REVIEW: The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King

The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King
Publishing Information: 1987 (first publishing) 2003 (current edition)
Publisher: Signet, Mass-Market Paperback, 464 pgs
ISBN-13: 978-0-451-21085-2
Series: The Dark Tower Book 2 (of 7)
Reviewer: Andy
Copy: Out of Pocket

Synopsis: (from inside-cover): While pursuing a quest for the Dark Tower through a world that is a nightmarishly distorted mirror image of our own, Roland is drawn through a mysterious door that brings him into contemporary America. Here he links forces with defiant young Eddie Dean and the beautiful, brilliant, and brave Odetta Holmes in a savage struggle against underworld evil and otherworldly enemies. Once again, Stephen King has masterfully interwoven dark evocative fantasy, and icy realism.


When I reviewed Book 1 of The Dark Tower, I was left with feelings of skepticism and confusion. The first installment, though it had a deeply promising premise and main character, was the work of an uncertain author, stumbling blindly into whatever environments his mind happened to conjure up. The story introduced parallel universes, but the link between them and the explanation of it was tenuous at best. The story was oddly vague - much too vague to have me itching to read the next book. There was no indication what direction the series would be taking, and though the mythic journey of the Gunslinger tracking the dastardly devilish Man in Black was poetic and provocative, it seemed more like a murky dream from King than the beginning of a well planned narrative.

But really, King needed to grow up as a writer. Where The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger showed hints of pretension and a young writer still trying too hard to be enigmatic, The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three is the work of a confident storyteller who can provoke excitement without manipulating the reader's emotions too much. King writes suspenseful scenes with a masterful hand, as Roland, the last gunslinger, hobbles sickly along a coast populated with eerie scavengers resembling giant lobsters.

Scattered across the beach are three doors, isolated in thin air that Roland must seek out. Each doorway is an entranceway into a consciousness from a parallel world, as Roland trespasses into the minds of those that will become his companions. These new characters are all deeply disturbed in their own ways, and the unlikely fellowship formed is one reminiscent of the unwilling participants thrown together in King's own The Stand or George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Though at times King's continuous pop-culture references seem a sleazy way to ingratiate himself to a mainstream audience, twenty-five years later they transform into treasured artifacts something that reads like a 1980's retro period-piece that anyone nostalgic about the eighties should appreciate.

In the book, the destination of the Dark Tower is no longer just a "quest-to-be-named-later" once King figures out what he is actually writing about. Though the nature of it the tower just as mysterious as ever, it now seems more like an elusive holy grail or a monumental Moby Dick, a symbolic image etched in the mind of an uncompromising character on a quixotic journey. With book two of the Dark Tower, King took what was at best a story that was a minor curiosity and penned it into what has the potential to be part of a modern classic.



Plot……….9/10

Characters………9/10

Style……….8/10

Overall……….9/10