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The Complete Stephen King Universe

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by Stanley Wiater




  To Iris and Tanya—for fighting off the wolves so long, so well. I love you both. And to Stephen King, for inviting me to your party in 1979 and allowing me to stay.

  —S.W.

  To Connie, Nicholas, and Daniel, my fellow explorers. And for the man himself, Stephen King, who always holds the lantern high to light the path, and yet rejoices in the shadows cast by its illumination.

  —C.G.

  To my parents, who endured my antics as a child, and to Nancy and the kids, who endure my antics now that I’m “allgrownup.” And to Stephen King, for all his wonderful stories.

  —H.W.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION - The Worlds of Stephen King

  SECTION ONE - The Worlds of The Dark Tower and The Stand

  1 - THE DARK TOWER: THE GUNSLINGER

  2 - THE DARK TOWER II: THE DRAWING OF THE THREE

  3 - THE DARK TOWER III: THE WASTE LANDS

  4 - THE DARK TOWER IV: WIZARD AND GLASS

  5 - THE DARK TOWER V: WOLVES OF THE CALLA

  6 - THE DARK TOWER VI: SONG OF SUSANNAH

  7 - THE DARK TOWER VII: THE DARK TOWER

  8 - THE EYES OF THE DRAGON

  9 - THE TALISMAN

  10 - BLACK HOUSE

  11 - HEARTS IN ATLANTIS

  12 - THE STAND

  13 - RELATED TALES

  “Night Surf” (from 1978’s Night Shift)

  The Little Sisters of Eluria (from 2002’s Everything’s Eventual)

  Everything’s Eventual (from 2002’s Everything’s Eventual)

  SECTION TWO - The Prime Reality

  THE PRIME REALITY, PART I: DERRY

  14 - IT

  15 - INSOMNIA

  16 - BAG OF BONES

  17 - DREAMCATCHER

  18 - RELATED TALES

  “Autopsy Room Four” (from 1997’s Six Stories)

  “The Road Virus Heads North” (from 2002’s Everything’s Eventual)

  SECTION THREE - The Prime Reality, Part II: Castle Rock

  19 - THE DEAD ZONE

  20 - CUJO

  21 - THE DARK HALF

  22 - NEEDFUL THINGS

  23 - RELATED TALES

  The Body (from 1982’s Different Seasons)

  “Nona” (from 1985’s Skeleton Crew)

  “Uncle Otto’s Truck” (from 1985’s Skeleton Crew)

  “Gramma” (from 1985’s Skeleton Crew)

  The Sun Dog (from 1990’s Four Past Midnight)

  “It Grows on You” (from 1993’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes)

  “The Man in the Black Suit” (from 1997’s Six Stories)

  SECTION FOUR - The Prime Reality, Part III: Jerusalem’s Lot and King’s Maine

  24 - CARRIE

  25 - ’SALEM’S LOT

  26 - PET SEMATARY

  27 - CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF

  28 - GERALD’S GAME

  29 - DOLORES CLAIBORNE

  30 - STORM OF THE CENTURY

  31 - THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON

  32 - KINGDOM HOSPITAL

  33 - RELATED TALES

  “Jerusalem’s Lot” (from 1974’s Night Shift)

  “Graveyard Shift” (from 1974’s Night Shift)

  “One for the Road” (from 1974’s Night Shift)

  Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (from 1982’s Different Seasons)

  “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” (from 1985’s Skeleton Crew)

  “The Reach” (from 1985’s Skeleton Crew)

  Secret Window, Secret Garden (from 1990’s Four Past Midnight)

  “Suffer the Little Children” (from 1993’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes)

  “The Night Flier”(from 1993’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes)

  “Popsy” (from 1993’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes)

  “Rainy Season” (from 1993’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes)

  “Riding the Bullet” (from 2002’s Everything’s Eventual)

  SECTION FIVE - The Prime Reality, Part IV: Tales of The Shop

  34 - FIRESTARTER

  35 - THE TOMMYKNOCKERS

  36 - STEPHEN KING’S GOLDEN YEARS

  37 - RELATED TALES

  The Langoliers (from 1990’s Four Past Midnight)

  SECTION SIX - Other Prime Reality Tales

  38 - THE SHINING

  39 - NIGHT SHIFT

  40 - CREEPSHOW

  41 - DIFFERENT SEASONS

  42 - CHRISTINE

  43 - SKELETON CREW

  44 - CAT’S EYE

  45 - MISERY

  46 - FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT

  47 - SLEEPWALKERS

  48 - NIGHTMARES & DREAMSCAPES

  49 - ROSE MADDER

  50 - THE GREEN MILE

  51 - SIX STORIES

  52 - FROM A BUICK 8

  53 - ROSE RED

  54 - EVERYTHING′S EVENTUAL: 14 DARK TALES

  SECTION SEVEN - The World of Richard Bachman

  55 - RAGE

  56 - THE LONG WALK

  57 - ROADWORK

  58 - THE RUNNING MAN

  59 - THINNER

  60 - DESPERATION

  61 - THE REGULATORS

  62 - RELATED TALES

  “The Fifth Quarter” (from 1993’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes)

  “The Ledge” (from 1978’s Night Shift)

  “Quitters, Inc.” (from 1978’s Night Shift)

  “Man with a Belly” (1978)

  “The Wedding Gig” (from 1985’s Skeleton Crew)

  “My Pretty Pony” (from 1993’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes)

  “Dolan’s Cadillac” (from 1993’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes)

  “The Death of Jack Hamilton” (from 2002’s Everything’s Eventual)

  “In the Death Room” (from 2002’s Everything’s Eventual)

  SECTION EIGHT - Tales from Beyond: Further Parallel Realities

  63 - RELATED TALES

  “Trucks” (from 1978’s Night Shift)

  “The Jaunt” (from 1985’s Different Seasons)

  The Mist (from 1985’s Skeleton Crew)

  “Beachworld” (from 1985’s Skeleton Crew)

  “The End of the Whole Mess” (from 1993’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes)

  “Home Delivery” (from 1993’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes)

  “The Doctor’s Case” (from 1993’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes)

  STEPHEN KING: - A Chronology

  APPENDIX A - Recommended Further Reading

  APPENDIX B - Recommended Web Sites

  APPENDIX C - The Fiction of Stephen King, in Order of Publication

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Copyright Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We would like to thank those people who had a hand in the creation of this book. First, our agent, Lori Perkins, who can truly say she was the mother of this particular (sometimes very particular) baby. And …

  Claudia Carlson

  Richard Chizmar

  Alan Clark

  Marsha De Filippo

  Julie Eugley

  Lisa French

  Kathi Kamen Goldmark

  Beth Gwinn

  Dave Hinchberger

  Misty Jenese

  Lisa Lenthall

  Arthur Morey

  Suzanne Moss

  Micol Ostow

  James Robert Parish

  Susan Shankin

  Bill Sheehan

  Stephen Spignesi

  Allan Taylor

  Bev Vincent

  Bill Walker

  INTRODUCTION

  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” w
ith 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).

 

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