Viking Hardcover - June 23, 2003 Plume Trade Paperback - June 24, 2003 NAL Massmarket Paperback - July 29, 2003 Unabridged audiobook - July 29, 2003
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About The Drawing of the Three: The Dark Tower II
In every way a far weightier undertaking than its predecessor, The Drawing of the Three makes abundantly clear from the start the epic ambitions, which fuel The Dark Tower as a whole. A strikingly unusual novel with a liberating narrative technique, Stephen King's second volume is thematically playful, nonlinear, and full of time-leaping conceits. As diversely populated and wide-ranging as it seems, The Drawing of the Three can nonetheless be viewed as a singularly contained and intricate rendering of one man's tenacious commitment to the realization of a straightforward (if wholly fantastic) aim. The one man, of course, is Roland of Gilead. And the aim is to reach the Tower, that mysterious construct which stands at the nexus of Time.
Volume II further develops the dark fantasy established in The Gunslinger and fuses with it the kind of richly textured realism readers have long associated with many of King's other novels. King's trademark juxtaposition of the humdrum and the supernatural is on masterful display here, as Roland's quest finds him passing from his own eerie, post-apocalyptic world into twentieth-century New York. Also in effect is King's matchless gift for making readers squirm: The tide of the Western Sea in Mid-World brings with it hordes of crawling, carnivorous creatures dubbed "lobstrosities." In the opening pages of the novel, these creatures consume the first two fingers of Roland's right hand and infect the gunslinger's bloodstream with their venom. Already at a fever pitch from the start, the story transports readers along as Roland, facing imminent death, discovers a series of three doors standing freely on the beach. Passing through each of them in succession, Roland enters our world and sets about "drawing" the people who are destined to join him on his Tower quest. From late-1980s New York, as seen through the eyes of a heroin-addled young man called Eddie Dean; to the Manhattan of the early-1960s, where the schizophrenic, wheelchair-bound civil-rights activist Odetta Holmes awaits; to mid-1970s New York, where an icy serial killer named Jack Mort plots his next murder, Roland performs his drawing of the three (though it proves not to be the threesome that Roland, or readers, had expected).
The Drawing of the Three witnesses the forging of a makeshift family of sorts, albeit a highly unconventional one, with the gunslinger as its haunted and raw-boned patriarch. The three pilgrims comprise Roland of Gilead's ka-tet—"one made of many"—a kind of karmic family united by a single shared destiny: The Dark Tower.
The Drawing of Three