Sit yourself down for a spell. Uncle Stevie has a few tales to tell around the campfire.

Stephen King’s newest effort, “The Wind Through the Keyhole,” combines two of the author’s more masterful skills: writing short stories with similar themes in a single package, and penning chapters set in his Western-tinged fantasy “The Dark Tower” series, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.

The tome is King’s eighth “Dark Tower” novel, although it takes place between the fourth volume, “Wizard and Glass” (1997), and the fifth, “Wolves of the Calla” (2003).

While on their mission to the mythical Dark Tower, the enigmatic gunslinger, Roland Deschain, and his fellow questers take refuge from an oncoming “starkblast,” a violent storm that brings deathly cold temperatures and destruction.

Roland tells his people of his early days as a gunslinger from Gilead and how he teamed up with another young man to investigate a shape-shifter, deemed “the Skin-man,” who began a killing spree around a mining town.

King takes the reader down the rabbit hole a little more from there: Roland strikes up a friendship with a young boy whose father is murdered, and tells him a fairy tale — one that lasts half the novel — involving magicians, dragons, swamp people and an 11-year-old named Tim determined to avenge his father’s death.

On anybody else’s typewriter, this might have turned into a mess. King, however, shows himself to be an ace storyteller yet again, spinning yarns like a favorite relative about a hero and his adventures in a world like our own but just slightly skewed.

The famed horror-meister has pulled back from expanding the sprawling Dark Tower world to now detailing different parts of its Mid-World, such as creating fairy tales parents tell kids, fleshing out previous characters and utilizing an indigenous speech and vocabulary as distinctive as Elvish or Klingon.

It may not be as much of a page-turner as King’s recent novels “Under the Dome” and “1 1⁄22/63,” but “Wind Through the Keyhole” is a perfect storm of everything he does well.

Copyright ©2026— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)