Although it is officially the eighth book of the Dark Tower saga, Stephen King likes to call The Wind Through the Keyhole book 4.5 of the series, since it takes place after our tet escapes the Green Palace at the end of Wizard and Glass, and before they reach Calla Bryn Sturgis, setting for Wolves of the Calla. The Wind Through the Keyhole is a story within a story within a story. At the outset, Roland and his American tet are traveling toward the River Whye in Mid-World. A great storm, called a Starkblast, is about to blow. While our tet is sheltering from the storm, Roland tells a story about his younger days, when he and his tet-mate Jamie DeCurry were sent to Debaria to investigate reports of a skin-man, a kind of dangerous shape-changer. While trying to comfort a young boy named Bill Streeter—the only survivor of a particularly brutal attack by the skin-man, and Roland’s only witness to the crime—Roland recounts yet another story. This time it is a sinister fairytale drawn from the book Magic Tales of Eld. The three stories are woven together by the freezing, howling winds of the Starkblast.