Stephen King's Dark Tower series has become a modern classic, with its gritty imagination and mix of fantasy and horror. "The Drawing of the Three" is an expansive follow-up to "The Gunslinger," introducing a new cast of brilliantly unusual characters, but it's a bit slow and too devoted to setting up the main quest of the series. 
 Roland of Gilead wakes up on a beach, surrounded by carnivorous lobster creatures that manage to bite off fingers and part of his foot. Sick and possibly dying, he stumbles away and collapses. 
 But despite his problems, he still has to find and "draw" two people to assist him in his quest for the Dark Tower. He finds a door that leads him into our world, and inside the head of Eddie Dean, a young junkie/drug smuggler. Eddie reluctantly allows Roland's voice to guide him, as his beloved brother is murdered and his drug deal self-destructs. 
 While Eddie goes cold turkey, Roland starts to pursue the second person: Odetta Holmes, a beautiful African-American activist who lost her legs when someone pushed her off a train platform. She is also mentally ill -- she has a second personality, the foul-mouthed, psychotic Detta. Now Roland and Eddie are stuck with a woman who can turn into a malevolent killer at any moment. And now Roland pursues Jack Mort -- and runs into a familiar face from his past. 
 "The Drawing of the Three" is almost very good, but not quite. Unlike "The Gunslinger," this is pretty obviously a bridge between the first and third books, setting up the scene for the rest of the series. So it's rather awkward at times, as King tries to write a story around his formative characters. In that, he does a pretty good job. 
 King's writing has an evocative slam-bang quality, with lots of vivid moments -- the lobstrosities, the doors, the airplane, the blistering postapocalyptic world that Roland lives in. The descriptions comes alive with vibrant intensity. But he doesn't seem to be at ease with the constant, sprawling flashbacks to Eddie and Odetta/Detta's past lives, which add a weirdly fragmented quality to the book. It's easy to lose track of the action. 
 Enigmatic gunslinger Roland doesn't get much fleshing out in this book -- it's all about Eddie and Odetta/Detta. King brings their struggles and feelings up in all their beauty and ugliness, showing Eddie's love for the brother who led him astray. Odetta/Detta is particularly interesting -- one personality is a cultured, refined heiress, and the other is a murderous, racist psycho. 
 King stumbles over his fragmented narrative at times, but "Drawing of the Three" is a good follow-up to "The Gunslinger" and sets the stage for the remainder of the Dark Tower series.