Read: The Drawing of the Three–“The Pusher”; “Final Shuffle”
Now that I’ve finished it I can safely say that I liked The Drawing of the Three less than The Gunslinger, maybe a lot less depending on how I feel at the moment you ask me. It’s not that it’s a bad book, although the flaws stand out clearer here than in most of the King I’ve read, the main one being the ostentatious overwriting of the main action sequences. During Eddie and the gunslinger’s confrontation with Balazar and his underlings, and during the gunslinger/Jack Mort’s rampage through the gun shop and the drug store, practically every sentence uttered and every movement made is surrounded by three or four paragraphs detailing what the gunslinger’s thinking, what his our-world counterpart is thinking, what each of their antagonists are thinking, and on and on and on. I’ve seen King employ this technique of superdecompressing an action sequence before during the shootout with the “zookeepers” in The Stand–and to much greater effect, since its use was basically limited to that one sequence, where it was meant to convey how a lifetime of terror and violence was packed into a minute-long confrontation. Here it’s the default mode, and it eats up page after page for no reason.
But the main reason I prefer The Gunslinger is that The Gunslinger is just different. Different setting, different style, different tone, different structure than most any King novel I’d read, and this is all to its benefit. With The Drawing of the Three you can do an apples to apples comparison with pretty much any King book. It doesn’t feel special, which is how an epic fantasy life’s-work type thing should feel.
But I don’t want to be churlish. I liked the “lobstrosities,” the monotony of the characters’ journey on the beach, and (in this most recent section) the fun of watching the gunslinger use the body of the serial killer he finds himself inhabiting as the equivalent of a kamikaze airplane. Of course the guy deserved it, but seeing the glee with which Roland inflicts pain upon this body he’s hijacked brings back the grim gunslinger of the first book, the one who’d let a kid die rather than risk his quest. This goes double with the two cops he dupes and then assaults–as we learn, his actions that day all but ruin their lives and careers, not to mention necessitate major surgery on at least one, and their only crime was being kind of lame. After all those tender times with Eddie and Odetta, it’s nice to see the gunslinger being scary again.
And oh yeah–Flagg shows up in this section! Well, kind of. He’s mentioned, in passing, as someone (or something–Roland’s onto him) the gunslinger encountered once long ago, a powerful magician who turned someone into a dog and was being chased by two guys named Dennis and Thomas. These of course are the characters from The Eyes of the Dragon who vowed to chase Flagg, the villain of that book, through whatever other dimensions he traversed until they caught him and put a stop to his evil. What really surprised me about this passage is how minor it made Flagg seem–it’s a throwaway mention of the character, who apparently kind of briefly brushed up against Roland during a confusing time in the gunslinger’s life, and who most importantly has nothing to do with Marten or Walter or any of the other big bads in Roland’s quest. Consider me flummoxed.
PS: This book offered a curious amount of interior monologue for ancillary characters: Jane the flight attendant, that mafia goon who worships Balazar, Odetta’s limo driver, the cops, Katz the pharmacist, etc. At any moment you’d think that one of them is about to become an important character in the book, but you’d be wrong.
PPS: Here’s a custom-made Roland action figure by Joe Acevedo. (Hat tip: Justin Aclin.) He looks a lot younger than I see him, insofar as he doesn’t look exactly like Clint Eastwood, but hey.
