Wizard and Glass
The Dark Tower IV





Viking Hardcover - June 23, 2003
Plume Trade Paperback - June 24, 2003
NAL Massmarket Paperback - September 30, 2003
Unabridged audiobook - September 30, 2003

About Wizard and Glass: The Dark Tower IV


Coming in at nearly 700 pages, Wizard and Glass: The Dark Tower IV is in itself a stand-alone epic. Stephen King has said that this fourth volume in the series was far and away the most difficult to write. In 1996, King wrote, "I knew that Wizard and Glass meant doubling back to Roland's young days, and to his first love affair, and I was scared to death of that story. Suspense is relatively easy, at least for me; love is hard."

In both its structure and its penchant for clever parallel characterizations, Wizard and Glass is a playful and richly evocative riff on Baum's The Wizard of Oz. At the same time, in its spellbinding evocation of the forbidden and ultimately doomed love that grows between young Roland of Gilead and Susan Delgado, Wizard and Glass can also be read as a suspenseful re-imagining of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. But for all its archetypal echoes and textual interplay, Wizard and Glass is above all an especially inspired continuation of Roland and his fellow pilgrims' progress (or lack thereof) toward the elusive Dark Tower. Along the way, King peppers his narrative with loaded references and tie-ins to many of his other novels outside the Dark Tower cycle—including The Stand, The Talisman, Eyes of the Dragon, and Insomnia.

Beginning with an ingenious resolution to the cliffhanger that marked the close of The Waste Lands—wherein the schizophrenic train called Blaine is finally bested by the ka-tet in their riddling duel—King's fourth volume finds his protagonists contending with the realization that they've fallen off the path of the Beam and must now find their way back. This getting-back-to-Kansas narrative unfolds within the opening and closing bookends that frame the story with which Wizard and Glass is centrally concerned. Here, in this central story-within-a-story, King takes us back to Roland's heretofore shadowy youth and brightens the corners of his formative relationships with Cuthbert, Alain, and, most importantly, the beautiful Susan. The circumstances surrounding his mother's betrayal are also finally illuminated.

"There's no place like home," Eddie says near the end of the novel. Here, perhaps for the first time, Eddie and Susannah and Jake are united and unwavering in their commitment to the quest and to their shared destiny; they have, indeed, come home. And Roland, devastating matricide notwithstanding, has for his part finally "learned to love again." But to what end? Wizard and Glass sets a wonderful stage for what is sure to be a wildly unpredictable answer to this fundamental question.

The Wolves of the Calla await.

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