The Drawing of the Three

I picked this up the night I finished The Gunslinger because I could not leave Roland on that beach. The first book had ended with desert and bones and a long talk in the dark. I expected more desert. Stephen King published this second volume with Donald M. Grant in 1987, a 400 page book with ISBN 9780937986905 that sits second in The Dark Tower series. It drops Roland out of myth and onto a beach in our world, sick and bleeding. Then it spends most of its pages in New York. That shift threw me. I had signed up for a weird western. I got a plane smuggling run, a shoplifting fight in a department store, and a long shootout in a mob drug den. By the end I liked the swerve. It made the quest feel larger. The Tower was not only out there in the desert. It could reach into 1960s and 1970s and 1980s New York and pull people through.

Roland wakes at the edge of the Western Sea with the tide coming in. He is tired from the palaver with the man in black. He falls asleep and wakes to something chewing on him. Lobstrosities, big armored things like lobsters with claws and beaks, come out of the surf at night. They talk in a strange chatter that sounds almost like questions. They take two fingers off his right hand and a chunk of his foot before he gets away. He kills one and eats it to live, even as the wound turns hot and red. Infection starts moving up his arm and leg. He has few bullets left and most of his powder got wet. He can barely walk. He needs medicine he cannot make. Then he sees the first door standing alone on the beach. No wall around it. Just a door with words on it. The Prisoner.

The door trick is simple and cruel. When Roland opens it, he looks into the mind of someone in our New York and can ride along, see through their eyes, even take over their body for stretches. He can also bring things back through, and in time bring people through. But the door only opens on that one person. He has to work with who ka gives him. The first person is Eddie Dean, twenty one, on a plane from the Bahamas to New York in 1987 with cocaine taped to his chest for a mob boss named Enrico Balazar. Eddie is funny and scared and strung out on heroin. His older brother Henry, who got him hooked and who talks in Vietnam stories that may or may not be true, is waiting for him. Eddie knows the plane routine is a trap. Customs will be watching. He swallows his fear with jokes.

I loved this section on reread even though Eddie annoyed me at first. King writes him as motor mouth, always joking, always stalling. Roland slips into his head mid flight and nearly ruins everything because he does not know what a plane is, or what stewardesses are, or why Eddie must act calm for the men in uniforms. Roland learns fast. He watches Eddie think. He figures out the cocaine. He figures out the fear. When customs pulls Eddie into a back room, Roland takes over enough to help him hide the drugs in a way no one expects, by passing them through the door to the beach and then back when the search is over. It is tense and a little silly, in a good way. Eddie sweating through questions while a gunslinger from another world whispers in his head. Customs lets him go. Henry meets him, high and loud. Balazar's men drive them to a shop in Little Italy that sells books on the outside and moves drugs on the inside.

What makes Eddie stick is not the smuggling. It is the need. Eddie loves Henry even though Henry ruined him. Henry was the cool older brother who went to war in his stories, who introduced Eddie to drugs as a kind of love. Eddie knows it and cannot cut loose. Roland sees this with disgust at first. In Roland's world you cut off rot to save the limb. He tells Eddie as much, coldly. Eddie hates him for it and keeps joking anyway. Their bond forms through insult and use. Roland needs Eddie's body to get Keflex, the antibiotic that will save his life. Eddie needs Roland to get out from under Balazar without getting killed. When Balazar figures out something is wrong and holds them at gunpoint with his men, including a scary enforcer named Jack Andolini, Roland comes through the door in full force with working guns and shoots the place apart. Eddie has to choose on the spot. Stay in his old life with Henry dead or dying in the crossfire, or step through a door to a beach with monsters and a dying gunslinger. He steps through. Henry dies in that shop. Eddie carries that guilt forward. I found that choice earned. King does not let Eddie off. He gets clean because there is no heroin on the beach, not because he gives a speech.

The Lady with two minds

The second door says The Lady of Shadows. Roland finds it further up the beach after dragging a feverish Eddie along. This time the mind is Odetta Holmes, a Black woman in 1964, well educated, active in civil rights work, missing both legs below the knee after being pushed in front of a subway train. She has money from a settlement. She is polite and thoughtful and brave in public. She is also Detta Walker, a second personality who is crude and furious and violent, who steals jewelry and insults white people to their faces and remembers every slight. Odetta does not know Detta exists. Detta knows about Odetta and hates her softness. The split came from a head injury years earlier when someone dropped a brick on her as a child. King ties both injuries to one man, though we do not learn that until later.

This is the hardest part of the book to read now, and King knew it would be hard even then. Detta's voice is written in heavy dialect, full of curses and slurs aimed back at white people. Odetta speaks in careful, formal sentences. The contrast is deliberate. Odetta is the lady Roland expected. Detta is the shadow. When Roland pulls Odetta through the door, he brings her body, wheelchair and all, onto the beach. Detta takes over and tries to kill him and Eddie almost at once. She refuses food. She screams. She crawls after them and plots. Eddie, sick from heroin withdrawal and grieving Henry, has to guard a woman who wants him dead while Roland burns with fever. It is miserable beach camping. No shelter. Bad water. Lobstrosities at night. A furious prisoner who sees Roland as another white man trying to chain her.

I struggled here on first read because Detta feels relentless. Page after page of screaming and scheming. I wanted King to move on. On second read I saw what he was doing, even if the method is rough. Odetta had learned to survive by being perfect and forgiving. Detta had learned to survive by never forgiving anything. Neither alone could walk toward the Tower. King forces them to see each other through Roland and Eddie. Eddie falls for Odetta's kindness when she surfaces. He also refuses to be bullied by Detta, which no one else had done. He argues back. He feeds her anyway. Roland, for his part, is blunt about using her. He needs her to get through the third door because only a woman in a wheelchair can go where he needs to go unseen. That cold use angers Detta further, and rightly so. A passage where Roland drags her in her chair across sand while she curses him made my stomach turn. It is supposed to. He is not a hero here. He is a man using sick and hurt people to keep walking.

The Macy's scene stayed with me. Roland rides in Odetta's head while she shops, and Detta breaks through to shoplift and cause a scene. Store guards follow. Roland has to keep Odetta calm enough to leave without police, while learning how strange 1960s New York looks to him. Bright lights. Music. Crowds. Paper money. He is baffled by doors that open by themselves and by food wrapped in plastic. King plays this for humor, but there is fear under it. Roland realizes how thin his knowledge is. In his world he was a knight. Here he is an illiterate beggar who does not know how to buy aspirin. He needs Eddie to translate the present. He needs Odetta's memory to move through stores. That dependence galls him. A man used to command now has to ask a heroin addict how to cross a street.

The man who likes to push

The third door says The Pusher. It stands near the end of the beach, and Roland dreads it. The tarot from the first book warned of death. When he opens it, he finds Jack Mort, a middle aged accountant in 1977 who looks ordinary and is rotten inside. Mort likes to push people. He pushed a brick off a building onto a child's head years ago. He pushed a young woman in front of a subway train. He pushes a detective in front of a car for fun. He plans to push a boy named Jake Chambers into traffic. Jake. The boy Roland let fall under the mountains to reach the man in black. Roland sees Jake through Mort's eyes and nearly breaks.

This reveal hit me harder than any gunfight. Jake died in New York because Mort pushed him. Jake then appeared in Roland's desert. Roland then let Jake fall a second time. Now Roland learns the pusher is real and still working. Time in these books bends. The man in black had sent Jake to Roland as a trap, knowing Roland would have to choose. Mort is the hand that started it. Roland hates him with a focus that scares Eddie. He does not want to use Mort. He wants to kill him. But he needs Mort's hands to get medicine and bullets. So he rides Mort like a puppet, forcing him to buy Keflex and ammunition, forcing him to walk through crowded streets while Mort screams inside his own head.

Mort is chilling because King writes him flat. No trauma speech. No jokes. He counts his pushes like a hobby. He keeps newspaper clippings. He likes the moment of surprise. When Roland forces him to enter a subway station with Odetta in her wheelchair nearby in another time, the plan clicks. Roland understands now that Mort caused both of Odetta's injuries, the brick and the train. That is why the doors linked them. Ka brought Roland to the maker of his companions' wounds. Roland makes Mort watch. He makes him feel. Then he forces Mort to throw himself in front of the train, the same way Odetta was thrown. It is grim justice, and King does not dress it up. Mort dies as he lived, surprised that someone pushed back.

The medicine run matters more than it sounds. Roland is dying through all of this. His hand wound stinks. Red lines climb his arm. Fever makes him hallucinate. Eddie has to clean and wrap the stump with torn shirts and seawater. Without Keflex, Roland will die on the beach and the doors will close. Watching Roland bargain with a pharmacist through Mort's mouth, trying to sound normal while burning up, was more tense for me than the mob shootout. He counts pills. He worries about dosage. He grabs extra bandages. He steals bullets and worries they will fit his old revolvers. These small practical problems ground the fantasy. A quest for a magic Tower still needs antibiotics and dry gunpowder.

Blood and merging on the beach

Everything comes due back on the beach. Eddie is past the worst of withdrawal but shaky. Odetta and Detta keep flipping, sometimes mid sentence. Roland is dosed with Keflex and can stand. Balazar's men? No, that fight already happened. The last fight is smaller and stranger. Detta gets hold of Roland's gun and tries to kill them. Eddie wrestles her. Roland drags her to the third door and forces her to look through it at the moment Mort dies, forcing both personalities to see their attacker and see each other. In that shock, with Roland talking hard and fast about choices and names, Odetta and Detta fuse into someone new. Susannah Dean. She remembers both lives. She keeps Odetta's reading and manners and Detta's fire and aim. She asks Eddie to call her Susannah. She claims her own name.

I did not buy it fully the first time. It felt fast, like King needed the party assembled and used a magic stare to do it. On reread I liked it more because King had planted the pain. Susannah works when you read her as a third person, not a compromise. She is not half polite and half angry. She is someone who can love Eddie and still shoot straight. She tells Roland she is not his prisoner. She chooses to stay because the Tower feels real to her now, and because Eddie stays. That choice matters. Roland drew them by force. They remain by choice. Ka-tet, as Roland calls it, a group bound by fate. Eddie and Susannah mock the word at first, then use it themselves when the lobstrosities come at night and they have to fight back to back.

The beach camp scenes after the merging are my favorite pages. King slows down. Eddie teaches Susannah how to move in sand with her chair. Susannah teaches Eddie how to listen without joking. Roland teaches both how to shoot, how to clean guns, how to save bullets, how to watch water for claws. They eat lobster meat and gag and eat again. They build a fire. They argue about New York pizza and hot dogs and music. Susannah sings. Eddie laughs for real for the first time since Henry died. Roland watches and does not know how to join. He was trained by a man named Cort to be hard and alone. He does not know how to be part of a group that teases him. King lets him be awkward. He tries to say thanks and it comes out as orders. Eddie corrects him. Susannah pats his shoulder. Small human stuff after horror. I needed those pages. Without them the book would be only doors and wounds.

The gun teaching has weight because Roland is crippled. He lost fingers on his shooting hand. He has to relearn his draw. He fumbles. Eddie sees it and understands that legends bleed. Susannah, legless, learns to shoot from a sitting position and turns out steady. They practice on cans and driftwood. They learn to count shots. They learn that Roland's revolvers are huge and old and precious, made of metal from a story they do not yet know. King does not explain the Tower or the Beams or the gunslinger creed in full. He lets training scenes carry history. Cort's voice in Roland's memory. The way Roland stands. The way he will not waste a bullet. Eddie complains. Susannah practices. That is how myth gets passed on, not through speeches but through sore hands.

Why it frustrated me and why I kept going

This book is very different from the first, and that will bother some readers. The Gunslinger was spare and strange, full of desert and riddles. This one is loud and crowded, full of 1980s slang and heroin sickness and racial anger and mob jokes. King writes New York with love and excess. Some slang lands. Some creaks. Eddie's jokes sometimes run long. Detta's dialogue sometimes feels written by a white writer trying too hard to sound Black and angry, which he was. I winced at passages. Friends told me they stopped here. I get it. If you came for lonely myth, a department store fight can feel like a betrayal.

The structure also sags in the middle. The second door takes a long time. Odetta shopping, Detta screaming, Eddie vomiting from withdrawal, Roland feverish, back and forth through the door for supplies. King repeats beats. Another fever dream. Another fight over food. Another explanation of how doors work. At 400 pages it does not drag badly, but I checked how far I had left around page two hundred and fifty. The plane section is tight. The Mort section is tight. The Odetta section could lose thirty pages and gain force. King was still learning how to braid three times and two worlds without losing pace. Later books handle large parties better. Here he keeps everyone on one beach, which helps, but still repeats.

And yet I kept going because the people won me. Eddie could have been a cliche, the junkie with a heart of gold. He is sharper than that. He is scared and loyal and quick. He calls Roland out when Roland treats people like tools. He stays with Susannah when she is terrifying. Susannah could have been a puzzle solved by magic. She becomes a person who chooses her name and her man and her quest. Roland could have stayed a cold killer from Tull. Here he has to ask for help, has to be nursed, has to admit he needs medicine and lessons in how to buy it. That softening does not erase Tull or Jake. It complicates it. A man who let a boy fall now begs a young addict to live. I found that movement honest. Not redemption. Need.

Who should read it? Anyone who finished The Gunslinger and wondered where the tarot cards pointed. The Prisoner is Eddie. The Lady of Shadows is Susannah. The Pusher is Mort. The book pays off that fortune telling directly. Fantasy readers who like portal tricks will enjoy doors that open on other times. Horror readers will get body horror in the lobstrosity attacks and the infectiondetail, plus crime horror in Balazar's shop and Mort's pushes. Readers sensitive to racial slurs and sexual violence should know both appear. Detta uses slurs as weapons. Mort's thoughts are ugly. King does not linger to enjoy it, but he does not look away either. If that will harm you, read a summary of this one and join at The Waste Lands, where the group is together and moving.

I closed the book thinking about hands. Roland's missing fingers. Eddie's shaking hands learning to load. Susannah's hands pushing wheels through sand. Mort's hands in pockets before a push. King keeps returning to what hands do. Hold. Drop. Push. Shoot. Heal. On the beach, with the sea hissing and the doors closed behind them, three hurt people learn to use their hands together. The Tower still stands far off. No one has seen it. But for the first time Roland does not walk alone. He walks with a former addict and a woman who made herself whole. Ka is a wheel, Roland says. This time the wheel brought him help he did not earn and cannot dismiss. I turned the page toward book three ready to walk with them.