by Stephen King. Yay, a bonus Dark Tower novel! While the Dark Tower series as a whole is very cool, there were definitely a lot of things that never got answered in the original seven novels. So an extra installment in between novels four and five was very welcome! Spoilers follow for The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass and The Wind Through the Keyhole.

One unfortunate thing about putting all the novels in order is that TWTtK comes immediately after the one that was already a novel-length flashback to Roland’s youth, which means there’s now a huge section right in the middle of the series where the present-day action barely moves forward, while Roland is telling stories to his friends. Buuuuuuut I don’t totally mind, because we get some more world-building for two separate periods of Mid-World’s history!

First, the old in-universe legend of Tim and the worst stepfather ever. This is the only piece of TDT literature that confirms the connections to Arthurian legend in Mid-World’s past, rather than mentions of “Arthur Eld.” The name “Maerlyn” had been used in the original novels as a possible alternate name for the good old Man in Black, the most recurring Stephen King villain there is. I feel dumb now, because I never understood that “Maerlyn” was supposed to be a corrupted version of “Merlin.” But having Merlin himself appear on page does a lot to make Mid-World’s past feel less like an unknowable legend that everyone alive was just guessing at, and more like the actual magical history the setting deserved to have. (Though it’s still awkwardly and confusingly mixed between real Earth history and its own fantasy elements.) We also get a dragon! I didn’t know Mid-World had dragons, and it’s kind of cool that they’re intelligent enough to let a little kid go after he apologizes profusely for disturbing her, rather than just being aggressive, mindless predators. I’m looking forward to reading The Eyes of the Dragon now, as I’ve heard that the Man in Black appears there too, which makes me wonder if it’s actually set in Mid-World.

As for the actual story-within-a-flashback, eh. I mean, it’s well set-up and all as a story, but as someone from a step-family, I’m never a fan of the old Cinderella-style cliché of “the step-family is evil.” I mean, I guess in fairness, Big Kells starts out evil first and only becomes step-father later . . . eh, doesn’t really help for me. Oh, and the appearance of the Man in Black in the story is interesting, because that means Roland heard fairy tales of his own future arch-nemesis when he was tiny, though admittedly, nothing in TWTtK indicates that Roland actually recognizes the character as such.

One interesting note is that when one character describes the ability billy-bumblers have to sense dangerous storms in advance, she called it their “bright.” This sounds a lot like the way characters are said to have a “shine” when they have the Shining. I’m not sure this is a connection King was trying to make, though, because up until now, only human characters have shined, and I don’t understand how an entire species of animal could have the Shining that way. But who knows?

Moving on to the flashback itself, it really ties up the emotional fallout we never got to see after the flashback in WaG, when Roland was tricked into shooting his mother. We knew Roland felt conflicted about it, due to his love for his mother, but also the betrayal he felt in her cheating on his father. But we never knew his father’s reaction, so it was nice getting more of Steven’s personality. We also get to see more of Mid-World’s slow descent into anarchy and rebellion against Steven’s rule, and even though our first-person protagonist is the king’s son, it’s actually pretty easy to sympathize with the lower class members of the society. With every aspect of Mid-World running down year by year, from the technological knowledge to the soil to time itself, survival becomes harder and harder, and Gilead’s resources for taking care of everyone and enforcing peace farther out from the capitol are clearly beginning to fail. (I mean, Roland’s inner monologue realizes that the mine workers are essentially paid slaves, and proceeds to do nothing about it!) I wonder if Roland himself ever understood that, or if he still feels bitter about the overthrow of his father?

The skin-man is a seriously scary monster. Obviously based on skin-walkers of Navajo legend, it evokes all the terror of that legend, and mixes in the usual Dark Tower technology through the fact that the creature was created when a man crawled into a crack in the mine and came in contact with technology from either our era of Earth, or from our future. It adds to the hints that Mid-World may have been an Earth itself at some point in the past, with both Earth tech and Earth legends still haunting little nooks and crannies in the world. I’m curious if the green light pouring out of the crack in the ground where the miner was transformed into a skin-man is supposed to be a hint at the green crystal ball, though I’m not sure we learned enough about it in the first novel to say for sure. Either way, the variety of animals the skin-man transforms into in this novel is pretty cool, especially the final one.

—doctorlit wonders if we’ll ever get more info on Roland’s backstory