While pursuing his quest for the Dark Tower through a world that is a nightmarishly distorted mirror image of our own, Roland, the last gunslinger, encounters three mysterious doorways on the beach. Each one enters into the life of a different person living in contemporary New York. Here he links forces with the defiant young Eddie Dean and the beautiful, brilliant, and brave Odetta Holmes, in a savage struggle against underworld evil and otherworldly...

Roland the gunslinger and his crew barely escape one world only to slip into another. It is in this other world that Roland relates to his crew a twisted and entertaining tale of his first quest as a gunslinger and the love of his life, Susan Delgado.

While Jake, Father Callahan, and Oy struggle to free Susannah Dean, whose body is possessed by a demon-mother named Mia, Roland and Eddie find themselves swept by magic to East Stoneham, Maine, in the summer of 1977.

Sent by his father to investigate evidence of a murderous shape shifter, a "skin man," Roland Deschain takes charge of Bill Streeter, a brave but terrified boy who is the sole surviving witness to the beast's most recent slaughter. Roland, himself only a teenager, calms the boy by reciting a story from the Magic Tales of the Eld that his mother used to read to him at bedtime, "The Wind through the Keyhole."