Wizard and Glass

The story starts where The Waste Lands ends, with the four gunslingers and Oy the Billy-bumbler aboard Blaine the Mono where they are caught in a riddle competition in which their lives are at stake. When all hope seems lost Eddie Dean saves the day by defeating Blaine using illogical riddles and childish jokes. The four gunslingers, accompanied by Oy disembark at Topeka railway station and are pleasantly surprised to find it’s Topeka, Kansas, yet the pleasant feeling of being back in America doesn’t last, the city is deserted, as it is a version of the world featured in The Stand, its inhabitants have died from influenza. The world also has minor differences known to Eddie, Jake and Susannah including car names and the popular drink “Nozz-A-Lazza”.

The Ka-tet leave the city, and experience a three dimensional hole called a thinny, it is here Roland tells the gunslingers about his first experience with a thinny, as well as the heart wrenching tale of his past. The reader finds out how Roland won his guns, about his mother's affair and how his father tries to protect him from his wife's lover. The story of Roland and his companions Cuthbert and Alain is full of emotion and action, and despite its reward it has the most awful consequences.

The gunslingers then continue their journey and come across a large, glass building with four sets of red shoes outside of it; an eerie similarity to The Wizard of Oz. It is here they face Roland's nemesis; Marten, though he goes under many other names. The gunslingers travel to Gilead and witness Roland murdering his own mother, when they awaken they are miles away from the palace and receive a warning that if they don't renounce they're quest, terrible things will happen.

The fourth part of the series is just as good as the ones before it, and now the Tower is closer...