The Drawing of the Three — The Dark Tower, Book 2

The Drawing of the Three Review

If The Gunslinger is an elegy — slow, atmospheric, and deliberately withholding — then The Drawing of the Three is the moment the Dark Tower series finds its pulse. King wastes no time: within pages, Roland is on a beach fighting lobster-like creatures that cost him two fingers and begin a slow poisoning that will shadow the entire novel. Wounded and desperate, he must traverse three mysterious doors that open onto our world at different times and pull his ka-tet — his destined companions — into Mid-World.

The structure of three distinct set pieces is King at his most architecturally confident. The first door takes Roland into the body of Eddie Dean, a young heroin addict being smuggled through JFK Airport in 1987. Eddie’s section is a propulsive thriller — Roland navigating drug interdiction while Eddie maintains the performance of composure — and it establishes immediately that this series will inhabit our world as comfortably as it inhabits Roland’s.

The second door delivers the novel’s most complex character: Odetta Holmes, a Black civil rights activist who is also Detta Walker, a vicious, streetwise alter ego who would cheerfully see Roland dead. The tension between Roland’s pragmatic need for her and her violent resistance gives the novel its emotional spine, and the resolution of Odetta and Detta’s fractured identity is handled with a psychological care unusual in genre fiction.

The third door — shorter and stranger — closes the loop in ways that recontextualise everything that came before. By the novel’s end, Roland has his companions, his losses are established, and the series has committed to its grandest ambition.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — The book that transforms the Dark Tower from a promising experiment into an unmissable epic.

Reading Order

1. The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, Book 1)
2. The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower, Book 2)
3. The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower, Book 3)
4. Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, Book 4)
5. Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower, Book 5)
6. Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower, Book 6)
7. The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, Book 7)
8. The Wind Through the Keyhole (The Dark Tower, Book 4.5)

Publication History

The Drawing of the Three was published by Donald M. Grant in May 1987, five years after The Gunslinger. The long gap between volumes reflected both King’s prolific output in other directions and the unusual nature of the series — a project he had been developing episodically since 1970, published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, that did not fit comfortably into his standard publishing schedule. The Grant editions were limited hardcovers; the mass market paperback publication by Plume brought the series to a much wider audience.

Where The Gunslinger had been largely atmospheric and deliberately resistant to conventional narrative satisfaction, The Drawing of the Three arrived with propulsive momentum that converted many readers who had found the first volume difficult. The series’ profile grew substantially with this publication.

The Dark Tower Series in Context

The Dark Tower series represents King’s most sustained creative project: eight main novels published between 1982 and 2012, plus the interstitial The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012), with roots in work begun in 1970. The series functions as a connective tissue for King’s entire fictional universe, incorporating characters and locations from Salem’s Lot, It, Insomnia, Black House, and dozens of other works. Roland Deschain’s quest connects every corner of King’s multiverse.

The Drawing of the Three is the volume in which the series commits to this connective ambition most clearly. By drawing Eddie Dean and Odetta Holmes/Susannah Dean from our world into Mid-World, King establishes that the Dark Tower saga will not confine itself to its primary setting but will use the portal mechanic to move freely between realities. This establishes the structural foundation for everything that follows.

Eddie Dean and Odetta Holmes as Characters

The two primary companions Roland acquires in The Drawing of the Three are among the most fully realized characters in the series. Eddie Dean’s heroin addiction is handled with the specificity King would later bring to Danny Torrance’s alcoholism in Doctor Sleep — not as a plot convenience but as a lived condition with its own internal logic and its own cost. Eddie’s intelligence and humor, which Roland initially underestimates, become among the series’ most reliable pleasures.

Odetta Holmes’s fractured identity — the civil rights activist and the streetwise, violent Detta Walker — is the novel’s most psychologically complex element. King draws on the history of dissociative identity disorder with care, and the resolution of Odetta and Detta’s split into the integrated Susannah Dean is handled as psychological healing rather than supernatural correction. Susannah Dean, the person who emerges from that resolution, becomes one of the series’ most important and interesting figures.

Reception and the Series’ Growing Reputation

By the time The Drawing of the Three was published, King was the bestselling author in the world, and the Dark Tower series benefited from an enormous built-in readership that engaged with it as something distinct from his horror novels — a personal project undertaken for reasons that seemed to have nothing to do with commercial calculation. That perception, accurate or not, gave the series a quality of intimacy with its readers that King’s more genre-conventional work sometimes lacks.

The novel solidified the series’ reputation as one of the most ambitious fantasy projects in American popular fiction and converted the atmospheric promise of The Gunslinger into a reading experience that reached a much wider audience.