The Worlds of Stephen King
Welcome, one and all, to The Stephen King Universe. It is an incredible place of grotesque terror, dark magic, and fearsome wonder, a great multiverse conjured from one individual’s imagination. It is a vast and still growing kingdom, and its many pathways can veer off into the darkest regions, where it’s all too easy to get lost without guidance.
That’s why we’re here. To be your guides.
And what about you? Why are you here?
Are you one of the faithful, one of those to whom Stephen King is referring in his author’s notes when he uses the term “Constant Reader”? If so, have you read his writings only casually, or are you among those who have paid closer attention, and realized there is a pattern? Perhaps you’ve only recently begun to explore what we respectfully term “the Stephen King Universe.” If so, you may not have realized that there is so much more to know: connections implied or revealed, stories hidden within stories, tales spun within tales.
The Stephen King Universe (SKU)—though it might more precisely be called a multiverse (a cluster of universes existing in parallel dimensions)—is a truly wondrous and monumental creation. This volume of the same name is not, however, a concordance, or an encyclopedia, nor is it exactly a critical examination. More accurately, it is a guidebook. Stephen King’s body of fiction can be, in large part, broken down by category based upon the world, or reality, in which each tale takes place. The world of the Dark Tower series or The Stand. The world he created under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman. Or the world in which most of his work has taken place,
the reality in which Derry and Castle Rock and ’Salem’s Lot exist, which we have called herein The Prime Reality.
They are all interrelated. Characters and stories cross over from one to the next. More importantly, there is a seemingly eternal struggle between good and evil, chaos and order, taking place throughout the Stephen King Universe and its myriad parallel realities or dimensions.
This is your guidebook to all of them.
Herein, broken down based upon the parallel realities, you will find descriptions of the significant action of nearly every story, novel, or original screenplay King has written, along with discussion of the themes that recur throughout the author’s work. In addition, however, we have created a sort of bible to reference every major individual and setting in the Stephen King Universe, including notes about the various characters’ current whereabouts or activities.
The implications of that are vital.
Why would you need to know the current whereabouts of Ben Mears from ’Salem’s Lot? That novel is more than two decades old. Simply put, ’Salem’s Lot isn’t truly over yet. It exists within the Stephen King Universe, an ever-changing fictional landscape that is constantly being altered because it is all of a piece, for, as noted, King has created—with a large portion of his audience not realizing it at the time of publication—an entire multiverse, a fully realized cosmology wherein every story and book is somehow connected to every other story and book by the author.
It’s easy to make these connections once you start to look for them. Let’s take a brief tour through the Stephen King Universe to demonstrate. The city of Derry, Maine, is an important hub of the SKU. Derry is mentioned in The Running Man, forging a link to The Worlds of Richard Bachman. Dick Hallorann of The Shining passed through Derry during his stint in the U.S. Army. Derry is also home to It, whose presence is felt in The Tommyknockers, and to Mike Noonan, the main character of Bag of Bones, a book that also features Norris Ridgewick, formerly of the Castle Rock Police Department. Another resident of Derry is young Patrick Danville from Insomnia, who plays an integral part in the action of The Dark Tower VII. And yet another key character featured in DTVII—Father Donald Callahan—first appeared in ’Salem’s Lot. There are dozens upon dozens of subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) connections within King’s work, but that is still only the tip of the iceberg.
King has, ever since beginning the Dark Tower epic while in college in
the 1960s, been feeding into one larger, greater narrative: that of Roland, the Gunslinger. The Dark Tower series is, simply put, the core of the Stephen King Universe. Works as seemingly diverse as It (1986), Insomnia (1994), Hearts in Atlantis (1999), The Eyes of the Dragon (1987), The Stand (1978), and The Talisman (1983) are all vitally and directly connected.
Not yet convinced?
Then note the following quote from the author’s afterword to The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (1997):
I have written enough novels and short stories to fill a solar system of the imagination, but Roland’s story is my Jupiter—a planet that dwarfs all the others (at least from my own perspective), a place of strange atmosphere, crazy landscape, and savage gravitational pull. Dwarfs the others, did I say? I think there’s more to it than that, actually. I am coming to understand that Roland’s world (or worlds) actually contains all the others of my making; there is a place in Mid-World for Randall Flagg, Ralph Roberts, the wandering boys from The Eyes of the Dragon, even Father Callahan, the damned priest from ’Salem’s Lot.
Stephen King has been choosing sides, you see, for decades. He has been inventing (and occasionally reinventing) his heroes and villains on a cosmic scale, across time and space and dimension, painting in broad strokes the outline of a battle for the fate of the multiverse—of the Stephen King Universe itself.
Now that The Dark Tower has concluded, we’ve seen the final battle for the fate of the Stephen King Universe … for now. But those who have followed Roland all the way to the Tower and yet are familiar with King’s other works may still be left with questions unresolved about characters and connections. We’ll touch on those here as well. After all, there is no doubt that Roland and his ka-tet (the group of characters whose destiny is bound together in the Dark Tower series), Ralph Roberts from Insomnia, the kids from It, Dennis and Thomas from Eyes, Ted Brautigan of Hearts in Atlantis, Mike Anderson of Storm of the Century (1999), and the cast of Desperation (1996)—and so many others—are allied, albeit perhaps unwittingly, against the evil forces that also inhabit the Stephen King Universe. These include the Crimson King, Flagg, It, Tak, Leland Gaunt, Andre Linoge, and many, many others.
These theories and ideas, certainties and possibilities, the connecting of various pieces to the puzzle, are, then, the fabrics of this volume. Like no
other modern author, King has crafted a massive fiction, comparable in some ways to the great universes of Marvel and DC Comics—which, of course, were the work of hundreds of storytellers. And yet, amazingly enough, the Stephen King Universe is the work of one person. In the Chronology, we will provide a timeline of King’s own life and work. We will also provide lists of recommended further reading and preferred Web sites dealing with this bestselling author and his work. For the most part, however, our primary goal is to present both the Constant Reader and the casual fan with a comprehensive overview of the creations of one of the most important writers in American history.
In essence, The Stephen King Universe is a travel guide for your sojourns into the Stephen King Universe.
In any undertaking of this magnitude, some hard and practical choices must be made. (For one thing, no one involved wanted a book that would be too large to lift off a desk without injury to the reader.) It should be noted that scattered herein you will find the words “apparently,” “presumably,” and other similar terms. In such cases, hypotheses were necessary, as no confirmation from our subject was available.
More important, however, were our discussions about what to include or exclude, how to present the information, what length to devote to an individual work, and so on. We focused on several fundamental questions:
1. WHAT DESERVES INCLUSION?
A question we struggled with time and again. Of course, all of King’s published novels as of March 2006 are included. But there are some gray areas, as follows:
• Original screenplays for Storm of the Century, Golden Years (1991), Cat’s Eye (1985), and Sleepwalkers (1992) are included as individual entries. Though we have a segment on film and television adaptations, whenever appropriate, in each chapter, we considered “official” or “in continuity” with the Stephen King Universe only the original print version, where one exists. For instance, parts of Cat’s Eye are based
upon stories that had been previously published, but one segment in particular was written specially for the film. Following our methodology, the original segment would be part of the Stephen King Universe, while the adapted segments would not, as we rely instead upon the originally published versions. Thus, Sleepwalkers and Storm of the Century are part of our official continuity, because they also had never previously appeared in another form. Golden Years proved a special challenge in determining what we would consider “official continuity.” See that chapter for further explanation.
• Conversely, in the case of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, The Stand, and short stories such as “Blind Willie,” which reappeared some time after their initial publication in an altered form, we consider the most recent versions as being in official continuity, since they have been updated by Stephen King himself.
• The author’s unpublished or most obscure works are generally not included.
• King’s early, short work is included only if he deemed it significant enough to be included in one of his collections.
• Though Tabitha King’s novels include references to her husband’s universe, and Peter Straub cowrote The Talisman—making the entire works of both authors tangentially a part of the Stephen King Universe—we limited our coverage to works actually written or, as in the case of The Talisman, cowritten by King himself.
2. HOW SHALL WE BREAK DOWN THE DISCUSSION OF EACH BOOK?
While we certainly wanted to examine the books themselves in open-minded fashion, we also deemed it important to discuss all of the significant characters and major elements of the Stephen King Universe as if the reader were truly entering that multiverse. In this way, we hoped to provide the proper feel, texture, and setting to those entries, so that instead of just reading about a character King created, the reader would become part of
the Universe, and thus be learning about and discovering a person who truly exists (or existed, given that a great many of those who have populated the Stephen King Universe have died).
[NOTE: Since the author himself is brought into the Dark Tower series as a pivotal character, and some of the action takes place in the “real” world, it follows that we are all a part of the Stephen King Universe. You are a character of Stephen King’s imagination. He may not have created you, but he has certainly coopted you.]
We also knew we had to mention the numerous film and television adaptations of King’s works, though we didn’t want to lose our focus on the literary medium. Indeed, there have already been several books written on that one aspect of King’s career alone, and another could easily be created with the information we gathered.
For three decades, Stephen King has been creating worlds that are enthusiastically visited by literally hundreds of millions of readers. According to Entertainment Weekly, he is the most significant novelist of the second half of the twentieth century. While Tom Clancy and John Grisham have challenged and briefly even surpassed his position as America’s most popular author at one time or another, no writer in modern times has had the staying power of Stephen King. His accomplishments in terms of worldwide sales and motion picture and television miniseries adaptations are, to say the least, extraordinary.
So phenomenal is his stunning success, in fact, that his literary accomplishments are frequently relegated to a position of less importance due to the staggering statistics (i.e. the number of novels he’s written, total number of his books in print, his personal finances and charitable activities) that accompany his every endeavor. Though many critics would disagree that he has any place in the lofty halls of Literature or Art, others have lionized him as the greatest writer of purely American fiction of his generation, comparing him to such past American masters as Mark Twain, others consider him this century’s version of the nineteenth-century British novelist Charles Dickens. This dichotomy has never been more fully realized than with the controversy that arose over his selection to receive a National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003. There were many who looked down their noses at the very idea that such a popular writer would be so honored—some in print—but many more who said, simply, “It’s about time.”
There is a great deal more going on in the work of Stephen King—on
several levels—than at first seems apparent to the casual reader. You will discover this for yourself as you turn the page …
[NOTE: When referring to “the author” or “the novelist” we always mean, of course, Stephen King, not the authors of this volume.]