The Drawing of the Three

The second volume in Stephen King’s #1 bestselling Dark Tower Series, The Drawing of the Three is an “epic in the making” (Kirkus Reviews) about a savage struggle against underworld evil and otherworldly enemies.

“Stephen King is a master at creating living, breathing, believable characters,” hails The Baltimore Sun. Beginning just less than seven hours after The Gunslinger ends, in the second installment to the thrilling Dark Tower Series, Roland encounters three mysterious doorways on a deserted beach along the Western Sea. Each one enters into a different person’s life in New York—here, he joins forces with the defiant young Eddie Dean, and with the beautiful, brilliant, and brave Odetta Holmes, to save the Dark Tower.

“This quest is one of King’s best…it communicates on a genuine, human level…but is rich in symbolism and allegory” (Columbus Sunday Dispatch). It is a science fiction odyssey that is unlike any tale that Stephen King has ever written.

**

Elaborating at great length on Robert Browning's cryptic narrative poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," the second volume of King's post-Armageddon epic fantasy presents the equally enigmatic quest of Roland, the world's last gunslinger, who moves through an apocalyptic wasteland toward the Dark Tower, "the linchpin that holds all of existence together." Although these minor but revealing books (which King began while still in college) are full of such adolescent portentousness, this is livelier than the first. Roland enters three lives in the alternate world of New York City: junkie and drug runner Eddie Dean, schizophrenic heiress Odetta Holmes and serial murder Jack Mort. If King tells us too little about Roland, he gives us too much about these misfits who are variously healed or punished exactly as expected. Typically, King is much better at the minutiae and sensations of a specific physical world, and several such bravura sequences (from an attack by mutant lobsters to a gun store robbery) are standouts amid the characteristic headlong storytelling. BOMC alternate.
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King is a master at creating living, breathing, believable characters. (Baltimore Sun)

This quest is one of King’s best…communicates on a genuine, human level…but rich in symbolism and allegory. (Columbus Sunday Dispatch)

Prime King…very suspenseful. An epic in the making. (Kirkus)