To Don Grant, who's taken a chance on these novels, one by one. The Drawing of the Three is the second volume of a long tale called The Dark Tower, a tale inspired by and to some degree dependent upon Robert Browning's narrative poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (which in its turn owes a debt to King Lear). The first volume, The Gunslinger, tells how Roland, the last gunslinger of a world which has "moved on," finally catches up with the man in black ... a sorcerer he has chased for a very long time�Djust how long we do not yet know. The man in black turns out to be a fellow named Walter, who falsely claimed the friendship of Roland's father in those days before the world moved on. Roland's goal is not this half-human creature but the Dark Tower ; the man in black�Dand, more specifically, what the man in black knows�D is his first step on his road to that mysterious place. Who, exactly, is Roland? What was his world like before it "moved on?" What is the Tower, and why does he pursue it? We have only fragmentary answers. Roland is a gunslinger, a kind of knight, one of those charged with holding a world Roland remembers as being "filled with love and light" as it is; to keep it from moving on. We know that