The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three - Stephen King

The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (King, 1987)

Now this is more like it. A desperately injured Roland must march up the coast of the Western Sea searching for his fate. As foretold by the man in black, Roland finds doors through which he will draw companions for his quest, doors bearing the names "The Prisoner", "The Lady of Shadows", and "Death". Each door opens into New York City in a different year, and the people Roland draws are already connected in ways they cannot imagine.

I find The Drawing of the Three a much better story than The Gunslinger. Action, suspense, creative fantasy, tight plot, bizarre creatures, and most important of all, relatable human characters make this a great read. In the previous book, Roland was a soulless, single-minded killing machine, almost immortal. In this book, he is immediately humanized when a creature from the sea (dubbed a "lobstrosity") critically injures him, and his humanity continues to come through as he interacts with smart-mouthed heroin addict Eddie Dean, wheelchair-bound schizophrenic Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker, and Jack Mort, a cold-blooded psychopath from the 1970s.

We don't learn much more about Roland's past in this book, or about what the Dark Tower is or why he is seeking it. We learn a lot more about Eddie and Odetta/Detta, where they come from and how they cope with life in a seemingly alien land. The action keeps things rolling along toward a surprising and satisfying conclusion, where quick thinking and fate intertwine to save the characters from death and bring together what Roland calls ka-tet: one from many, a group of people bound together by a single purpose. But the ka-tet is not complete yet, and Roland's actions have caused a rift in time...

Arbitrary rating: 4.5 out of 5 lobstrosities