The Drawing of the Three is the second instalment in The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. It follows Roland as he goes through three doors into other worlds and recruits new characters who to help him on his quest to the Dark Tower. The series is inspired by the Robert Browning poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.”
Some spoilers ahead, so proceed at your own risk.
Here are my favourite metaphors, similes, and descriptions from The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King:
metaphors & similes
His right hand kept trying to do this job, insisted on forgetting its reduction in spite of the pain, and he found himself returning it to his knee again and again, like a dog too stupid or fractious to heel.
“You have the key, Senor?” he asked, except in that British public school accent it came out sounding like what you called your last year of high school.
The other woman laughed and nodded, but if that was a real laugh, the gunslinger thought, he was a river-toad.
Through it he could see a gray, grainy beach and waves the color of old athletic socks breaking upon it.
Jack Andolini finally turned his head. He did so slowly, as if it was an act he performed only rarely, and at great personal cost. You almost expected to hear old oilless hinges creaking inside the thickness of his neck.
“You ready?” George Biondi said, and gave the others an enormous wink as Henry’s chin floated down to his breastbone and then slowly rose once more—it was like watching a soaked log not quite ready to give in and sink for good.
But this did more than catch her attention; it snagged it, as if on a thorn.
…but by then he was already pelting into the bathroom, and he barely made it to the kneeling penitential position before the porcelain altar before dinner came up the express elevator.
…all of that was for him buried away like dead teeth beneath perfect blinding white caps.
Must be kind of strange when one of your characters has seen a movie based on one of your other books:
He was staring into the doorway, hypnotized, as an aisle of Macy’s rushed forward—he was reminded again of The Shining, where you saw what the little boy was seeing as he rode his trike through the hallways of that haunted hotel. He remembered the little boy had seen this creepy pair of dead twins in one of those hallways.
The younger man was no more than a snoring rock, but the Really Bad Man stirred a little in his sleep and she froze with a snarl tattooed on her face until he quieted again.
“Odetta.” His voice was a whisper, like the onset of rain.
The ground was becoming grainier, more and more like cheap and unprofitable soil and less and less like sand (in places bunches of weeds grew, looking almost ashamed to be there), and there were so many large rocks now jutting from this odd combination of sand and soil that Eddie found himself detouring around them as he had previously tried to detour the Lady’s chair around the sandtraps.
The sound was a little like crickets, but higher pitched than that, and with no swing of rhythm—just a steady monotonous riiiiiiii sound like power-lines.
The growl rose to a tortured scream that sounded like a cry of some being suffering a horrid death (it might actually have signalled no more than a successful mating).
For the first half-hour or so his shadow ran with him, the improbable shadow of a scrawny giant tacked to the soles of his sneakers and stretching long yards to the east.
Sleep did not drift upon him as it sometimes did but seized him with the rough hands of a lover who is awkward in her eagerness.
Roland would have been as helpless to do otherwise as a gun is helpless to refuse the finger that squeezes the trigger and flings the bullet on its flight.
Gradually he relaxed, as a finger curled around a trigger may relax at the last instant.
Detta laid up in a deeply shadowed cleft formed by rocks which leaned together like old men who had been turned to stone while sharing some weird secret.
Delevan felt as if someone had used the inside of his head as a nuclear weapons testing site.
He simply swung the scatter-gun flat smack as the stock connected with O’Mearah’s left cheek, the sound of a baseball bat connecting with a real steamer of a pitch.
In the gunslinger’s world Eddie Dean’s hopes were crumbling like dykes in a downpour. Soon they would collapse altogether.
There were no parking spaces, and the driver made no effort to find one. He simply double-parked and let the clog of traffic behind him inch its laborious way through the loophole remaining, like a trickle of blood trying to serve a heart hopelessly clogged with cholesterol.
Approach with extreme caution, the dispatcher had said. This man is armed and extremely dangerous. Dispatchers usually sounded like the most bored human beings on earth—for all Andy Staunton knew, they were—and so the almost awed emphasis this one put on the word extremely had stuck to his consciousness like a burr.
descriptions
“You are a fuck,” the sallow thing said in its impeccable British accent.
“No,” Eddie said, “a fuck is what you expected. I came with my legs crossed. You want to be here before eleven with something that I can use—it doesn’t have to be great, just something I can use—or you will be one dead scuzz.”
What in the blue fuck is going on here?
The language here is so colourful:
“You guys have emptied the crap-tank on that plane already. God, you’ve had enough time to have been through it three times. You’ve been through my stuff. I bent over and let one of you stick the world’s longest finger up my ass. If a prostate check is an exam, that was a motherfucking safari. I was scared to look down. I thought I’d see that guy’s fingernail sticking out of my cock.”
“Yeah, you can drone off,” he said, “but first you gotta take your dope. It’s time. Sun says it is, anyway. I guess. I was never no Boy Scout, so I don’t know for sure. But I guess it’s close enough for Government work. Open wide, Roland. Open wide for Dr. Eddie, you kidnapping fuck.”
The gunslinger felt a dull species of shame but only repeated: “At least for now, that part of your life is done.”
The first words which came into Eddie’s mind were If you think you’ve gone insane, Odetta, you’re nuts. Brief consideration, however, made this seem an unprofitable line of argument to take.
Later, with strange galaxies turning in slow gavotte overhead, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full.
Henry might have known, but Henry was dead—a thought which had a way of constantly surprising Eddie into grief.
But never in his life had he felt such a deadly need for sleep. It would take him soon enough; if he didn’t give in willingly, sleep would rape him.
The potions that really worked were kept safely out of sight. One could only obtain these if you had a sorcerer’s fiat. In this world, such sorcerers were called DOCKTORS, and they wrote their magic formulae on sheets of paper which the Mortcypedia called REXES.
Which ones are your favourites?
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