DF LEWIS’s DETAILED REAL-TIME REVIEWS OF THE WHOLE DARK TOWER SERIES LINKED FROM HERE.
My on-going real-time reviews of THE DARK TOWER novels by STEPHEN KING. These reviews are intended to be virgin first-reading real-time-review extrapolations without benefit of any other information about them.
[All my real-time reviews are linked from here: http://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/ or just the Stephen King ones: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/my-real-time-reviews-of-stephen-king-the-dark-tower-etc/]
There is no guarantee how quickly the review below will progress, whether it be days or years.
THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE by Stephen King
first published 2012 – this edition Hodder & Stoughton hardback 2012 (first British edition) purchased from Amazon UK and received today.
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STARKBLAST
Pages 3 – 8
“Oy was beyond them, at the edge of the circus-painted raft, looking rapidly down at his own reflection.”
So early into my retrocausal ‘inquel’ reunion with my friends of this story-world-made-real, I did not expect such personal confirmation to me in this way from the author himself of my theory in earlier ‘Dark Tower’ real-time reviews that I am Oy or Oy am me. Retrocausal is the key word, the ka word, I guess, something that I’ve been harping on about ever since I invented Cern Zoo. Here, we (Roland, Eddy, Susannah-Detta) find Oy talking to an old man. I, you see, am an old man, too – in real life as the reader of this book. Well, it is good to be back; Jake is somewhere ahead. [I made acquaintance with someone called Jake today for the first time by email after having read his excellent stories a few weeks ago. Retrocausality and Serendipity]. (27 Apr 12 – 6.30 pm bst)
Page 8 – 13
“‘Are ‘ee ready?’ Bix asked them. His eyes were nearly as bright as Oy’s.”
I feel an uncanny power upon me. That Bix is the old man’s name. (Bix B9 Benign??) He is the ferryman with a raft to take the ka-tet bank to bank, I guess. Just like the reader does by reading it. Nothing happens at all if left unread. Meanwhile, oy myself wonder about ‘The Path of the Beam’ and how it has been affected by this retrocausal diversion to pre-Calla. We’re in a new billy-bumbler ball-game for we readers who read (about Mia’s Farrow et al) ‘The Dark Tower’ in its pre-ordered, pre-ordained order – till now. (28 Apr 12 – 2.15 pm bst)
Pages 13 – 35
“‘And if you come back this way, stop and visit awhile with old Bix. Tell him of your adventures.'”
As Starkblast approaches, Roland prepares to thread the wind – or the wind threads him – with two inner stories. One of which his Mother told him, as a child, about the Wind through the Keyhole. Stories so huge, I guess, that as inner stories they eventually become outer ones. Inner and outer in or out of synergy? Filleting each other for primacy? (28 Apr 12 – 6.45 pm bst)
THE SKIN-MAN (PART 1)
Page 39 – 56
“She might have been knitting a blanket, but held before that barrel of a body and breasts so big each of them could have fully shaded a baby from the sun, whatever it was looked no bigger than a handkerchief.”
Like fantasy and the handkerchief-sized paper page in this book I read and on which such fantasy is literally stained in the sahpe of words. So… O any Ebook readers of this story eat your hearts out, as you think you truly follow (like me) a younger Roland and his callow companion on their inner-story quest to save a community from the skin-man. Commissioned by his father. Things I vaguely recall from reading the Dark Tower books heretofore come back to me piecemeal, making them even more real than I actually thought of them before. Time within earlier time within future time within earlier time… There is something fiction-magical, fiction-magal about the name Stephen King – a character in these books – that makes me believe I ought to read this excresence to a once thought-to-be-whole canon of truth. With any other author and I wouldn’t have bothered. Even with other authors I might generally prefer to King are not worthy of such second thoughts of completism. Only King, at his best or his second-ratest… (29 Apr 12 – 9.35pm bst)
Page 56 – 76
“I loved it myself; the sound of the wind has always made me think of good times and far places.”
Although considered by the locals as too young for the job, Roland and his companion are set to deal with the skin-man – as his father once dealt with the Crows… “…‘here are the billy-bumblers sitting all a-row and scenting the air. They know, don’t they?‘” (30 Apr 12 – 6.50 pm bst)
Page 76 – 96
“At least the wind, which was still strengthening, was at our backs.”
Poignancy among the skin-man kill; as a boy is comforted about his dead dad. A whodunnit for Roland and Jamie to tease out the culprit when in human form. One of the salt-miners or someone else? Currently, I’m not sure where this is all going. Even the style, oddly salted itself, drags meaningfully… (1 May 12 – 6.50 pm bst)
Page 96 – 116
“Stories take a person away. If they’re good ones, that is.”
Cooling his bootheels, Roland continues – with hypnotism – to whodunniticise the boy whose dad died at the ‘hands’ of the skin-man: and tries to scry the skin-man’s markings not as an animal but as a human for future identity purposes: and, a story-within-a-story-within-a-story as a by-product or retrocausation of that hypnotism: as they prepare to face the danger of gittin that skin-man: the story within the story within a story being ‘The Wind Through the Keyhole’ that his Mother once told Roland as a child (Roland here in first person singular nekkidness as a young man being told about himself by an older manself with a mind to the Child as Father of the Mind): and it’s just like us readers being hypnotised back into the dark-towering layers of ‘story’ we were once told by a mother-King (without the ‘fu’) in a backdrop of our minds or of our single mind… “now working against the wind.” (2 May 12 2.30 pm bst)
THIS REAL-TIME REVIEW NOW CONTINUED HERE
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A comment from a reader of this review appended here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/wind-through-keyhole.html