Book #38 of 2025: The Drawing of the Three (Dark Tower 2)

[thistlechaser]

The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King.

Quick synopsis: Near death, Roland the last gunslinger has adventures in the 1960s and 1980s US.

Brief opinion: Do you have a lack of the word "nigger" in your life? Then get reading this book! I swear it was used more times than I've heard or read in the last 30 years total. Also the story was zero fun at all; I skimmed or skipped multiple chapters. Also it had what every good, believable romance needs: Instant love...

Plot: Picking up just a few hours after after book 1 ended, Roland wakes up on a beach. A lobster-like creature is attacking him. It bites off two of his fingers and one of his toes. He fights it off, then continues down the beach. The wounds quickly become infected and he becomes very sick.

He finds a door just hanging in thin air. By going through it, he ends up in Eddie (heroin addict)'s body while Eddie is in the middle of trying to transport cocaine into the US. Roland helps Eddie through that, including a shoot-out with a mafia boss and his gang.

Together the two (Roland really sick now and Eddie going through withdrawal) continue down the beach and find another door. Through it is Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker, a woman with "schizophrenia" (dissociative identity disorder/multiple personality disorder, but I guess when this book was published in the 80s, they called it schizophrenia?). I'm sure he helped her out with something, but I couldn't stand her character and I skipped her chapters.

Together the three find a third door, through it a sociopath. Roland takes control of his body to get revenge for something the sociopath did to Odetta, buy a bunch of boxes of ammo and antibiotics, and then steals a cop car and goes on a high speed trip through New York City.

Eddie falls in love with Odetta instantly, and before the book ends she has "married" him (taken his last name, no way to really marry).

Writing/editing: The one positive about this book is that the writing was a lot closer to King's standards than The Gunslinger was.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: Remember how in my review of book one I complained that female characters existed only for Roland to fuck or to have angsts over when they were murdered? The first 50% of this book was even worse! There were no female characters at all other than two really minor characters (flight attendants)! Ugh.

But worse than that was the racial stuff. At the 50% point we meet the third main character of the series, Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker. Her Detta Walker personality spoke in the most "jive turkey" slang possible. It was so unpleasant to read. It felt like a racist caricature (which it sort of was on purpose, but that didn't make it any more enjoyable to read).

The whole book just felt so unnecessary. Half the book was set in Eddie's America and most of the other half in Odetta/Detta's. Sure we needed backstories on these two main characters, but an entire book?

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️ ½ - I really, really did not enjoy this book.