It stood six and a half feet high and appeared to be made of solid ironwood, although the nearest ironwood tree must grow seven hundred miles or more from here... this door where no door should be. It simply stood there on the gray strand twenty feet above the high-tide line, seemingly as eternal as the sea itself, now casting the slanted shadow of its thickness toward the east as the sun westered.

When Roland enters the door, he discovers that he has the ability to manipulate and even take full control of Eddie, which allows King to lead us on a merry and fascinating exploration of The Rules. For example, Roland can bring matter from our world back to his, but not vice versa. When he "comes forward" and takes possession of his host, the host's eyes change color to represent Roland's eyes. When Roland moves in his world, the door follows him. The door is only visible at 180 degrees from one side to the other -- moving behind it results in its "vanishing" until the observer returns to the front side. Only Roland can open the door.

The first third of the book focuses on Roland's acclimation to these mystical principles and their fantastical permutations. There's no attempt (yet) to make this function as science-fantasy in terms of some greater mechanistic axiom, and as John Clute notes in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, "[the] bleakly fantasticated, underpopulated landscape of the future... is an imprecise fantasist's future rather than a SF one." But what began in the first book as "strange events [occurring] among the decaying detritus of a lost technological age" begins to take on systemic weight as King develops his Dark Tower universe by augmenting its relationship to our own.

The most substantial changes occur at the level of narrative style. King is occasionally fond of singsong rambling bordering on stream-of-consciousness, but here -- as in the other Dark Tower books -- it is mitigated and refined, controlled and subservient to the story rather than overpowering it. Even so, the distant stoic pilgrim's voice has been replaced by a collection of American idioms that shatter the mythic ambiance and slacken the narrative structure compellingly. What follows is extracted from a scene in which Eddie, smuggling Cocaine taped under his armpits, has a momentary cynical lapse about the plan, and addresses the master planner, his brother Henry, in his mind.

Hey Henry, o great sage & eminent junkie big brother, while we're on the subject of our feathered friends, you want to hear my definition of cooked goose? That's when the customs guy[s] at Kennedy [decide] there's something a little funny about the way you look... and they say maybe you better take off your t-shirt... because you look like maybe you got some kind of a medical problem, buddy, those bulges under your pits look like maybe they could be some kind of lymphatic tumors or something... so you take off the t-shirt and hey, looky here, you're some lucky kid, those aren't tumors, unless they're what you might call tumors on the corpus of society, yuk-yuk-yuk, those things look more like a couple of baggies held there with Scotch strapping tape, and by the way, don't worry about that smell, son, that's just goose. It's cooked.

While the first, third and fourth books move Roland and his companions over vast geographic distances, this second book feels more like an interlude, a place for Roland to consider his mission and replenish his strength, relatively speaking. Like the revised edition of The Gunslinger, this edition of the second book also has a new subtitle: Renewal. The new introduction, "On Being Nineteen" is also duplicated here, but otherwise the story, complete with its opening "argument" synopsis and book-ending afterword are identical to the previous editions.

The Drawing of the Three was originally published by Donald M. Grant in 1987 as a hardcover with full color illustrations by Phil Hale. These tended to be edgy human forms awash in glistening panels of light blues and dusty oranges. A second edition was published by Donald M. Grant later with entirely new illustrations, also by Phil Hale, but starkly different -- a mix of browns and blacks, with character physiology (particularly the contorted hands and faces) packed full of kinetics and visualized in clenched fists and grimacing faces. The latter illustrations inhabit the new Scribner edition and are easy to linger over. Though I personally prefer Hale's original illustrations, it is his version of Roland, then as now, that comes to mind when I read these books.

Well worth price and time, the second book in The Dark Tower series is a masterwork of dark fantasy that continues King's homage to the western epic, now interlaced with gritty urban imagery and late twentieth century American colloquialisms. Fiction this compelling is rare, but compelling fiction with a literary pedigree is rare indeed.