The Drawing of the Three

Stephen King is an amazing writer. This is the second book in his Dark Tower series and it amounts to an endless trek along the shore of the Western Sea. The basic scenery changes little, yet Mr. King is able to keep the reader eagerly turning the pages. He is a master at creating characters that are real and that you care about. You will either love them or hate them, or be frightened by them, but he seems to be incapable of writing a cardboard cutout.

The Gunslinger, Roland is mauled fairly early on by a sea creature that has lobster like claws, and they have taken the first two fingers of his right hand and a big toe. But that barely slows Roland down, until they become infected.

Roland comes across a door in the middle of the beach with no connecting structure, and the door leads into another world (Likely our world and it is New York city) when Roland walks through the door he is immediately thrown out of his body and his "ka" is inserted into Eddy, a young drug smuggler coming into N.Y. with a couple pounds of coke taped to his body. This is the first of three doors which holds Roland's destiny.

The second door is a deeply troubled schizophrenic black woman named Odetta , who is also wheelchair bound, due to a nasty push on a subway platform. This woman has two distinct characters in her head, one is a sweet and beautiful rich woman, the other is hell on wheels. A mean-spirited, kleptomaniac, who doesn't take kindly to Roland's invasion of her mind.

The third door holds a man with a past that involves Odetta's past and even the boy Jake from the 1st book of this series.

The way Stephen draws out the tension and the action is a wonder to behold and there are no dull moments. This is a story that is violent and heartfelt. It runs the gamut of many emotions, and the reader is willingly swept along at a break-neck pace to a quite satisfactory conclusion of this step on Roland's march to the Dark Tower.