Wizard and Glass

Wizard and Glass is the fourth volume of the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, published in 1997. It functions as both a step in the quest and a long flashback.

The present-day plot is compact. Roland and his companions, travelling towards the Dark Tower, have to survive an encounter with a monorail that has decided to end itself, and they are still trying to rejoin the Path of the Beam. Most of the book's length is given instead to Roland's account of his youth and of Susan Delgado, which supplies the history that the earlier volumes had only referred to. The book opens by settling the monorail's riddle contest before the group continues along the Beam.

The structure means the novel can be read as a self-contained tragic romance inside a much longer quest, and the flashback is the reason it is often named as the emotional centre of the sequence. Most of the volume is the flashback, so the present-day journey advances only at its edges, and Dave McKean's eighteen illustrations appeared only in the 1997 first editions.