by Bev Vincent
The first chapter of The Drawing of the Three was published in the April/May 1987 issue of Castle Rock: The Stephen King Newsletter, and Donald M. Grant published the limited and limited-trade editions, illustrated by Phil Hale, shortly thereafter. King dedicated the book to Grant for taking a chance on the novels one by one.
Like The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three was not copyedited prior to publication. It contains more mistakes than any other book in the series. Character names change from one page to the next, and several geographical details are wrong. King will subsequently use these errors as part of the story. Some will become cues that let readers know whether something is taking place in one version of reality or another. Many of them, though, are simply mistakes and no meaning should be read into them.
The second book in the series opens on the beach by the Western Sea seven hours after the end of The Gunslinger and relates events that take place over about a month. During this period, Roland makes no forward progress toward the Dark Tower. He probably gets farther from it as he makes his way up the coastline.
He is dealt a major setback within the first few pages. Though he has just slept for an unknown length of time after his palaver with the man in black, he is dead tired. He falls asleep on the beach. The incoming tide awakens him and, to his horror, he discovers that some of his limited supply of ammunition has gotten wet. He doesn’t know if any given bullet will work when needed.
Worse, though, is the grievous injury delivered to him by a lobsterlike monster that emerges from the ocean and clips off two fingers on his right hand and one of his big toes. Until now, it seemed as though Roland could accomplish his goal without any assistance. Losing a toe is inconvenient. Losing two fingers, though, is a crushing blow for a man who lives and dies by the gun. He also loses a boot to the lobstrosities, which will make walking to the Dark Tower difficult. However, none of that matters if he is poisoned by the infection that sets in afterward. His quest might have come to an end in those few moments of uncharacteristic inattention.
One of the issues people had with The Gunslinger is that Roland is a loner, and not a very nice man. He is the kind of person who would sacrifice a young boy in the name of some abstract goal. He isn’t exactly hero material, and some readers found it difficult to spend time with him.
All of that changes in this book. For the first time since the fall of Gilead, Roland assembles a ka-tet—a group of people bound together with a common goal. In the past, the members of his ka-tet, which included Cuthbert Allgood, Alain Johns and Jamie DeCurry, joined him willingly. On his quest for the Dark Tower, some force that wants him to succeed delivers his allies to him. He has no say in the selection process—nor do they. Roland essentially conscripts them into duty. Because of his injuries—and because ka demands it—he is forced to embrace these new companions. Without help, he will never make it to the Dark Tower. He needs them; therefore, they must come.
At first glance, they seem like unlikely candidates: a heroin junkie and a woman who lost her legs after being pushed in front of a train and who suffers from multiple personality disorder. And yet Roland understands that these people can become gunslingers. The structure of the book parallels the man in black’s tarot reading, with sections named for each of the three cards/doors and interludes where the deck gets shuffled.
In addition to expanding the cast, King also broadens the story’s scope. In The Gunslinger, Jake Chambers tells Roland about New York City. In The Drawing of the Three, Roland experiences that universe, both vicariously and in person, thanks to three magical doors that appear along the beach. They’re one-dimensional: visible from only one side. Their hinges aren’t connected to anything. Only Roland can open them and, when he does, he can enter the minds of the people they represent, leaving his body inert and defenseless on the beach. If he so chooses, he can step through into the alternate location—or locations, since each door opens into a different time: 1987, 1964 and 1977 respectively.
Another aspect of The Gunslinger that presented problems for some readers was the fact that a lot of it was told in flashback, which can impede forward momentum. Not so with The Drawing of the Three. From the opening salvo in which Roland is injured, the novel advances at breakneck pace from one crisis to the next to the next.
Roland’s experiences with the three doors are quite different from one another. His first glimpse through the door marked THE PRISONER shows him a world he’s never seen before from a perspective he’s never had before: out the window of an airplane. When he enters the world of THE LADY OF SHADOWS, he finds himself inside a divided mind. The door marked THE PUSHER gives him access to a sociopath who represents death.
When Roland enters Eddie Dean’s mind, he spends some time figuring out the rules of doorway travel and learning what he can about this new universe. He discovers that he can bring things from one world to the other, in both directions. This is important, because he needs medicine, and for it to do any good, he has to get it back to the beach. He also learns that he can remain in the background and observe what’s happening around him or he can step forward and take full control.
Eddie, a heroin addict who has been somewhat clean for a while, is the most accepting of the three people Roland enters. They quickly establish détente. Roland needs Eddie and, as it turns out, Eddie needs Roland. He’s carrying cocaine back from the Bahamas and the flight attendants have grown suspicious of him. If he doesn’t find a way to ditch the drugs, he’ll go to prison. However, if he loses the drugs, he’ll be in serious trouble with the mobsters who sent him on this junket. Roland offers a solution. Before the plane lands, they take the drugs through the door to the beach, where they can retrieve them later.
Roland will always be a fish out of water in New York. He understands some letters and words, but many things elude him. However, his training allows him to detect danger before it happens. He is the one who notices that the flight attendants are suspicious of Eddie, even if he doesn’t understand exactly what they are. He senses that Eddie will have problems with the ritual of Customs, without knowing what it is. He isn’t protecting Eddie out of goodwill, though. If Eddie ends up in jail, he won’t be able to provide the antibiotics Roland badly needs. Eddie is a means to an end, like most other people Roland encounters.
Their intimate connection, however, gives Roland a chance to size Eddie up. He is weak, primarily because of his drug addiction, but Roland sees strength in him, too. He reminds Roland of his old friend Cuthbert. With Roland providing moral support, Eddie stands up to the customs officials in a way he couldn’t have managed on his own. He’s also ready to confront Enrico Balazar and a dozen of his henchmen who are holding his older brother, Henry, hostage until he delivers the drugs.
Henry is Eddie’s true weakness, the source of most of his problems and destroyer of his self-esteem. Their single mother relied on Henry to “look after” Eddie after a drunk driver killed their sister, to make sure something similar didn’t happen again. Henry used this obligation to excuse his own shortcomings, especially when it turned out that Eddie was better than his brother at just about everything. Henry was wounded in Vietnam and came back addicted to painkillers, the first step in his downward spiral into drug addiction. He pulled Eddie in after him, but Eddie was smart enough and resourceful enough to keep at least a partially clear head, which meant that he ended up looking after his brother instead of the other way around.
For the first time, readers are given an independent assessment of Roland. Though Roland is in bad shape, Eddie can see the strength within him. He respects Roland and develops a nascent love for him, even though he knows this is a man who will likely cause him harm.
Eddie pulls off a bravura performance at Balazar’s headquarters. Roland’s faith in his inner steel makes him almost unrecognizable to the drug kingpin. He’s assertive and self-confident, taking part in a gunfight while naked. He is driven by the discovery that Henry died from a drug overdose shortly before he got there. He willingly goes
to war with Roland, who steps through the doorway to join in the fray. For the first time ever, Roland gives up one of his guns—he can no longer use both at once, thanks to his maimed hand—and they reduce the population of the Leaning Tower to zero, just as Roland did back in Tull.
Being thrust into such a dangerous situation together is a bonding experience. Eddie’s need for payback is satisfied and Roland gets his antibiotics, though not a large enough dose to cure him. Roland had planned to wrest Eddie back to Mid-World, but in the aftermath of the battle, he offers Eddie the choice to join him on his quest without guaranteeing that he’ll survive. The only thing he can promise is that if they make it to the Tower, Eddie will see something remarkable.
Even though he’s battling withdrawal, Eddie looks after Roland in the days following the gunfight, providing food—in the form of lobstrosity meat, much to Roland’s horror—and making sure the gunslinger takes his medication. He even builds a serviceable travois and drags Roland up the beach. He’s not cured of his addiction, though. He needs Roland so he can get back to his own world to score drugs.
Roland knows better than to trust an addict—advice, like most, usually delivered to him in Cort’s chiding voice. He’s also reluctant to get too close to Eddie because he might have to sacrifice him, too. Eddie believes that he is unlikely to survive in Roland’s world, even if they make it to the Dark Tower. He recognizes the addiction in Roland’s personality, too: Roland is a Tower junkie.
When they reach the second doorway, marked THE LADY OF SHADOWS, Eddie is so determined to go with Roland that he threatens to kill the gunslinger’s defenseless body if he’s left behind. Roland puts his trust in ka and plows ahead, ditching Eddie and throwing himself into another strange place. He had warned Eddie that the doorway might take them to a completely alien destination. In a way it does. Roland ends up in Macy’s in New York City, nearly a quarter of a century earlier than the time from which he drew Eddie.
The second person destined to become part of Roland’s ka-tet is Odetta Holmes, a black woman who is in a wheelchair because her legs are missing below the knees. She is a strong, independent woman who is active in the civil rights movement. Inspired by Rosa Parks, she has become nearly as famous as Martin Luther King and has appeared on the cover of Time magazine. She has recently returned from a trip to Oxford, Mississippi, where she was jailed and humiliated after attending a protest.
However, it is not Odetta’s mind Roland enters but that of Detta Walker, a personality of which Odetta is unaware. Detta first materialized after Odetta was hit in the head by a brick when she was five years old, but her appearances were rare until 1958, when Odetta was pushed in front of a subway train, the incident that cost her her legs. Odetta is still the dominant personality, and Detta’s adventures are sufficiently infrequent that Odetta can fill in the blanks the way a person with an eye injury learns to compensate for the missing part of their field of vision. Detta is more aware that something is wrong, but she doesn’t know what.
Where Odetta is refined and genteel, Detta is rage personified. She talks like a caricature, spouting vile and illiterate jargon that even Eddie will have a hard time understanding. She doesn’t shoplift because she needs things, but out of spite. The things she takes are of little value, which reflects how she sees herself, and she usually throws them away. She is promiscuous and crude and completely amoral. Her greatest desire, Eddie comes to believe, is to be killed by a white person.
Roland is only vaguely aware of any of this when he opens the door. Detta is on a shoplifting spree when he enters her mind. Detta and Odetta become briefly aware of each other and are equally horrified by what they see. Detta fights back against the invading white man. With the house detectives closing in, Roland sends her through the doorway to the beach.
When they arrive, she is Odetta. Yanked out of her world and disoriented, she denies her new surroundings. She has no memory of going to Macy’s. The last thing she remembers is watching the news on television. She is either dreaming, has suffered another brain injury or has gone crazy, she decides. Even when presented with contradictions in her story—the costume jewelry she’s wearing, for instance—she refuses to believe what Roland and Eddie tell her.
She won’t eat, but allows herself to be pushed along the beach. Roland thinks that Eddie will be okay now because he has someone to look after—a surrogate for his brother—and he sees the early signs that Eddie is falling in love.
Eddie is taken completely by surprise when Detta emerges that night. Whereas Odetta refuses to acknowledge the truth, Detta fervently believes things that never happened, most of them terrible. She accuses Eddie and Roland of raping her and trying to poison her.
Roland is getting sick again—the antibiotics only knocked back the infection without eliminating it—but he is alert enough to warn Eddie that Odetta is two women in one body. Because Roland believes that Eddie needs a lesson in how dangerous Detta can be, he allows Detta to steal his unloaded gun while they sleep. She tries to shoot Eddie and hits him in the head with the gun when that fails. This is the way Cort taught Roland important lessons.
Detta remains in control of the body as they struggle toward the third doorway. She does everything possible to impede their progress, just to be contrary. Even strapped to the chair, she manages to throw the hand brake and upset herself. She tries to bite any fingers that get within reach. At night she screams if Roland and Eddie fall asleep. Eddie is getting sick, too, from malnourishment caused by a constant diet of lobstrosity meat. Roland is too weak to push the chair and finally grows too weak to even walk. Fortunately, Odetta reasserts control. Since she is more cooperative, Eddie can take her ahead to the next door and come back with the chair for Roland.
They have a dilemma, though. In addition to the lobstrosities, there are wild creatures in the nearby hills. Roland has a gun to defend himself while Eddie and Odetta are gone, but Odetta will need to stay by herself for a couple of days while Eddie comes back for Roland. Roland tells Eddie not to leave his gun with her, but Eddie is in love and ignores Roland’s advice. When they arrive at the doorway marked THE PUSHER, Odetta is missing. Eddie worries that an animal might have killed her, but Roland knows that she is lurking in the hills, a creature more dangerous than any wildcat or lobstrosity. And armed.
This time, Roland wants Eddie to come with him through the doorway, where he’ll be safe, but Eddie refuses to abandon Odetta. Roland enters the mind of sociopath Jack Mort, a CPA who amuses himself by dropping bricks on people and pushing them in front of cars. He was responsible for both of Odetta’s traumas, even though they took place years apart in different cities. Mort isn’t interested in Roland, and Roland can’t take being inside the killer’s head for any longer than necessary. Fortunately, Mort’s consciousness faints, allowing Roland free rein of his body and complete access to his mind and all the information it contains.
His objective in New York is twofold: get ammunition and antibiotics to fight his infection. He has a third item on his checklist, too, though that one requires Detta to emerge from the hills and to look through the door at the right moment.
To his horror, Roland realizes that Mort’s next target is Jake Chambers. He wonders if this is a form of punishment: to witness Jake’s first death without being able to stop it. Regardless of what it means for his quest, he won’t stand aside and let Jake be sacrificed a second time. He steps forward long enough to make Mort miss his chance. Roland is improving. His brief exposure to Eddie and Odetta has made him more aware of the way his quest impacts the lives of others.
Throughout his adventures during this trip to New York, Roland has to worry about Eddie, who fell asleep while watching for Odetta and was captured by Detta. She hog-ties him and leaves him at the high-water line for the lobstrosities, hoping that this will draw Roland back so she can shoot him. Roland can’t let her see what he sees when he looks through the door until he’s ready, though, so he proceeds with his mission and resists the temptation to ch
eck up on the situation on the beach.
Nothing goes smoothly. At the gun shop, he is stymied by the fact that, though he has enough money to buy more bullets than he could imagine ever needing, he requires a carry permit to purchase them, and Jack Mort doesn’t have one. He has to concoct an elaborate plan involving two rather stupid police officers who are keeping an eye on the gun shop in hopes of catching the owner selling weapons to criminals. Roland tells them the clerk robbed him. Once they are inside the shop, he disarms the police officers and “robs” the store, taking all the bullets he needs, but paying for them.
He proceeds around the corner to the pharmacy, where he pulls off the first penicillin heist in history, leaving behind Mort’s gold Rolex as payment for the Keflex. To maintain order, he has to shoot one of the guns he confiscated from the cops, which attracts the attention of more police officers.
For the final part of his plan, Roland has Jack Mort lead him to the subway station where he pushed Odetta. A patrol officer shoots Mort, but his cigarette lighter saves him—an unlikely happenstance, but the sort of thing that occurs frequently when the Dark Tower is involved. Roland forces Mort to jump in front of the oncoming train and yells for Detta and Odetta to look at the moment the train cuts Mort’s body in half at the waist.
The traumatic experience causes the woman to split into two factions that fight for control of her body. Odetta offers love and forgiveness and, as a result, a new entity is born: Susannah, who has Detta’s “fight until you drop” stamina tempered by Odetta’s calm humanity. She demonstrates her abilities as a gunslinger by taking Roland’s guns to the beach to rescue Eddie from the lobstrosities.
Roland now has two companions. Though he was meant to draw three, he now believes that Susannah, who is three people in one, represents the three. Eddie still doesn’t trust Roland completely. He knows that he and Susannah could still be sacrificed, and Roland doesn’t deny this. He’s already damned for letting Jake fall, but would sacrifice someone else if it meant he could save everything—not just his own world, but all worlds.
