Honeyed Words: Dismembering Heros - Not My Style (Why I Haven't Finished The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King)

Dismembering Heros - Not My Style (Why I Haven't Finished The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King) · 27 April 2007

The The Drawing of the Three is the second in King’s Dark Tower series, a set of books that’s highly acclaimed. I recently picked it up, read three pages, and promptly put it down.

My relationship with King is shaky at best. I love his writing style. A few of his books (notably The Stand) also scare the hairs off the back of my neck (yep, they don’t just stand up, they get up and leave). King presents his stories in a way that everything happening makes perfect sense in the context of the story. Since his stories are often set in modern America, it’s very easy to make the leap to it being perfectly sensible that something outrageously terrifying from his stories could happen out here in the real world. So, I mean it as a compliment to King when I say that I can’t handle him in large doses.

I’d read the first book in the The Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger, back in High School. When I resolved to catch up on the rest of the series, I started again at the beginning by re-reading it. The Gunslinger was as good as I remembered; it was poignant and other-worldly and it promised to move towards a satisfying unfolding of a traditional quest-type epic.

The Gunslinger reads like an episode in the larger story, and as the first leg of the gunslinger Roland’s quest draws to an end, the reader can see the literary curtain fall as he prepares for the next scene. The first chapter of The Drawing of the Three takes place very shortly after the closing chapter of The Gunslinger. As I said, I made it about 3 pages before putting it down.

I felt I should examine why I haven’t re-attempted reading this book yet. I almost never start a book without finishing it, so for me to read only 3 pages and then stop is an unusual event. I’ll even plug through a book that I don’t particularly enjoy out of a sense of wanting to tie up loose ends. It was an assortment of factors that made me set The Drawing of the Three Aside.

It was the proverbial “dark and stormy night” on the evening I was reading. I had no trouble imagining the scene of the first chapter being played out in my own yard as I was reading it. The scene was also graphically gory. As I’ve mentioned, I don’t do well with blood, descriptively crunching wounds, or a combination thereof. But the third, and I think terminal reason, that I couldn’t read on was that King had spent the entire first book building up the hero The Gunslinger, and then in less than a chapter he tore down everything that the hero’s sense of self worth was built on.

Though I originally thought I would return to the book on a bright sunny day and find out what happened next, I haven’t. After a few weeks, in which I started and finished a handful of other novels, I had to ask myself, “Am I so shallow that I can’t recognize the hero’s ability to adapt to a situation? Am I so hidebound that I can’t see calamity as opportunity in disguise? Do I not recognize that people can, and should change?”

I’d like to think the answers to all these questions is “No.” Nonetheless, I had a visceral reaction to King’s dismembering of the hero figure that wasn’t entirely based on my aversion to gore. I am probably selling King short and I’m sure he will construct a new reality for the hero in which he will thrive. But, I may always long for the hero of the first novel, the white knight that King introduced and made us love (flaws included) in The Gunslinger.

I fear that this is one of the first signs of an aging attitude, a nostalgia for the past and an inability to adapt. As usual, King has found a way to scare me silly - but because I’m not going to quietly fade into a world in which it’s always 2000, I will eventually pick up The Drawing of the Three and give King a chance to show me what wonders the future can hold.

Book Reviews, Dark Tower Series, Fantasy, Hero Worship, Horror, Science Fiction, Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three