The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three

Hey now, that was much better. Much, much better. I've still got some nitpicks with The Drawing of the Three, but it was much, much better than The Gunslinger. Let's jump right into bullet items here. Again, since this series has already been posted about at length on the blog, the assumption is that you've already read this book; heavy spoilers will follow.

• From my Gunslinger post: "Holding back some key information from the reader for a period of time is fine, but when your story's environment, protagonist, and antagonist are all incredibly vaguely defined, there's nothing left for the reader to latch onto." I stand by my assertion that this was the biggest problem with The Gunslinger. Who is our hero? Who is his foe? Why is he doing what he's doing? Why is he going where he's going? How does his world work? It almost felt like King was making crap up as he went along, and granted, this hasn't changed all that much; the second book ends with a note from the author that includes an admission that King doesn't yet know how his series will play out. Still, as a reader you'd like to get the idea that the story you're reading takes place in a well-defined environment. This is called "world building," and no matter how much or how little the setting resembles a world you're familiar with, it's nice to know the general gist of the setting you'll read about for hundreds of pages. I'm already rambling here, on my very first bullet, but the nice part about The Drawing of the Three is that most of it takes place in New York City. And the parts that don't take place there take place on a fairly nondescript long stretch of beach. It was so much easier to Roland's quest this time around since it was so straightforward this time around.
• Speaking of the beach, how about those "lobstrosities!?" Dog-sized lobsters with razor sharp claws unafraid to approach, attack, and even eat people. One of King's strength has always been his ability to conjure up nightmarish creatures, and it works wonders here. In fact, a lobstrosity attack kicks off the novel, leaving Roland handicapped (two fingers and a big toe, gone!) and practically unarmed (all those shell casings, wet and useless!) - so right off the bat I had an easy way to empathize with Roland and root for his short-term survival. Forget the tower - just get this guy to some other people and some medicine!
• The other two characters introduced in the story were easy to root for, too. Eddie is a heroin addict. Odetta is wheelchair-bound and haunted by schizophrenia. Eddie's addiction makes him attack Roland at one point; Odetta's alternate personality plots to kill Roland and Eddie. This all made for much more compelling reading than "boring ass Roland continued to follow the nondescript but totally evil - just trust me, he's really evil, I don't need to tell you why - man in black..." These were fleshed out characters giving in to moments of weakness and having realistic - if extreme and dramatic - conflicts with each other. Yes. This. More of this, Stephen King. Cut the mysterious bullshit and give me reasons the characters are doing what they're doing.
• Here's a nitpick, though. One of my criticisms of The Gunslinger was that the King disobeyed one of the most basic rules of good writing: "show, don't tell." I characterized the plot development where Roland comes to realize that he loves Jake as exceedingly lazy. I mean, they're just walking and talking - what else would they be doing in a book about following an evil guy westward? - and all of a sudden, hey, presto, there's an emotional connection. I'm disappointed to note that this happened again, sort of, in The Drawing of the Three. In one case, Eddie, a heroin addict being forced to quit cold turkey (which from everything I've heard about heroin addiction sounds like a potentially fatal thing to do) just kind of gets better. Like, he's sick and feeling terrible for a page or two but then it's dropped and never really brought up again. Similarly, Eddie just falls right in love with Odetta because... she's there? I'll admit, King put about a hundred times as much effort into developing Eddie and Odetta's relationship before dropping the L-word as he put into Roland's affection for Jake in The Gunslinger, but it still felt totally abrupt and plot-convenient. Having said that, I at least buy into the idea that Eddie and Odetta - now Susannah - are in love; I could never even be convinced of that when it came to Roland and Jake.
• I complained that in The Gunslinger, what should have been the emotional climax of the story - Roland doesn't save Jake from death and pursues the man in black instead - fell totally flat for a variety of reasons. First, it was foretold from the get-go - not foreshadowed or hinted at, but explicitly stated, to both Roland and Jake - that Jake was going to have to die. And since King didn't spend so much as a sentence inside Jake's head, struggling to accept that fate, Jake never felt like anything more than a plot device. Furthermore, Jake had already died before, yet here he was, alive again, and there were no assurances that the same thing wouldn't happen this time when he died; for all I knew, Jake was immortal. Anyway, another nice part about The Drawing of the Three was its ability to surprise me. The shell of the story is laid out from the beginning. Roland makes his way up the beach, opening three doors, each of them a portal to another world, and more than that, right into another person's mind. But what happens behind each door, and hell, between the doors along the way, was unpredictable and exciting. It's amazing how you can build suspense when you don't explain to the reader what will happen in advance!
• Another very specific nitpick, and this one's incredibly minor, but it represents a larger issue I have with Stephen King's lack of attention to detail. So, Roland spends the entire first book heading west. He reaches the sea at the beginning of this book, and decides to head north along the beach. From here, King makes multiple references to the sea being on Roland's right. Either Roland's world has opposite definitions for the cardinal directions - and it wouldn't be the first wildly unexplained thing in these books - or King simply made the same error multiple times and never caught it on an editing check. I thought the former was the case - hoped for it, even - but no. I checked the Internet, and apparently this is a "mistake" King only makes in The Drawing of the Three. It's the little things, man. I know King was on lots of drugs when he wrote these books, and that's apparent based on how frequently he changes points of view and just sort of assumes the reader is keeping up, but these kinds of mistakes and inconsistencies are just sloppy. Things like this make King's entire Dark Tower series feel like less of a coherent and cohesive story and more of a melting pot of crazy ideas King had for elements of a larger story. And I'll give him credit - the guy is creative and imaginative and all - but I would have appreciated more polish and attention to detail. (Now, I highlighted the cardinal direction confusion example because it was a personal pet peeve, but there are numerous occasions where details contradict each other - chronological order of certain events, character ages, character hair colors, and more.)
• The pacing was just so much better here. Nothing zips back and forth between the present, the long ago past, and the recent past; a few flashbacks occur, but they just provide necessary character background for our new protagonists.

I think I've hit on all the specific things I wanted to hit on here. I know a lot of them were still negative, so I want to reiterate that I enjoyed The Drawing of the Three overall. The characters were more complex, their motivations were simpler and clearer, and most aspects of the story, fantastical or realistic, made sense. When I finished The Gunslinger, I jumped right into this book because I just had to see it get better. The book still took me more than a month and a half to finish, but that was due to my own deliberately slow pace; for most of February, I'd read a chapter or to a night before going to sleep, savoring the story for what it was rather than racing through just to be done with the book altogether. What I'm getting at is, I don't plan to jump right into the third book, and when I do, I have no idea how quickly I'll read it. It's almost 600 pages long and I've got plenty else in the backlog, so maybe I'll hold off for a little while, at least for variety's sake. Rest assured, though - not only did I enjoy this book, but I've come to terms with the way King has written the series, for the most part, and I think I can calm down enough just to enjoy the ride instead of letting myself get riled up by under-explained or sloppily written plot developments. Everything I've heard suggests that The Waste Lands represents the apex of the series, so I want to wait until I'm in the right mood to appreciate it instead of diving in and losing steam.