Hello, everyone. I'm Robbie Darden, and this is A Serial Fanacist, the podcast where fans of everything. Welcome. Today, I'm joined by Matt Hamm to discuss The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King, book two of the Dark Tower series.
In it, we see Roland, the last gunslinger, join together his ka-tet in his quest for the dark tower. Matt and I talk about this trio of characters, some of the problematic aspects of Odetta's character in particular, and the intersection of magic and mental health in fantasy fiction. It was fun to talk with Matt, as it always is. On to the discussion Hello, everyone.
I'm here with Matt Hamm to discuss The Dark Tower 2, The Drawing of the Three. Matt, how are you? I'm great. You know, it's drawing, like you draw with a pencil, but it's also like you draw the cards.
I get it now. Yep. See, King is not necessarily known for deep metaphor. Subtlety is not really his thing.
No, it's not. It's really not. This is not. We're continuing our journey into the drawing into the dark towards the dark tower, I guess.
We're getting there just slowly and surely, just as Roland, the last gunslinger, is, we are on book two, The Drawing of the Three, which comes out 10 years after the first book. It's a really long time to wait for a sequel. It is. It's like, oh, so this is gonna be a seven book series.
And it's 10 years between books. This is not looking good. This is the George R. R.
Martin version of publishing. Wait, 3 comes out in 91. So it's only four years between 2 and 3. However, 5 comes out, let's see, in 97.
So six years. And then after that, it's another 15 years until, I think Now, Wizard of Scala, 2003, so six more years. But then Cala, as long as with Susanna in the dark tower itself, is within a year of each other. So it's bits and starts until we get to the last three books.
Yeah. I almost wonder if he wrote them all at the same time. Well, they take place all over the place with different characters. It's just easier to write them all at once and then publish them a little bit, you know, after that.
Those last three, I think, were largely written all at once. But combined, those last three books are hundreds, probably a million words altogether, I would say. Which is all that's I mean, King is so prolific. A million words is not actually that much considering his body of work.
And he writes books where things actually happen. Weird. Not all the time. Depends on the book.
I feel like this book part in particular had a decent amount happening, although most of it was just characters going, what? No way. Yes way. No way.
Yes way. I mean, okay. So The Drawing of the Three is, we are kind of given a vision of this at the end. Well, yeah, 10 years pass between the publishing of 1 and 2, but only seven hours have passed within between the two books in the universe, in the story itself.
There's it literally like Roland basically just woke up after his, his uh his palaver with a 10 year nap. Yeah, his 10 year nap with the man in black. And he is drawn, The Drawing of the Three is he has to go get these people and he doesn't know what it is and we don't either. And that's literally all this book is.
It is him forming his ka-tet. See, that's the part together. Yeah. He's a gunslinger.
So it makes sense. Exactly. He is. This is, that is the entirety of this book is him.
And there, there will be others that join them as we go and depart as they, as we go. But these three are the core uh of the rest of the series. It is the rest of the series. If this book, these series is no longer just about Roland.
The series is now about is about Roland and Eddie and Susanna, now Susanna. Well, by the end of the book, she becomes Susanna. Exactly. By the end of the book, she is Susanna.
Which I just, I feel like we should get this out of the way. Uh, the way that this particular book uh treats mental illness, uh, I believe uh dissociative identity disorder that we call what Susanna had. Uh, it just, it's problematic, let's put it that way. I think, yeah, I mean, it's not, I don't think it's trying, I don't know if it's trying to be representative of real life because I, I, I, I generally lump all the stuff that happens in this to magic.
That is, that is very true because uh, for those of you who haven't read the book, uh, basically Roland gets these people by finding doors on a beach that lead to, essentially what is our world, uh, in, I guess Eddie was technically in the present uh when the book was being written and Susanna is in the past. So magic. Right. And I, I, and like the doors open into their heads, you know, like he is, Roland is literally stepping inside them in a certain way.
Um, so I don't, and like literally the last door, you know, there's three doors. First door is Eddie. Second door is Susanna. Third door is the killer, the pusher, as he's called.
The Jack Mort is his name. And he's the reason that Jake dies or Jake dies in the real world and is transported into Roland's in the first book. He pushes him into the traffic. He's the reason that Susanna has the initial head trauma and is the reason that Susanna loses her legs.
And I think it is, I think he all of this is, I, I, I feel like anything that happens in these books is about, is intrinsically tied to fate and destiny and Ka, as Roland would say. Yeah. That's one of the things that I was going to ask you, Robbie, is, uh, do you think that uh someone was trying to tell uh Jack the pusher who to push and when to push them? I mean, I largely, I feel like that's alluded to in the first book, is that the man in black is doing it.
And I feel like. That's true. It's the man in black. But in this book, I get the feeling that the man in black is obviously dead at this point, or at least we're meant to think so.
And he said that he had a higher level boss. Right. But I mean, I think that the man in black is still timeless to a certain extent. I think he just, I he might not be like corporeal or whatever, but also there's time travel going on and interdimensional travel.
And like I, it's a part of it, like, it's kind of a thing where Roland is traveling back in time to a time when, you know, he's, he's traveling interdimensionally and through time. And, you know, the man in black is showing him these things. And Jake is already, you know, he stops Jake's death, which would have prevented Jake from ever coming to his world in the first place. So it, there's like kind of a causal loop that got disrupted here.
There's a paradox that got created by him saving Jake in the, in the universe. Not quite. We're not done with Jake. Oh, what weird.
We're gonna, we're not done with Jake. Uh, there'll be more Jake in the future, in the future books. Um, not the Jake that we knew, I think is it, but there will be more Jake. Um, but I think that I just, that I, it's, I don't think that, I don't know.
Odetta is a pro. I like, I, I, it's, she's really strange. Odetta and Deta and what's Susanna is. I think Susanna is awesome.
Well, yeah, because she's, basically the way Susanna works is you take these two characters, uh, Odette and Deta, and you basically, they were seen as What's the best way to put this? Like Odette was like the love interest for Eddie. I like to talk a decent amount about Eddie because I think his story is very fascinating. And then you have Deta as basically the antagonist for most of this entire book.
And then when you combine those two, they become like the ultimate badass. And that's a little strange, I guess. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's weird how they out King gets there. I think that's my, it's my biggest problem with this book, frankly.
Um, I think after this though, you know, in the following books, Susanna is probably my favorite character. Susanna is awesome. Um, and I kind of like, I, I, I think now, in the year 2019, I think now most writers understand how to be more sensitive when you're writing about mental illness. Uh, King himself, I think, is more sensitive about it, understands it more.
This is written, like, you know, it was written in the 70s and 80s, which, you know, there's no, there's, there's still stigma about mental illness now, when then was, that's four years ago almost. Um, so I don't, you know, I, I, it's problematic, I think you said, but also gets us to the point where we have Susanna, who is a black woman, a black woman with, you know, with a handicap in the legs below the knees. And she ends up being like, she is a main character She knows what she's doing is a stereotype, but she's doing it on purpose to frustrate these other people. She's putting on an act to try and hide her intelligence, which, you know, Detta is just as smart as Odetta is.
They are not, you know, she's not a different, you know, she's not necessarily different. She's just mean. She's just awful, while Odetta is kind of the opposite. She's just good, but also kind of fragile.
And I think... It's like you said, the two, like, this person has been shifted into two different aspects. So, you know, Odetta got all the, she's intelligent and well-mannered, uh, but kind of naive and, uh, weak, both physically and a little bit mentally. Whereas Detta got all the, the gumption, but also all the mean-spiritedness.
So, Susanna is basically the person that she was, uh, going to be before Jack intervened. Right. And so it's, I don't know. I think it's really interesting.
I don't think it works. I don't know. I don't know if it worked well in 1987. I, because I was two years old.
I don't, so I don't know if, you know, it's largely a product of, you know, it's 30 plus years later. What are we gonna do, you know, it, it's more like, it doesn't, I think you have to, you have to hand wave a lot of this stuff away for it to, you know, I don't, I don't, it, it doesn't matter. At a certain point, you have to look at stuff, and certain, look at art and say, it doesn't matter if the story works or if this character works, if it's so over-the-top offensive and problematic, it's not worth that. You know, no story is worth it, necessarily.
And that's, you know, but it gets us Susanna. I think if King, I largely, I think that if King was rewriting this thing today, you know, if he was starting from scratch, and this never happened, he never wrote this, I think we would get Susanna in a different way. I think we’d probably, he would come up with some other way for a Susanna to arrive in this world. Um, but, you know, I, I, it's fine.
You know, it's fine. It ends up okay. Yeah, because like it is what happened today, we would probably involve something more akin to magic or, you know, something that didn't involve a mental illness kind of thing. Right.
I, you know, so I just, I say, it is a thing you have to, you know, when you're discussing the book, you talk about it. That's it. That's all it is. You said you want to talk about Eddie.
What do you think about Eddie as a character? I like Eddie a lot. I do too. That's why I was, I was a little worried that you would not like him for some strange reason, but I think, uh, he has a very interesting window on New York society in the 80s and someone with a drug problem.
Uh, I've never had a substance abuse problem, uh, but the way Eddie deals with it and thinks about it, uh, rang very true to me. Uh, you know, as someone else says, Susannah, that's wrong, feel free to read the book and tell us why. I'll stop you, just to cut in. Yes, while King was writing this, he was a tremendous cokehead.
That's true, like, heroin and cocaine are different enough that maybe he didn't quite have a Substances abuse problems, a substance abuse problem through certain addiction is addiction. Regardless of what you're addicted to, certain things are harder than others. I'm sure heroin is one of the hardest things to be the addict to opiates in general. But I don't, you know, King wrote a lot about a lot of addicts in the 80s and stuff because he was an addict.
Yeah, and I just, I feel like Eddie is a very interesting character, like his concern for his brother. And one of the things I really appreciated about Eddie's story especially is how nothing ever went right for Eddie. And basically, this story is King as a D&D DM saying, all right, you have failed every check I have given you. Let's see where the story goes.
Because every time they try and do something, like the closest they get is, oh, they get some antibiotics for Roland's sickness. Like, that's the only thing that goes right in the tuna fish sandwich, because, you know, let's all be honest, tuna fish sandwiches are fantastic. Uh, everything else they do, they, like once things fall apart and Eddie finds out that his brother is dead, and they just get into a giant shootout with all the, what's the guy's name? The, the mob boss's name, and just things go crazy from there.
I thought that was a very interesting and elegant way for that to happen and to loose Eddie of any ties he had to the real world. And even after that, when Eddie is pulled into Roland's world, how incredibly pissed off Eddie is at Roland, uh, for, you know, making that unilateral decision without, you know, really, uh, you know, consulting him. That felt very organic and real. Like he is a fully realized character, I feel like.
I mean, you can, like you King of a lot of, a lot of things in his writing, but he's never afraid to hurt his characters and to, to direct, to inject direct conflict, um, with them. And I think that's, I like Eddie a lot. Um, I think Eddie's Eddie is a little bit neater in this story because it's not, you know, there's not, you know, problematic racism stuff injected into his little vignette. It is, it's an addiction story, which King is very familiar with, and he writes it very well.
And Eddie, you know, Eddie's... Eddie's character is someone who needs to be saved, but doesn't want to be saved. And that's what Roland is doing basically, you know, and, and even Eddie is not necessarily still comfortable with any of this, you know? And Eddie is dragged in this world and he's never gonna leave, as far as he knows.
There's no out of this. He is stuck in this other, this dying world with this, this gunslinger who is also dying from infection from the lobsters, the lobsterocities. God. It's so funny when you think about an antagonist for a book like this, because obviously you have Detta and you have Jack, but it feels like the real danger to them, the most constant danger is the lobsterosities.
It's just like, wow, who would think this whole thing could have been derailed by weird giant lobsters? The little, and they're really unnerving. King does a tremendous job of making them really unnerving and really sell how dangerous they are and the how simple a thing they are. Like, as soon as, as long as Roland has his gun and ammo, they are not a threat at all.
He just blows them away and they run away. But as soon as he doesn't have a gun, as soon as he doesn't have bullets, they are incredibly dangerous. Yeah. And I think, Roland, maybe you should carry a sword or something, buddy.
I, yeah, I mean, even then, I don't know. They have shells. I don't know if the sword will do the job. Um, but we start like Eddie, like literally we are, we meet Eddie.
He's on an airplane. He's smuggling drugs and he, and Roland is the way for him to get out of it. Uh, Balazar's the name of the kingpin. Yeah, which is the weirdest name for a drug kingpin.
I was like, are you a demon from the Bible as well? Ah, kinda. Yeah, he kind of is. I think that's the, I think we're supposed to, there's, he's, he's supposed to be mythical.
Oh, okay. That makes sense then. He's supposed to be, you know, he's a, this big kingpin in New York and he's a myth, you know, he builds, he builds, you know, uh, card, uh, what do you call them? Uh, out of cards, he builds, um...
Oh, uh, towers. Towers. Yeah. He, he, he, it's, you know, that stuff is very, you know, when you think about like the Godfather, you know, you think about The Sopranos, you think about that kind of mafioso type, the kingpin type, they are mythical.
So having a name like Balazar, I think is appropriate. Um, but Eddie's relationship with his brother is, I think, realized. I think fully realized in this. I think, and like Roland, I think injects himself into that relationship in a very interesting way.
And I think really brings out Eddie's character and how Eddie feels about his brother and how his brother has dragged Eddie into this life. And now Roland is dragging Eddie into a new life. And Roland is replacing his brother in a lot of ways. Well, yeah, it's funny because Roland is basically the polar opposite of Eddie's brother.
Uh, Roland is the one, like, well, you know, it's probably better to say that Roland is what Eddie's brother would have been like had he never discovered drugs and had a slightly, I'll admit to say this, harsher upbringing because Eddie and, uh, what's Eddie's brother's name? Uh, I don't remember. Richard. Okay, it doesn't matter.
I want to say it's Richard, but I'm not sure. I don't think that's right. uh, but yeah And that it takes time to develop, and it's refreshing. I mean, like I said, Stephen King is not known for his subtlety, but the way he writes allows you to exercise that muscle fairly well in an interesting way, and I really appreciate that.
And I think that that single-mindedness is a hook, you know, like I think because Roland is such a... I honestly love Roland. He's still a monster in a lot of ways. Well, he's a very interesting monster.
Yes, and like Eddie's, I highlighted this, Eddie's reaction... Eddie is kind of, I think Eddie is really interesting because he feels like us, honestly. He feels like a kind of, you know, not that we're heroin addicts, but he feels like an everyday normal dude. And he says, you know, he liked Roland, feared him, but liked him as well, suspected that in time he could love him as he loved Henry.
And that's kind of what I, you know, that's how I feel about Roland is that, no, like, yeah, I'm kind of afraid of him because he's scary, but also I love him. He's great. He is so compelling. He's tough as nails.
And we see trauma happen to him. He loses his fingers, and it's over. Yeah, Roland is one of those people that you can be friends with, but it's never a very close friendship because you know you can never 100% rely on them to do what's best for you. It's almost like a coworker or, you know, that weird guy that you hang out with sometime, and you never know where things are going to go when that person is with you because they have the single-minded influence on everyone around them.
And people, for some reason, just go along with it because they're so charismatic, but you know that you have to, you might have to be the break on something that goes wildly wrong. And that's, I think, going to be, I think, the general, I think the general impetus of the series is seeing these now also powerful personalities, Susanna in particular. And I think that's why I love Susanna so much as we go, is that she is the true, like, rival to Roland's cult of personality. Like, his will, Eddie isn't that.
Eddie doesn't have the same will that Roland does. Eddie gives in. Susanna doesn't. Susanna has the same will as Roland, and that's why I think, you know, Eddie is kind of a, I don't know, an interesting influence on both of them, largely because he loves the both of them, kind of, you know.
And that's hinted at here, but, you know, he's growing to love both of them in this weird, this weird posse, this weird group they have, the three. And I don't know, that, it's Roland has none of that in the first book. Oh, no, because he's an alien stuck in a weird world, and you don't get any of that from his character. No, and yet now he has it.
He has people pushing back on him. He also has support. You know, he has both of those things that he has it. We haven't seen him.
We haven't seen him have friends. We haven't seen him have anyone he loves. We've seen Jake, and we saw him willingly sacrifice Jake. However, in this book, he saves Jake.
He saves Jake's life. He goes back into Jack's... I thought one of the best parts about this book was him inside of Jack and just doing all the crazy things that he knew he needed to do, just using Jack for everything and just being like, peace, I'm out, and Jack's gone. You know, I mean, there's a certain...
One, there's a certain level of kind of justice porn to that because we get to see Jack punished for being such a bad person. But it also does a good job illustrating Roland's resourcefulness and how he is a complete stranger to this earth, to this world. You know, he knows just only what he's learned by being in Eddie's head for a very short amount of time. And now he's able to understand, okay, what police are, where I can get these drugs, where I can get guns, and everything else works into place.
He's able to enforce his will on a place that is completely strange to him. It's also nice to see, you know, this terrible sociopath, you know, get his comeuppance. And it also, I think the third thing it does is really, it draws a very clear comparison to the world that Roland is from and our world and how he is never, even he was a noble, so he had access to a better life than most. And still...
It was still hard on him. Yes. Still, he had just the complete lack of resources he was raised with. And he looks at this earth and he's like, how can they look into this?
Everyone is rich. You know, you can just get anything you want at any time. And he's like, and he goes to the... I love him.
The scenes in the gun store. Oh yeah, where he's like, oh, I spent so long hand rolling every single bullet. All right, here's a case of 300 for six bucks. It's like, what?
He's kind of, because that's what he knows. He knows weapons. He knows guns. And then he goes and sees like, oh my God, look at this.
Look how many they have. Look how easy it is. Because I think one of the things that really pushes him is he realizes that everyone here has it so easy. That's why no one is tough because no one has had to work hard.
Like everyone is able to have an easy life doing the one thing they want to do. Right. And I think that's him. And also it, I think it tells us a lot about how, you know, how special guns are in this alternate world or in Roland's world.
Because when he's the only one we've ever seen that have guns, we have yet to see. They're incredibly tough. Yeah, they're old, old weapons. They're magic, basically.
And he's magic. And now the guns are like on earth. They're coming from some place. Very simple.
There's nothing. There's so many of them. And it tells us a little bit about, I think it's all kind of indirectly showing us like, now these people are going to be in Roland's world. And Roland's world is hard.
Roland's world is dying. And these people are going to have a hard time because they're not prepared. They have Roland, though. And I think they have it in them.
I think it's one of the reasons they're part of Roland's, you know, ka-tet is they have it in them to survive in a world like that. They just have to be, you know, brought up to speed very, very quickly. And I think that's why they were chosen. You know, that's why they were fated to be part of this group is because they have that toughness inside of them.
Both Susanna and Eddie. They're both made of tough stuff down deep inside. They can handle this. They can handle this world that has moved on.
I don't know. I think it's going to be interesting. I think it's a really... I think this...
It's the other thing I think we're going to see as we go on. This book is very tight. Meaning there's not a lot of waste in it, if any. No, that's one thing I really enjoy about Stephen King, at least in the books I have read, which is probably four or five now, that he doesn't waste a lot of time on random things.
The character observing what the countryside is like or something like that. Every single word is moving the plot forward or at least expanding the characterization of somebody. Yeah, for that, Matt, about that. Oh, no.
Okay. It's just, you know, I've read these books a long time. I haven't read these, the early ones, in a long time. I'm going to run any of them in a long time, technically.
But, you know, like, revisiting these in a lot, you know, it feels like there's two kinds of King novels. And you never know what you're going to get. I mean, you can look at it. You just look at the size of the book and you kind of know.
But these books are relatively short, and they are punchy. And they're bullet trains. They get you to where you're going as fast as you can. They give you only the core amount of information you need.
But I think it's a thing we'll be talking about as we go, is these books get longer and longer. And it starts here. Like, this book is only a little bit longer than the first one. But book 3 is substantially longer than book 4.
And they get longer as you go. It's like Harry Potter. But I'm really interested to see as we go how I feel about those lengths of those books, because that's... As I've gotten older and I've read more King and I've gotten a little bit more...
A little bit more stringent on my critique of him, it's usually these things are way too long, man. You need to... You don't need to have this many words in your book to tell the same story and for it to be effective. And I'm curious.
Like, this is a fantasy epic, so it makes sense. But I don't know, when we get to, like, books 5, 6, and 7, man, you're gonna... I'm feeling you're gonna be a little... You're not gonna be saying those same...
You're gonna be saying a different song. It is very possible. I mean, I know a lot of authors change as they age. And once we get to the silver Stephen King, you might be willing to doubt a little more.
Ah, it gives me Growing up, I never encountered anything like it. And that's a part of the charm of it, was very much for me as a Stephen King fan, was reading this and I'm like, oh my God, this is The Shining. He's talking about The Shining. That's a Stephen King book.
And it's in this book, but he's talking about it like it's an actual thing that it's just art to him. And then as you go, you encounter more of these characters from our universe technically coming into this place. And it's really it it's for a person who loves meta-narrative a lot of the time. It's really interesting and strange.
Nothing. It didn't exist at this time. Like authors doing this. It's like if J.R.R.
Tolkien wrote another series and suddenly it was about entirely different characters and then Frodo Baggins just shows up in the middle of it. Oh, no, it's more like they read a book about Frodo Baggins. Like, hey, remember that time I read Lord of the Rings? This is the only the beginning of that.
There's gonna be characters from Stephen King books showing up. Wow, all right. This is gonna be a real interesting. Yeah, it's gonna be very fascinating.
I'm gonna keep an eye out for it. It's just, it's just these little, these little, it's not very, it's not very present yet. This is still the series, I think, and I think it explains a little bit of how long it is, how long it took him to write it. It's still becoming.
This isn't quite what the Dark Tower series is yet, I think, in most people's minds. It's becoming what it is. It's becoming what its final form is, I guess. But it's only no, it's a little things here and there, you know, he references The Shining.
When he, when we talk about people traveling between worlds, we're only at, we're kind of the tip of the iceberg. It's only, it's starting. This is only the second book. And if you look at the entire length of how many pages, how many words this thing is, this is probably only like 10% of the entire story.
Two sevenths is 10% of it. All right, that's good to know. Something like that. It might be less, considering how long those last books are.
They're very long. So we'll see. But I'm, it does little hints that make me go, get me excited because I'm, I want to experience that again. It's one of my favorite things.
I don't know. I don't, I don't know if I have anything else. I think it's interesting where we're at. I'm excited to see you experience these, frankly, how, despite how crazy some of the stuff is, it gets crazier.
These books are insane. Well, I can't wait because I feel like these books are really good, but if they get insane now, well then... I mean, insane in like, they just go like things you're not predicting, things you're not expecting at all. And that's kind of the charm of them also is that just like just go ridiculous crazy things.
And pull in more meta-narrative both in King's works and larger kind of fictional zeitgeist. All kinds of stuff. Suzanna and Eddie become really good characters. I'm excited for that.
And have you ever read The Stand? I have not, no. Or seen the miniseries? Nope.
Okay. I don't, I, I hesitate to say you should read The Stand because it's very long and way too long, frankly, as somebody who's read it recently. But I will say that if you want to read The Stand, it will add a, add a certain level of knowledge to the next few books. That's up to you.
All right, I have time to pick that up. You don't have to read it, okay? I'm not saying don't, you're not required to read The Stand because The Stand is long. It's very, very long.
And if you have, if you feel the, I'll say that on the record, if anyone listening out there, before you continue on the rest of the series, The Stand, I think, factors in. The Stand also features the man in black. So there's that connection immediately. All right.
Randall Flagg is a main character, main antagonist of that novel. But the, there's, there's this, I will say you should read Eye of the Dragon, Matt. Eye of the Dragon. Eye of the Dragon is, if it's a standalone, mostly standalone fantasy novel by King, and it's fantastic.
It's strange to me that more people don't recommend it. Like, you know, people talk about The Shining and, you know, his other, like It, Dead Zone, those kind of books that are like formative for a lot of people. Eye of the Dragon is amazing. It's relatively short, and it also features Randall Flagg as the antagonist.
You may notice a trend here. I really like this guy. Yeah. But Eye of the Dragon is a fantastic fantasy, just a standalone fantasy novel.
Even not even as a King novel. I would definitely, before anyone listening, if you're reading along with us, I would suggest definitely reading Eye of the Dragon, along with three and four. We're probably gonna take a little bit of a gap between this book, this book and our next. Frankly, because I'm very busy.
But I would, if you haven't read Eye of the Dragon, definitely read it. And if you haven't read The Stand, if you're a King fan, you might, you probably read The Stand because The Stand is pretty, like very iconic as well. But it's also incredibly long. Something you can't just, you know, you could read Eye of the Dragon in a weekend or in a day, if you're really, or a fast reader.
The Stand, you cannot do that. But The Stand enters in heavily in the next few books. So having that knowledge contributes to it. However, I would say you don't need to read them.
I think that The Dark Tower works without them. But I think it's like kind of like, you know, if you've seen, if you're seeing Endgame and you haven't seen, you know, Ant-Man and the Wasp, you're not gonna, it's not gonna kill you. You get the information, you know, but you're missing out on little things in there. Same kind of, same kind of deal.
All right, all right. But Eye of the Dragon, I wholeheartedly recommend, even if you're not even reading, I don't, Eye of the Dragon is fantastic. It's one of my favorite King novels. And frankly, now that I'm thinking about it, I want to go reread it because it's great.
It's very like, it's kind of, you know, fantasy political intrigue kind of story. Very Games of Thronesy, even, you would say. I don't know, Matt, anything else we haven't talked about? Not at this book.
Can't wait for the next one. Yeah, our next book will be The Dark Tower 3, The Wastelands, which takes, comes out four years after, after published for about four years after this book with only five weeks between the ending. So I'm excited. It is a lot more world building, man.
If you have questions about this place, that the Roland, Roland's world, we're gonna get all that information about that. Sweet. Yeah. I don't really have anything else either.
I think this book's great. I love The Dark Tower. I still love The Dark Tower. We'll see how I feel about it after I get through these, those really long, long books at the end.
That's because that's really the, that's where I go, start going some of the stuff a little bit. We'll see. Matt, is there anything you'd like to plug before we go? I would, in fact.
It turns out if you like kittens, I happen to have a couple of very cute ones in my house on Instagram and Twitter. It's Kitten Interns, K-I-T-T-E-N-T-E-R-N-S. If you want to see the adventures of the Maximoff twins, they are currently there. It will be for the next probably month or so while they gain weight and continue to be the floofiest things that have ever been on this planet.
They're very cute, guys. I'm not lying. I look at it, it makes me want to take them. I don't, I don't need any more cats.
And I look, I'm like, oh man, those kittens. You can use an extra cat. This one is especially very, very fast, Pietro. I wonder why that is.
I wonder. But Matt, thanks for joining me. Of course, thank you. Thanks again to Matt for joining me.
You can find me on Twitter at Robbie Norman and my website is rabbienorman.com. You'll find links there for my other podcasts and my debut horror novel, Conquest, available now on Amazon. You can read it for free with Kindle Unlimited. The show's website is SerialFantasist.com.
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