The story begines where Waste Lands ends: inside a crazy machine that threatens to commit suicide with Roland, Susannah, Jake, Eddie and Oy still inside.  Unless... they can outsmart him with riddles.  I won't give away much when I say they succeed; otherwise there would be no continuation of the Dark Tower series I reckon.

When the Ka-tet is out of mad Blaine they end up in what seems to be Kansas - but not really.  Still close enough to what Susannah, Eddie and Jake know as "their" Kansas to make them feel very uneasy.  As soon as they get out of Topeka - the other Topeka - they all notice a bright tall building, far away ahead.  Trouble on their path, again, but before they reach that Roland has to tell them some more about him, about his youth, about what started making him what he is today.

At the age of fourteen, nobody ever did it any younger, Roland became a Gunslinger.  Pushed into this challenge he wasn't supposed to win by a magician known by many names, he drew a life-threatening danger upon him.  His father and the fathers of his friends Alain and Cuthbert sent them to the relative safety of the Barony of Meijis, to count all there is that might be of interest for the Baronies in Mid-World in their upcoming battle against John Farson, the Good Man.  At least, that is their official task.

At the age of fourteen Roland and his friends arrive in Hambry, a peaceful village near the sea.  But Hambry is not important to Roland, Susan Delgado, daughter of Pat is.  He met her the first night they arrived, and that first meeting sparked a true and deep love in both of them.  But life is rather complicated in Hambry, where Susan is to carry the married Mayor's first child, and where treason and superstition are just as much part of every-day life as harvesting or horse-breeding is.  Soon Roland and his friends discover how important that treason is for Gilead's future.

At the age of fourteen the young Ka-tet is forced to take decisions boys that age shouldn't take, and they are forced to use their weapons for a bloodshed boys their age shouldn't witness (should anyone?), let alone play the first fiddle, but there really is not much choice.  During the cause of those fights they win an important prize, but Roland looses the dearest ones he ever had, and he'll feel guilty for that the rest of his life.

A lot of time went between The Gunslinger and this fourth book in the series, and that is good.  It meant King's craft could develop so that this combination of SF, Fantasy, Western and Love Story can have all these elements without it seeming as if it is a puzzle of loose pieces.  The result is that Wizard and Glass is a surprise, both from King and in this Dark Tower series.  The love-story is as warm and endearing as "The Body", a total contrast with the somewhat strange happenings of today's Ka-tet in a world that has moved on.

This book may have taken a bit of a side-track from the story, for most of the time at least, still it is of utter importance to the series.  We know Susannah, Eddie and Jake.  We sort of understand Roland's world, strangely similar to ours.  And after this book we understand Roland much better: what drives him, where did his self-imposed quest and the self-sacrifice for that quest come from?  And rather than creating an epic story about a quest, Wizard and Glass has turned the Dark Tower series in a more complete history.