Books
Wizard and Glass, the fourth episode in King's white-hot Dark Tower series, is a sci-fi/fantasy novel that contains a post-apocalyptic Western love story twice as long. It begins with the series' star, world-weary Roland, and his world-hopping posse (an ex-junkie, a child, a plucky woman in a wheelchair, and a talking dog-like pet named Oy the Bumbler) trapped aboard a runaway train. The train is a psychotic multiple personality that intends to commit suicide with them at 800 m.p.h.--unless Roland and pals can outwit it in a riddling contest. It's a great race, for the mind and pulse. Movies should be this good. Then comes a 567-page flashback about Roland at age 14. It's a well-marbled but meaty tale. Roland and two teen homies must rescue his first love from the dirty old drooling mayor of a post-apocalyptic cowboy town, thwart a civil war by blowing up oil tanks, and seize an all-seeing crystal ball from Rhea, a vampire witch. The love scenes are startlingly prominent and earthier than most romance novels (they kiss until blood trickles from her lip). After an epic battle ending in a box canyon to end all box canyons, we're back with grizzled, grown-up Roland and the train-wreck survivors in a parallel world: Kansas in 1986, after a plague. The finale is a weird fantasy takeoff on The Wizard of Oz. Some readers will feel that the latest novel in King's most ambitious series has too many pages--almost 800--but few will deny it's a page-turner.


Amazon.com Audio Review
Frank Muller, the recognized virtuoso of audiobook narration (The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption), takes on Stephen King's Goliath tale of sorcerers, time travelers, and sci-fi love. Totaling more than 27 hours and spanning 18 cassettes, Wizard and Glass requires the listener to love Muller's Hannibal Lecter-like voice--either that or suffer in audio hell for the equivalent of three full working days. While some might find his breathy staccatos irritating at best, others will find his voice the perfect accompaniment to King's creepy characters and nightmarish plots. (Running time: 27 hours, 18 cassettes)


Amazon.com Author Profile
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From Library Journal
Frank Muller's reading of King's fourth book in a projected seven-part series (e.g., The Waste Lands: The Dark Tower, Bk. 3, Audio Reviews LJ 2/15/92) is effective in creating a suspenseful and fearful atmosphere. We find Roland, the knight errant/gunslinger, continuing his quest to attain the Dark Tower, the source of destructive forces in his Mid-World. A major portion of this work is a recounting by Roland of his ill-fated love affair with Susan Delgado. The writing is expectedly imaginative, the story line engrossing, and the characters vivid. The listener is carried along through alternating Western, urban, and futuristic settings. The work stands on its own, incorporating a summary of Books 1-3, but will be better appreciated if listened to as part of the whole. Recommended for sf/fantasy collections and Stephen King fans.?Catherine Swenson, Norwich Univ. Lib., Northfield, Vt.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Frank Muller performs the epic of Roland of Gilead and his friends as they continue their search for the elusive Dark Tower. His reading marks the first in the audio series not performed by King himself. Muller gives us all the gritty vocalizations and subtle intonations of the author's reading, and more. The witch Rhea cackles and creaks with creepy conviction. Roland goes from his forties to his teens and back again, with total realism in the aging and pacing of his voice. Eddie Dean of New York blurts his oily Brooklyn street speech with shocking clarity and consistency, and 'Detta Walker converses in the fluent Ebonics of the '60's. King's intricate plot twists take the audience in and out of worlds and times, each of which calls for variations of dialect and several social classes. Muller rises to the challenge. R.P.L. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
The fourth volume in King's protean fantasy saga, The Dark Tower, doesn't advance its heroes' journey to that edifice much from where The Waste Lands (1992) left them, but at least it gets them out of the fix they were in and primed to get into another. The book's 720 pages are mostly devoted to a flashback in which principal protagonist Roland of Mid-World relates his initial exploits--at 14--as a gunslinger. Those adventures involved plenty of mayhem and also his first, ultimately disastrous love affair. King acknowledges in an afterword that it took him a long time to write this story because he was not confident of his ability to write of "the heat and passion of seventeen [sic]." Many may feel his mistrust was well placed, for the romantic stuff is rather a yawn. Unfortunately, the blazing action that succeeds it is hackneyed stuff typical of movie and TV westerns--strictly intentionally, though, for Roland's world of origin is a post^-nuclear holocaust culture that has reverted to earlier ways, including those of knightly chivalry and pistol-packin' cowboys. Still, King is the genre fiction writer's genre fiction writer, and the action that is hackneyed here is also, as noted, blazing--brightly. Ray Olson


From Kirkus Reviews
After a five-year lapse, King's gargantuan cowboy romance about Roland of Gilead (the Gunslinger) hits volume four, with three more planned. King's behemoth was begun in 1970 and published serially as The Gunslinger (1988), followed by The Drawing of the Three (1989) and The Waste Lands (1992). Volume one was portentously sophomoric, volume two prime King, volume three slack. Though this latest begins where The Waste Lands leaves off, with Roland and his four companions, Jake, Eddie, Susannah, and Oy, a half human/half animal with limited speaking ability, in a verbal gunfight to the death with Blaine, the homicidal supercomputer that lives on riddles, the story doubles back on Roland's youth and his grand love for Susan Delgado. The roundabout narrative leads us to Wizard of Oz territory--more particularly to a horribly transformed Topeka, Kansas--which the quintet must pass through as they seek the Dark Tower, the hub of creation, where Roland will discover some knowledge that will halt the quickening destruction of his post- technological Mid-World. In 1986, Topeka and the nation are huge graveyards struck by the superflu from The Stand. Roland retells the story of his youthful adventures in Gilead and of his teacher Cort, of star-crossed Susan, and of his companions Alain and Cuthbert, while reading portents in the wizard Maerlyn's glass ball . . . . Will the Path of the Beam from the Dark Tower be from the lighthouse in King's Castle Rock film logo? In Roland's quest tale, which King calls ``my Jupiter'' among the solar system of his published works, the bleak cosmology of self-assurance versus wrongness is as compelling as ever. But seven rambling volumes of bemusedly wry storytelling? This will be The Ring Cycle on top of The Lord of the Rings. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
Beginning with a short story appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1978, the publication of Stephen King's epic work of fantasy-what he considers to be a single long novel and his magnum opus-has spanned a quarter of a century. Set in a world of extraordinary circumstances, filled with stunning visual imagery and unforgettable characters, The Dark Tower series is King's most visionary feat of storytelling, a magical mix of science fiction, fantasy, and horror that may well be his crowning achievement. In November 2003, the fifth installment, Wolves of the Calla, will be published under the imprint of Donald M. Grant, with distribution and major promotion provided by Scribner. Song of Susannah, Book VI, and The Dark Tower, Book VII, will follow under the same arrangement in 2004. With these last three volumes finally on the horizon, readers-countless King readers who have yet to delve into The Dark Tower and a multitude of new and old fantasy fans-can now look forward to reading the series straight through to its stunning conclusion. Viking's elegant reissue of the first four books ensures that for the first time The Dark Tower will be widely available in hardcover editions for this eager readership.


About the Author
Stephen King has written more than forty books and two hundred short stories. He has won the World Fantasy Award, several Bram Stoker awards, and the O. Henry Award for his story "The Man in the Black Suit."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The past year was a stellar one for Stephen King, thanks to the phenomenal success of his serial novel in Signet paperback, The Green Mile, as well as the hardcover publication of Desperation and The Regulators (by Richard Bachman). Now, Stephen King invites readers back into the world of Roland the Gunslinger, in this, the eagerly anticipated fourth volume in his epic series of horror and fantasy.

Wizard and Glass picks up where the last book left off, with our hero, Roland, and his unlikely band of followers escaping from one world and slipping into the next. And it is there that Roland tells them a story, one that details his discovery of something even more elusive than the Dark Tower: love. But his romance with the beautiful and quixotic Susan Delgado also has its dangers, as her world is tom apart by war. Here is Roland's journey to his own past, to a time when valuable lessons awaited him, lessons of loyalty and betrayal, love and loss.