It’s a safe bet to say that Stephen King‘s newest adventure in Mid World, The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole, is one of the most anticipated books of 2012. The cover of the book has hit the internet to titillate ka-tets everywhere. The cover art is being done by Jae Lee, the artist of the Dark Tower comic books from Marvel, and features young Roland sharing a moment with a frak-off huge Tiger (a Guardian of the Beam maybe????)

We join Roland and his ka-tet as a ferocious storm halts their progress along the Path of the Beam. As they shelter from the screaming wind and snapping trees, Roland tells them not just one strange tale, but two – and in doing so sheds fascinating light on his own troubled past.

In his early days as a gunslinger, in the guilt ridden year following his mother’s death, Roland is sent by his father to a ranch to investigate a recent slaughter. Here Roland discovers a bloody churn of bootprints, clawed animal tracks and terrible carnage – evidence that the ’skin-man’, a shape shifter, is at work. There is only one surviving witness: a brave but terrified boy called Bill Streeter.

Roland, himself only a teenager, calms the boy by reciting a story from the Book of Eld that his mother used to read to him at bedtime, ‘The Wind Through The Keyhole.’ ‘A person’s never too old for stories,’ he says to Bill. ‘Man and boy, girl and woman, we live for them.’

I love this cover. Jae Lee has done great work as a penciler on the comic book and this looks absolutely stunning. But I wish they would have used the lettering from comics for the book. I’m not really a fan of the purple wispy font.

You can read King’s forward and the first five pages of the novel over at the publisher’s site here. The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole hits stores in February.

[Source] SUVUDU