Having escaped Blaine the Mono, the ka-tet find themselves on a version of Kansas from King's The Stand. Before pressing on, Roland tells his companions the story of his youth: the love affair with Susan Delgado that ended in tragedy, the political scheming of the Big Coffin Hunters, and the events that set him irrevocably on the path to the Tower.
The fourth novel is the longest in the series and the most structurally unusual - a book within a book, a coming-of-age story folded inside a quest narrative. The Susan Delgado sections are among the finest writing King has produced.
