New ‘Dark Tower’ Book On The Way from Stephen King

Stephen King’s The Dark Tower franchise has stood the test of time as one of the best anthologies ever in print. There are now comics and graphic novels that follow the stories with films and a TV series on the way. The question most fans have is what’s left for the books? What can we expect from King and his beloved Roland? Well, the next installment is a stand alone book called The Wind Through The Key Hole.

This book is set in the gunslinger days and has been rumored to bring together the events from book 4 and 5 in the series. Set to hit the shelves on April 24^th, 2012, Stephen King returns to Mid-World after thinking about some unfinished business while penning his latest book 11/26/63. Here is the official press release for the book.

“For readers new to Stephen King’s epic 7-volume fantasy masterpiece The Dark Tower, The Wind Through the Keyhole is a stand-alone novel, and a wonderful introduction to the series. It is an enchanting Russian doll of a novel, a story within a story within a story, which features both the younger and older Roland Deschain – Mid-World’s last gunslinger – on his quest to find the Dark Tower.

For the legions of fans, it is a gift of deeper insight and a chance to discover what happened to Roland and his ka-tet between the time they leave the Emerald City and arrive on the outskirts of Calla Bryn Sturgis.

We join Roland and his ka-tet as a ferocious storm halts their progress along the Path of the Beam. As they shelter from the screaming wind and snapping trees, Roland tells them not just one strange tale, but two – and in doing so sheds fascinating light on his own troubled past.

In his early days as a gunslinger, in the guilt ridden year following his mother’s death, Roland is sent by his father to a ranch to investigate a recent slaughter. Here Roland discovers a bloody churn of bootprints, clawed animal tracks, terrible carnage – evidence that the ‘skin-man’, a shape shifter, is at work. There is only one surviving witness: a brave but terrified boy called Bill Streeter.

Roland, himself only a teenager, calms the boy by reciting a story from the Book of 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 says to Bill. ‘Man and boy, girl and woman, we live for them.’

And stories like these, they live for us.”