2013 read #69: The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King.

The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King
389 pages
Published 2012
Read from June 1 to June 2
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The Wind Through the Keyhole is the fourteenth King book I've read to date, meaning I have now read more titles by King than by any other single author. I got curious to tally the runners up; here's how the list stands as of today:

Stephen King - 14
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - 13 (depending on how you divvy up the Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger collections)
Roger Zelazny - 10
Mark Twain - 9
Michael Crichton - 8
Tad Williams - 8
J. K. Rowling - 7
Robert Silverberg - 7
Dan Simmons - 7
Kurt Vonnegut - 7

Raw numbers aside, what drove my interest in King was, almost exclusively, the Dark Tower series. At its best, that series mingles high fantasy and Western horror to create possibly the most absorbing and addictive fantasy setting I've encountered. The seven books in the main series are wildly uneven -- The Gunslinger is the best, followed closely by The Wastelands, with the final three post-car accident books way way down on the quality scale -- but for a few years I couldn't get enough of that story universe, going so far as to read books like Insomnia, which only connects to the Dark Tower in the most circuitous of ways. Those last three Dark Tower books may have cured me of my fixation, but when I saw The Wind Through the Keyhole on prominent display at the library, I figured Roland's world was worth a revisit.

Some minor spoilers ahead.

This time around, the story's enjoyability improves with its distance from the "present" of the Dark Tower series. The book is structured as a framing device within a framing device; trapped during a freak "starkblast" (a clumsy Game of Thrones reference?), Roland tells his ka-tet a tale of his youth, in which younger Roland tells a boy an In-World fairy tale, the titular "The Wind Through the Keyhole." The scenes set in the ka-tet's "present" are awful. King's heart doesn't seem to be in it at all; neither Susanna nor Eddie talk or act like themselves, Jake barely says a word, and Roland speaks and behaves incorrectly, given when this falls on the series' timeline. (As I remember it, Roland didn't begin to shed the Man With No Name act to be more like a friendly old grandfather figure, or revert to his goofy In-World speech patterns with all the thankee-sais and whatnot, until after he danced the commala in Wolves of the Calla, well after this point in their journey.) The tale of Roland's youth is fairly okay, a definite improvement. And the fairy tale at the center of the book is really quite good. But not amazingly good, d'ye kennit.