King’s latest book reflects power of a keyhole to the past
Horrormeister returns with a new instalment in the Dark Tower series
After a heroic journey featuring a dragon, swamp mutants and a giant- sized tiger, the young protagonist at the centre of Stephen King’s newest novel comes to a dreamy thought about all of time and space.
“Time is a keyhole … We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do — the wind that blows through the keyhole — is the breath of all the living universe.”
The cosmic image runs the risk of coming out a wooden clunker, but King’s storytelling makes it come alive. He also uses the metaphor to bind together the three short tales in The Wind Through The Keyhole in surprising thematic harmony.
When the prolific author entered his self- imposed retirement in 2004, it was on the heels of wrapping up the Dark Tower series, the genre- bending epic that spanned over 30 years and seven books.
It followed Roland, the last gunslinger, on his quest across a dark, supernatural- filled wasteland crawling with literary mash- ups and allusions galore. ( The Wizard of Oz was one of many touchstones memorably and hauntingly folded into the series.)
Threads from the series were also woven into a dozen other King books, from Salem’s Lot to Hearts In Atlantis. If there ever was a time for King to step away from storytelling, it was after finally completing the uber- narrative that carried through so much of his writing.
But King not only ended his exile years ago, returning like clockwork to his book- a- year cycle, but he’s now returned to Dark Tower’s weird fantasy world with an unconventional entry that escapes the trappings of a cash- in sequel or prequel.
The Wind Through The Keyhole picks up after the events of the series’ fourth book, Wizard and Glass, long before many of the characters met their alternating grisly and bittersweet fates. Roland and his fellow travellers, Jake, Eddie and Susannah, seek refuge inside from a deadly “starkblast” — an explosive winter storm that’s also a likely nod by King to George R. R. Martin’s popular A Song of Fire and Ice series.
From there, it’s pure campfire storytelling, as Roland tells his group a flashback tale from his own past — a horror- western about his younger days hunting a shape- shifting monster — which turns into a fable that makes up the heart ( and bulk) of the book, about a boy trekking through an endless forest to find a wizard.
All three stories fold into each other smoothly, and even though this is one of the shorter entries in the Dark Tower series, the book is big on action, tension and King- style creep- outs, thanks to a deadly shape- shifter, a tribe of mutant swamp- things and a ghastly tax collector.
The Wind Through The Keyhole is a well- crafted reflection on how the stories from our past can still affect us, and it’s made even more effective with King using the Dark Tower mythology to frame the events.
King may have officially closed the door to the series in 2004, but with The Wind Through The Keyhole he has found a masterful way to revisit the themes, motifs and characters from the series — however briefly — without kicking the whole door down.
In the end, it’s the readers themselves who are looking through the keyhole into different pasts of the Dark Tower mythology.
But through the keyhole, even after almost a decade since the series completed, King’s fantastic universe still lives.