans, and I suggest it for all King readers, new and old, as it is not dependent upon the earlier works. It is a story of life’s joys and sorrows, and a young boy whose love for his mother conquers the evils which beset him. A wonderful book.

⭐For all you Dark Tower fans, it is a lot of fun to see the ka-tet back together again, but the real point of the book is to have Roland tell a long story to the group. Unlike Wizard and Glass (Book Four of the series), however, the long story is not about a younger Roland, but rather a story in and of itself. So, if you are chomping for more background on the ka-tet here, there is some, but not a lot. If, on the other hand, you are up for a terrific story in its own right, this book is great. At times reminiscent of select scenes from LOTR and at times reminiscent of stories like The Eyes of the Dragon, this story has stayed with me a few weeks after finishing it.

⭐I began reading the Gunslinger nigh on thirty years ago. It took me several false starts to push through that first book (on a cold, wet day I recall.) It’s thirty years later and I still go back to Roland’s ka-tet like old friends. The Wind through the Keyhole is a breath of air between Blaine and the Calla, and is a pleasure to re-read years later. Say true.

⭐This entire tower series was excellent. It took me until the second book to fully understand what was going on. But after that I ordered the whole series as soon as available and could not put any of the books down. In fact, I got 2 other people hooked on this series. These are a combination of science fiction, mystical, and adventure. They do have some violence in them, but not like some of his other books. Anyone considering reading this book should start with book 1; it will make more sense. This particular book came out after the Tower Series was completed, but is still part of the group.

⭐Stephen King’s writing has improved over time and this novel, the latest in the series, proves the point. Once again, these stories told by Roland Deschain were fascinating, compelling and so enjoyable. They made me laugh, made me cry and made me wish they would never end. This 8th volume of the Dark Tower Series is one of Stephen King’s BEST! A novel that anyone would enjoy immensely, even those who never read any of the other Dark Tower novels. However, after reading this book, I’m sure they would want to read all of the others in the series. Enjoy! Can’t wait until the next Dark Tower novel!

⭐The Unsung Hero of Stephen Kings Considerable Talent:Wow. What can I say? I didn’t read this collection because having read Stephen’s entire catalogue, I didn’t see what amounts to a very long Western {I avoid Westerns like the plague usually} adventure, could possibly add to the mix. I couldn’t be more wrong! I’ve read all of the Gunslinger volumes now, including the post conclusion addition Wind Through The Keyhole and I am once again left in awe. The way Stephen has written these tales weaves Cowboy Roland Deschain, Ex-druggie Eddie Dean, profoundly injured but in no way Disabled Susanna Dean and young but no Child Jake Chambers and their wonderfully intricately painted {That way Stephen has of creating live images of every tiny detail the through words} surroundings in to your imagination and in this case, your heart, is nothing less than breathtaking! When I am reading these books, I’m in love with Mr Deschain and the other characters feel like well loved members of my own family. I feel like I could walk out of my house and down the road and I will stumble into an arid wasteland populated by tumbleweeds, cowpokes and old world Sheriffs who wield huge nickel plated revolvers and drink themselves silly in the local tavern every evening to drown out the harshness of their daily lives. These stories are written so well you feel like you almost could be there. It’s shocking how totally immersed one can get into the dreamscapes of another’s very clever imagination.I recommend you read these if you like John Wayne, or not. Read them if you’ve been avoiding them because they might be a little bit too far from Stephens usual work, because they’re not. If anything life back then could be more harrowing than an alien invasion, a killer clown on the lamb, or a rip through time enabling one man to go through and rewrite history for the destruction of life as we know it. At turns these books are terrifying. But they’re also beautiful, heart-wrenching, thought provoking and harsh. They are masterpieces each and every one.

⭐A return to Stephen King’s completed Dark Tower saga, which appears to have disappointed many. Set midway through the seven book cycle, this was never going to be a story of revelations about the main characters of that masterpiece. Their story is told. Instead, they appear only as a framing device for two other stories. As they hunker down before a mighty storm, Roland begins to tell a tale of his youth, and his battle against a skin changer. This is where things get interesting, because ‘that’ isn’t the story either – it’s an entertaining novella, but itself is a framing story for a third, which young Roland tells to a child in his care. This core story, ‘The Wind Through The Keyhole’, is a lovely tale of quest and self-discovery, as a young man seeks revenge for his father’s death and hope for his mother’s blindness. I love the structure of this book – the Russian Doll effect of a story within a story within another story. That said, it’s a device with potential that King barely scratches, and therefore it wastes an opportunity to really expand on the world he’s built, and examine it in new ways outside of the central Tower narrative. King’s storytelling gift is evidenced in each story, but he shows little interest in the potential for complexity that his nested structure offered.

⭐He is back, the master gunslinger of realistic fantasy. With him we are not getting down into some world of a nightmarish imagined fictionalized past, but in a world we are a part of. Stephen king does it with a very effective method that he is not the only one to use but he uses it with such an art that this novel becomes both a thriller and a treatise in philosophical and practical ethics.First of all we are so happy to meet with Roland, Eddie, Suzanna and Jake again, plus of course Oy, the smart wild furry pet of theirs. This pet is useful in the first layer of the three-tiered story since he is the one who felt the coming of the starkblast, a special meteorological phenomenon of the Middle World: a wind tornado that sweeps a swathe of land with hurricane-force wind and cold that can freeze dead any living organism and explode any tree into splinters.And that’s the first quality of Stephen King’s multi-layered story telling. He takes us into a world that has several layers too. In this novel the top layer which is our modern world is hardly present except with the three characters that have been napped from it: Eddie the weaned and reformed drug addict, Suzannah the female black lady crippled by a subway accident in New York, and Jake the young teenager escaping his stifling family. Then a few allusions, to Gary Cooper or who knows what or whom that comes like an ugly duckling in a batch of swan chicks.Deep under the story-telling present which is nearly ours, at least simultaneous to ours, the old dead world of super-advanced technology that has left behind some artefacts, machines, some technology that is often going berserk or is already out of order. In this episode we do have some allusions to some of that technology, satellite communication, cloud computing and a few others, but always emerging from that old world that has gone to rot. This technological, blind, inhumane and non-human world survives as a danger, a menace, the attempt by survivors or pirates who took control of what’s left of this world to take over time and history and hence the worlds that came after this technology. In other words this deepest layer is the advanced world that existed before an apocalypse that destroyed it leaving behind ruins and desolation.We have to understand here both the top modern world that is ours and this deepest technological world that has died and is only surviving archaeologically are embracing the Middle World with two destructive influences. Everything that dies in the deepest world causes devastation and death in the Middle World, and everything that goes wrong in our world, especially due to careless pollution and the unsustainable race to easy profit, even if that means exploiting or killing human beings, causes negative phenomena in the Middle World.Finally the Middle World, just under ours, with doors here and there to cross from one to the other, and more por less over the oldest dead one, is a fantasy world, feudal in organization and very close to some 19th century western saga. It is the main locale of the Dark Tower novels. But this world has history and the story telling technique used by Stephen King in the Dark Tower novels is to intersperse the picaresque voyage through this Middle World, along the Path of the Beam to the Dark Tower where the Crimson King is locked up in his insane but power-packed senility, with stories told by Roland, the dunslinger from Gilead, a dead kingdom of the Middle World, about his own youth and experience.In this novel the voyage and discovery in the Middle World is very limited since the seven Dark Tower novels have already taken Roland and his friends to the Dark Tower itself, hence to the end, which is nothing but a new beginning, of course should I say, since the end is always the beginning. So the essential part of this novel is a long story told by Roland, and this story told by Roland contains a story that his own mother used to tell him, the eponymous story of the novel, a story that took place in the distant past of Middle World embedded in the story of one of the very first missions Roland got from his father as a gunslinger.Hence in a universe that has at least three layers Stephen Kind embeds a story that itself has three temporal levels. This multiplication of levels within levels is the originality of this novel and all Dark Tower novels. Other novelists use this technique, Anne Rice for instance, but this triple time strata within this triple space strata is definitely original. And it is fascinating since we are taken away from our present by so many layers of distance building fantasy, the top layer being our own world, that we feel the deepening distance as natural and not some illusion. This deep and distant worlds become all the more real.Yet Stephen King though is a lot more than a simple story teller. He is a realistic author who speaks directly and/or allegorically of our problems in our world in our time. What are the problems he is speaking of here? They are essential in many ways.He speaks of love and of the very bitter experience Roland went through with his mother he adored and still adores, though he killed her himself, by accident in a way, but his guilt is constantly over-brimming. In this experience Roland learned that the most powerful love between two people can just be terminated by any event and one of these people moves into another adventure, love affair or whatever, and leaves the other person and eventually their offspring stranded in frustrated love. In this case it is Roland’s mother who moves on and we already know from another novel that Roland killed his mother. We are confronted to his guilt, though he could not know he was actually killing his mother, but we are also confronted with a note she left behind for him and her demand, request, prayer, begging that he should forgive her. And here I must say Stephen King must have changed with age. Under the name of Richard Bachman he would never have answered yes to this question, and I must say that even under Stephen King’s own name he extremely rarely got to such an ending.A crime leads to a crime which leads to a crime, with no possible outlet, evasion, escape from this curse, fate, course of affairs. To evade a curse at the least and at the best Stephen King has always required a human sacrifice of some sort. Think of Thinner in which the main character is saved from the curse by having his wide and daughter cursed I n his place. Think of The Stand in which three innocent sacrificial human beings are burnt to death by an A-bomb to push aside for a while the Black Man, the forces of evil. These are only two examples, and even Christine, the devilish car survives after being crushed into the size of a shoe box.But that leads to another element that is fascinating. Stephen King had always been a very little empathetic and emotional author but in this latest novel the empathetic emotions we feels all along are numerous and so powerful that at times we have to stop reading just to digest the emotions. In the old days Stephen King was a genius of terrorizing, horrifying or grossing-out his audience with his tales. Here there is another dimension which is reaching the emotional power of empathy. If you think of Misery there is no love wasted anywhere and there is no empathy either required from the readers for the fictional author or for the nurse. The fictional author is a cold, cruel insensitive man totally deprived of sympathy or empathy for anyone and the nurse is a paranoid schizophrenic torturer.In this novel, more that in any of the other Dark Tower novels, there is a tremendous level of emotional empathy, probably because the hero of the central story is an 11 year old boy.What’s more the novel is constantly crossed with class distinctions, class segregation, class exploitation at a level that is so intense that we are surprised by this discourse in Stephen King. This is a sign of his period, of the enormous human suffering the present crisis is imposing onto the world in general but also on to the weaker and weakest strata of society. It is not new in Stephen King. It is only a lot more intense than what I seem to remember from all the novels and short stories I have read.Yet do not turn Stephen King into a social writer. He is not. A social writer could not have resisted making the shapeshifter be the owner of the general store of the mine, of the bars and whorehouse of the mine, the direct and main exploiter of the miners in their everyday life though not in their work since that man is not the owner of the mine itself. He is only the parasite exploiter of an exploitative situation and an exploited bunch of miners. The second generation exploiter, the second tier of exploitation. In other words Stephen King avoids the easy social depicting and caricaturing of humanity. Evil is NOT ONLY the result of exploitation and the deed of exploitative businessmen and industrialists or even shopkeepers. Evil is a deeply human “quality” that is absolutely shared by everyone and if some manage not to be evil, at least not most of the time, it is because they use their heads first and their instincts and impulses only second.And there Stephen King is a tremendous ethical author and it is a real pleasure to read such horrible stories because they are profoundly human and even humane.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

⭐Whilst seemingly a late addition to King’s epic Dark Tower series, The Wind Through The Keyhole is in reality so much more. Roland and his ka-tet take shelter from a storm, and, whilst taking refuge, the Gunslinger tells a tale from his own younger life about a ‘skin-shifter’, a man who can change shape to take animal form. This story in turn features the younger Roland telling a boy the story of ‘The Wind Through The Keyhole’ – and it is this standalone story that lies at the heart of the book and, rightly, takes up the bulk of its pages.This main part of the book is a tale of which the Brothers Grimm would have been proud. It’s hard to say much without giving too much away, but it’s simply an old fashioned fairy story in which a boy heads out into a massive, terrifying forest to save himself and his mother from the clutches of the evil stepfather. Whilst this may sound massively cliched – and could easily be so in the hands of a less gifted author – in the hands of Stephen King, the story unquestionably succeeds. One of King’s massive strengths as a writer has always been his ability to seemingly recollect how it was to be a child or a youth, and to write from that perspective. He’s shown this time and time again in stories such as The Body (filmed as Stand by Me) and It, and The Wind Through The Keyhole shows that encroaching old age has not dimmed this talent.What the story also shows is King’s overriding ability to simply tell a story. In recent years it seems that, after literally decades of being tagged as simply a horror eiter, the media and the critics are now beginning to see him as something far more than that – a master story teller, who can tap into one’s deepest feelings, whether love, dread or despair, and can quite literally transport one to another world.If this book has a companion in King’s massive canon of work, rather than The Dark Tower series, it’s surely The Eyes of The Dragon – a standalone fairytale about a prince being framed for the murder of his father, the king, by an evil magician. Whilst King later loosely tied The Eyes of The Dragon into the Dark Tower series, the link is here far more overt.My only criticism of the book is that the fact that it is a Dark Tower novel, which fact may deter non-DT fans from reading it. If so, it would be a great loss. If you’re a DT fan, you’ll revel in the further glimpse into Roland’s early life, and enjoy the superb fairy story at the heart of the book. If you’re not a DT fan, you’ll still love the fairy story. In either case, there is no excuse for missing out.

⭐This is a nice little addition to the “Dark Tower” series which I enjoyed very much. A story within a story, we see our Ka’tet sheltering from a storm and whilst doing so, Roland tells them a story from before…and during this story another story is told. There is not really a lot more to be said, our favourite characters make an appearance and its set about midway through the Dark Tower series as a whole – Dark Tower 4.5. The 3* rating I have given it is based on this book and where it sits within the Dark Tower series, rather than a rating I might have given it as a standalone book – because really, if you havent read or don’t intend to read the series you are probably not going to pick this up anyway. As someone who devoured all 7 Dark Tower books in under two weeks I would recommend this: If you are intending to read the series but have not yet started, or reached the point where this book sits, then DON’T read it as book 4.5. Read books 1-7 and come back to it. If you have already read the books, and are intending on a re-read, then you could happily read this where it is set – in the middle – and it would work very well. It doesnt really expand or answer any lingering questions from the epic as a whole but its fun and it was very nice to visit with Roland and friends again.

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