The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three recap

Fevered and maimed after a monster on the beach takes two of his fingers, Roland finds three free-standing doors along the shore of the Western Sea, each opening into the mind of a person in twentieth-century New York. Through the first he reaches Eddie Dean, a heroin addict, and pulls him bodily into Mid-World after helping him survive a mob deal. Through the second he reaches Odetta Holmes, a legless woman whose mind is split between a genteel self and a violent hidden self. Through the third he inhabits Jack Mort, a secret killer whose old crimes maimed Odetta and once pushed the boy Jake to his death. Using Mort, Roland engineers a crisis that forces Odetta's two selves to confront each other and fuse into a single, whole woman, Susannah Dean. The three are drawn: Eddie and Susannah join Roland as the beginnings of a new ka-tet, and the fellowship turns inland toward the Dark Tower.

In the first book, the last gunslinger, Roland Deschain of the fallen land of Gilead, pursued the man in black across a desert in a world that has moved on. He passed through the town of Tull, where the sorcerer's meddling forced him to kill everyone, then found a displaced boy, Jake Chambers, and took him along, only to let the boy fall to his death in the mountains rather than lose the chase. Roland finally confronted the man in black, who read his future in a deck of cards, foretold three companions he must draw to him, and spoke of the Dark Tower as the linchpin of all worlds before a night-long talk aged Roland by years. Roland woke alone and walked on to the shore of the Western Sea, still bound for the Tower and now knowing he must gather three.

By the end, Roland has drawn his three. Eddie Dean, pulled out of a life of addiction, has begun to get clean and is becoming a gunslinger in his own right. Odetta Holmes and her buried second self, Detta Walker, are forced into a single confrontation that Roland stages through the body of the killer Jack Mort, and out of it emerges an integrated woman who takes the name Susannah Dean. Jack Mort dies before he can be drawn as a person, killed by a train much as he once killed others. Roland remains physically diminished, having lost fingers to the beach-monster, but he is no longer alone: Eddie and Susannah, already drawn to each other in love, stand with him. The new fellowship leaves the shore of the Western Sea and starts inland, bound together as ka-tet on the long road toward the Tower.