Reviews with content warning for Racial slurs - The Drawing of the Three

I keep reading Stephen King because he's a hell of a storyteller. This story is GOOD. The writing is compelling, the pacing keeps you wanting to turn the pages, and the characters give you whiplash rooting for and against them.

That being said, I didn't love the first book in the series, but am glad I continued.

However, this book is dated in a lot of ways. There are outdated slurs of all kinds and horrible ableist language. This is hard to overlook, despite the book's publishing date. I can forgive some of it, but not all of it.

Overall, I had a great time reading this and will continue reading the series over time

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misfitnightmare's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

Cringed a lot for unnecessary use of n slur in the book. Plus it seems that S. King didn't do very good research about mental disorders because Odetta doesn't have schizophrenia, she has DID. Other than that it was better than the first book.

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senesced's review against another edition

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dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

Painful to get through given the jarring amount of slurs used. I would say that this didn't age well, but I can't imagine a time in which the language was every accepted. Yikes.

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joshkiba13's review against another edition

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adventurous dark funny mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

"In matters of the Tower, fate became a thing as merciful as the lighter which had saved his life and as painful as the fire the miracle had ignited. Like the wheels of the oncoming train, it followed a course both logical and crushingly brutal, a course against which only steel and sweetness could stand."

What a trip. The Gunslinger served as a slow-burning prologue to this series; The Drawing of the Three was the race following a starting gun. It begins hours after the end of the first book, and follows Roland on a journey to survive and to fulfill one of the many prophecies from the first book.

Destiny (or ka) leads our gunslinger to people to aid him in his quest for the Tower. I love how unconventional his companions are. We have a guy in his 20s suffering from a heroin addiction and sticky dealings with the mob, and a legless woman plagued by a split personality. Roland doesn't understand why these people have been placed in his path, but he accepts it with radically relentless trust in ka and moves forward.

There were a lot of intense and gripping action sequences, and many tender moments between characters, as well as ones of great introspection. I loved this passage of Roland understanding that to live without love would mutate his quest beyond its worth:

"A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast. To be a beast is perhaps bearable, although the man who has become one will surely pay hell's own price in the end . . . If there is naught but darkness in your heart, what could you do except degenerate from beast to monster? . . . But to gain one's object as a monster . . . To pay hell is one thing. But do you want to own it?"

The entire nearly 500 page book took place over a few days, and in the grand scheme of the series it really seems like a prologue part II since it's completely the assembly of Roland's team. I'm excited to continue toward the Tower in The Waste Lands (following the reading a few offshoot books to prepare).

This book was waaay more King's regular style compared to the very prose-y first book, but there were still some cool phrases here and there, such as this one describing Roland from a mob boss's point of view:

" . . . a tall man with dirty gray-black hair and a face that looked as if it had been chiseled from obdurate stone by some savage god."

There are still a ton of questions from the first book left unanswered, principal among them being what set Roland on this quest to the Dark Tower in the first place. I really hope that is touched on early on in the next installment so that I can connect more with his determination. I know the fourth book, Wizard in Glass, is almost entirely a backstory for our gunslinger, but crossing my fingers that we can have just a little more to go on in the third book first.

Overall a quick and fun read. Excited for more to come soon.

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