Wizard and Glass

The Dark Tower Book 4

Stephen King

This book is dedicated to Julie Eugley and Marsha DeFilippo. They answer the mail, and most of the mail for the last couple of years has been about Roland of Gilead—the gunslinger.

Basically, Julie and Marsha nagged me back to the word processor. Julie, you nagged the most effectively, so your name comes first.

ARGUMENT

Wizard and Glass is the fourth volume of a longer tale inspired by Robert Browning’s narrative poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.”

The first volume, The Gunslinger, tells how Roland of Gilead pursues and at last catches Walter, the man in black, who pretended friendship with Roland’s father but who actually served Marten, a great sorcerer. Catching the half-human Walter is not Roland’s goal but only a means to an end: Roland wants to reach the Dark Tower, where he hopes the quickening destruction of Mid-World may be halted, perhaps even reversed.

Roland is a kind of knight, the last of his breed, and the Tower is his obsession, his only reason for living when first we meet him. We learn of an early test of manhood forced upon him by Marten, who has seduced Roland’s mother. Marten expects Roland to fail this test and to be “sent west,” his father’s guns forever denied him. Roland, however, lays Marten’s plans at nines, passing the test... due mostly to his clever choice of weapon.

We discover that the gunslinger’s world is related to our own in some fundamental and terrible way. This link is first revealed when Roland meets Jake, a boy from the New York of 1977, at a desert way station. There are doors between Roland’s world and our own; one of them is death, and that is how Jake first reaches Mid-World, pushed into Forty-third Street and run over by a car. The pusher was a man named Jack Mort... except the thing hiding inside of Mort’s head and guiding his murderous hands on this particular occasion was Roland’s old enemy, Walter.

Before Jake and Roland reach Walter, Jake dies again... this time because the gunslinger, faced with an agonizing choice between this symbolic son and the Dark Tower, chooses the Tower. Jake’s last words before plunging into the abyss are “Go, then—there are other worlds than these.”

The final confrontation between Roland and Walter occurs near the Western Sea. In a long night of palaver, the man in black tells Roland’s future with a strange Tarot deck. Three cards—The Prisoner, The Lady of the Shadows, and Death (“but not for you, gunslinger”)—are especially called to Roland’s attention.