Wizard and Glass — The Dark Tower, Book 4

Wizard and Glass Review

Wizard and Glass is the longest, most unusual, and arguably most essential volume in the Dark Tower series. After dispatching the Blaine cliffhanger in its opening pages — with an answer that is both absurd and deeply satisfying — the novel pivots entirely away from the forward momentum of the quest to spend 600 pages in Roland’s past.

The ka-tet settles in after their ordeal, and Roland, compelled by grief and the unfinished business of memory, tells his companions the story of his first mission: sent at fourteen to the coastal town of Hambry with two young companions — Cuthbert and Alain — supposedly to count the Affiliation’s resources, actually to keep him away from a romance his family disapproves of. In Hambry, Roland meets Susan Delgado.

The love story at the heart of Wizard and Glass is the most surprising thing King has written. Susan is not a fantasy heroine but a fully imagined young woman — brave, principled, and trapped by a social obligation she did not choose. Roland’s love for her is total and devastating, and King writes it with the kind of patient, detailed tenderness usually associated with literary fiction. The romance earns every page it is given.

The tragedy that follows is one the reader can see coming from early on — Hambry is full of betrayal and dark magic, and the world of Mid-World does not permit happiness to last — but King’s skill is in making the ending arrive with full force despite the warning signs. Susan’s fate is one of the most genuinely upsetting moments in the series, and it explains everything about the man Roland Deschain has become.

The frame narrative — Roland’s companions listening, learning who he was before he became the Gunslinger — deepens the entire series retrospectively.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — The emotional centre of the Dark Tower saga, and proof that King can write tragedy as well as horror.

Reading Order

1. The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, Book 1)
2. The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower, Book 2)
3. The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower, Book 3)
4. Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, Book 4)
5. Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower, Book 5)
6. Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower, Book 6)
7. The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, Book 7)
8. The Wind Through the Keyhole (The Dark Tower, Book 4.5)

Publication History

Wizard and Glass was published by Plume in November 1997, six years after The Waste Lands — the longest gap between any two consecutive Dark Tower novels in the main sequence. The delay was not unusual for King’s writing schedule in the mid-1990s, which included Insomnia, Rose Madder, Desperation, and The Green Mile alongside continued work on the Dark Tower. But six years after a cliffhanger ending of genuine intensity, the gap was felt by readers as unusually long.

The novel debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and received reviews that were notably more divided than the earlier volumes — some critics found the 600-page flashback an audacious structural choice, others found it a frustrating interruption of the quest narrative. The divided response reflected genuine disagreement about what the series was and what it should be doing.

Susan Delgado

Susan Delgado is the character in the Dark Tower series most frequently cited as evidence of King’s capacity for genuinely literary characterization within genre fiction. She is not a fantasy heroine in any conventional sense: no supernatural gifts, no exceptional combat skills, no destiny. She is a young woman in a small community who has been promised to a wealthy old man in exchange for her family’s security, who falls in love with the wrong person, and who is destroyed by the collision of her private life with forces she cannot have anticipated.

King writes Susan with the patient specificity he brings to his best female characters — Beverly Marsh, Susannah Dean, the older Carrie characters — and her fate arrives with full force precisely because he has made her so particular. The tragedy of Hambry is not abstract. It is the loss of a specific person.

The Flashback as Series Architecture

The decision to spend most of a 672-page novel in Roland’s past — to halt the quest completely and instead explain who Roland was before he became the Gunslinger we have followed across three novels — is the most structurally unusual choice in the series. King defends it in his afterword by noting that the ka-tet’s willingness to listen to Roland’s story deepens every relationship in the series, and that understanding why Roland is the way he is makes every prior scene retroactively richer.

This is true. But it is also true that Wizard and Glass tests the patience of readers who came to the series for the quest and find themselves in a 600-page romance/Western that does not advance toward the Tower at all. The novel’s reception has bifurcated across two decades: Dark Tower devotees tend to cite it as the series’ emotional peak; readers who approach it hoping for the momentum of The Drawing of the Three or The Waste Lands often find it the series’ most demanding entry.

The Emerald Palace and the Overlap

Wizard and Glass ends with a sequence in which the ka-tet arrives in a world that is clearly a version of Oz — an encounter with the Tick-Tock Man, a journey through a poisoned landscape, a confrontation in the Emerald Palace. This moment of explicit crossover with L. Frank Baum’s mythology is the series’ most directly playful engagement with American popular culture and establishes clearly that Mid-World’s relationship with our fictional universes is not incidental but structural.

King has always been interested in the way popular myths interconnect, and the Oz sequence in Wizard and Glass makes the argument that the Tower mythology can absorb American fairy tales as readily as it absorbs Western genre conventions.

Legacy in the Series

Wizard and Glass is the emotional center of the Dark Tower series in the sense that everything preceding it is clarified and deepened by knowing what happened in Hambry, and everything following it carries the weight of what Roland lost there. Susan Delgado is never mentioned without consequence; the memory of what was done to her — and what Roland did, and did not do — shadows the Gunslinger through every subsequent volume. The tragedy of Hambry is not a digression from the series’ concerns but their fullest expression.