The Complete Stephen King Universe

by Stanley Wiater

  For years, King’s fans had been hoping to see the novel adapted to the screen, and during an interview four years before the miniseries was finally made, executive producer Richard Rubinstein noted in an interview with the authors of this book that he had been taking an informal survey for some years of which scenes in the massive tome were absolutely indispensable to a film or television version. The number-one request on that list, the infamous “Lincoln Tunnel scene,” was terrifying to view, but could not possibly duplicate the novel’s intensity. This was mainly due to the fact that in the book, it takes place in total darkness.

  Ratings were stellar and reviews generally positive, and King, of course, continues to have a very creative, productive, and profitable relationship with ABC.

  THE STAND: TRIVIA

  • In the uncut version of The Stand, Fran Goldsmith reads aloud from Rimfire Christmas, a Western novel by Bobbi Anderson—the main character of The Tommyknockers (1987)—which of course only exists within the Stephen King Universe.

  • Real-life killer Charles Starkweather’s deeds apparently haunt King. In addition to giving us “the Kid,” a reincarnation of the killer (according to Douglas E. Winter’s indispensable Stephen King: The Art of Darkness), King told TV Guide in 1994 that “[Randall] Flagg is like the archetype of everything that I know about real evil, going back all the way to Charles Starkweather in the ’50s.”

  • Early on in the unexpurgated version of The Stand, King pays tribute to crime writer Ed McBain (a pseudonym for novelist Evan Hunter) by having a character, Lt. Edward Norris of the New York City Police Department, think about his colleague, Steve Carella of the 87th Precinct. Carella is an integral part of McBain’s long-lived 87th Precinct series of novels. Set in Isola, a stand-in for New York City, the hard-hitting series premiered in 1956 with Cop Hater.

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  RELATED TALES

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

  First published in the men’s magazine Cavalier in 1974, the short story “Night Surf” was included in King’s first short story collection, Night Shift. A precursor to The Stand (1978), this story introduces the idea of the superflu, nicknamed Captain Trips (an ironic reference to Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, who shared the nickname), which kills most of the population of the world. The narrative focuses Bernie, Corey, Joan, Kelly, Susie, and Needles, a group of rural New England teenagers doing their best to survive in a postapocalyptic world.

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

  Though Roland appears—or is at least referred to—in a number of other Stephen King works, his primary story has been confined to The Dark Tower series of novels. Until now. First published in 1998 in the massive Legends—a collection of fantasy novellas edited by Robert Silverberg—The Little Sisters of Eluria reveals a previously untold story of Roland, and hints at connections we had only suspected before.

  In this tale, early on in Roland’s pursuit of the man in black that opens the first Dark Tower book (1982’s The Gunslinger) but late enough in the epic storyline that he is already questing on his own, Roland finds himself in what amounts to a classic Western ghost town. There are echoes of “Children of the Corn” in that setup, of course, but it is a traditional fictional conceit. Of course, the town isn’t completely deserted. There are “slow mutants” in the area. They are green-fleshed and horrid to look at, the victims or descendants of victims of radiation exposure from long ago.

  Baseball field built by King, “The Field of Screams,” Bangor DAVID LOWELL

  When Roland is attacked by a band of slow mutants, he is turned over to “the Little Sisters of Eluria.” They appear, at first, to be a religious organization dedicated to nursing patients back to health. However, that is far from the truth. They turn out to be a special breed of vampire, and they have their sights set on Roland. Sister Mary, their mother superior, particularly dislikes him.

  Roland is protected by a chain around his neck that he took from a dead boy, whose living brother he finds in the “hospital” with him. It isn’t long before that young man succumbs to the vampires’ charms. However, he is also protected by Sister Jenna, who appears to hold power over the others. She is, in some way, the chosen one among her kind, the inheritor of “the dark bells,” ones that can call the black bugs called “the good doctors,” insects that heal the sick.

  But she misses her humanity and loves Roland, at least a little, so Sister Jenna eventually helps him to escape. Sister Mary is killed. When the sun comes up, however, Sister Jenna’s fate is to be rendered into another form—transformed into an army of black bugs.

  Clearly, these are not the vampires of ’Salem’s Lot (1975). But the two are related, one might suspect, given that Father Callahan—who encountered the vampires in that novel—eventually made his way into Roland’s world.

  In addition to presenting a new chapter in Roland’s story, this novella also gives us both subtle and overt connections to other King works. The most obvious is that the boy in the bed next to Roland’s is from the city of Delain, which is the setting of The Eyes of the Dragon.

  Second, there is mention made of the witch, Rhea of the Coos, from The Dark Tower series, “and her sisters.” Given that The Eyes of the Dragon mentions Rhiannon of the Coos, that is an additional connection.

  Third, it’s worth mentioning that Eluria is near the Desatoya Mountains, also the location of the China Pit mine in Desperation. Like the demon Tak, the little sisters also speak the language of the unformed.

  Finally, a very small thing: Roland recalls that his friend Jamie DeCurry was fond of saying that Roland “could shoot blindfolded, because he had eyes in his fingers,” likely a reference to the early King story “I Am the Doorway.”

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

  This story, about a young man gifted with a paranormal “wild talent” (King labels him a “tranny”), first appeared in the October/November 1997 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and later in the collection called Everything’s Eventual. It represents the author’s most recent return to the science fiction genre, and continues his fascination with otherwise ordinary individuals possessing incredible psychic abilities.

  Dinky Earnshaw, the teenage narrator of this 20,000-word novella, tells of his ability to kill people merely by writing them letters, a talent he discovered when he dispatched a neighborhood dog simply by etching some runes and glyphs on an adjacent sidewalk. Dinky lives a pampered existence, his every need seen to by TransCorp, a private enterprise whose goals seem to parallel those of the secret research unit known as The Shop—all he has to do is write letters to people the corporation designates as targets. At first compliant, Dinky comes to loathe his job. Eventually he turns on his handler, the mysterious Mr. Sharpton, after receiving a message from a fellow “tranny” that causes him to question what he is doing.

  Dinky later appears in the seventh volume of the Dark Tower series, alongside another Breaker, Ted Brautigan from Hearts in Atlantis.

  (A brief aside: it’s worth noting that one of Dinky’s nemeses, Skipper Brannigan, was a friend of Henry Dean, gunslinger Eddie Dean’s brother.)

  SECTION TWO

  The Prime Reality

  In this and the following sections, we will discuss the most familiar Reality in the Stephen King Universe. We have called this section “The Prime Reality,” only because it encompasses so much of the Universe, perhaps as much as 90 percent of King’s canon. It should be noted, however, that as regards the overall struggle between good and evil, or the Random and the Purpose as King has sometimes referred to it, the Reality of the Dark Tower is more significant.

  Yet there is no question—as you will undoubtedly find as you read the segments that follow—that this war is waged within the pages of nearly every one of Stephen King’s works, and as such, nowhere with more frequency than in this, the Prime Reality.

  For the sake of clarity and in order to
make it a bit simpler for the reader to envision, we have broken down the Prime Reality into five parts: Derry, Castle Rock, King’s Maine, Tales of the Shop, and Other Prime Reality Tales. Still, it must be reinforced that all of these parts combine to form the whole that is the Prime Reality. In addition to Prime, there are only three other Realities or Parallel Dimensions that are significant, those of The Dark Tower, The Stand, and of King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman (a complex division we will arrive at eventually). As you will have noted, we have already discussed the first two, and the latter we will cover a bit further on. For now: the Prime Reality.

  THE PRIME REALITY, PART I: DERRY

  Though perhaps not as “name-branded” for longtime King readers as Castle Rock, Derry has proved to be a key battleground in the cosmic struggle between good and evil that constantly rages within the Stephen King Universe.

  While most of the settings King has invented for his Prime Reality (or most prominent parallel dimension), particularly those in Maine, have seen their share of skirmishes in this war, Derry’s seem to have happened on a larger scale than others. It is, after all, the site of It and Insomnia, among others, both of which have evil antagonists who are undoubtedly more powerful and grander than their less all-encompassing counterparts in Castle Rock (e.g., Leland Gaunt) or Jerusalem’s Lot (e.g., Kurt Barlow).

  Derry has also proven to be one of the pivotal locations supporting our thesis that all of King’s worlds and works are connected. While there are obvious links between Castle Rock, etc., to other locations and works within the Prime Reality, tales set in Derry, as you will see below, have provided some of the most significant links to the other Realities that together make up the substance of the Stephen King Universe.

  Located near Bangor, Derry appears on its surface to be a typical New England town. Some unsettling statistics tell a different story, however:

  • The murder rate in Derry is six times the murder rate of any other town of comparable size in New England.

  • In Derry, children disappear unexplained and unfound at the rate of forty to sixty per year.

  One would think that these statistics would alarm the populace, but, as Mike Hanlon commented in It (1986), “in Derry people have a way of looking the other way.”

  Apparently people have been looking the other way for quite some time—here are some significant events in the history of the town, many of which were gleaned from Mike Hanlon’s unpublished book, The Unauthorized History of Derry. Hanlon, who along with many of his childhood friends faced the creature known as “It” twice in his life and survived, knows a great deal about the dark side of his hometown.

  • 1741: the entire population of Derry township vanishes. Mike states, “The only case remotely like it in American history is the disappearance of the colonists on Roanoke Island, Virginia.” This may create an interesting link between It and the sinister Andre Linoge, who, as we know from his appearance in the 1999 TV miniseries The Storm of the Century, was responsible for the disappearance of the colonists.

  • 1851: John Markson kills his entire family with poison, then consumes a deadly “white nightshade” mushroom.

  • 1879: A crew of lumberjacks find the remains of another crew that spent the winter snowed in at a camp in the Upper Kenduskeag, at the tip of the modern-day barrens. All nine had been hacked to pieces.

  • 1906: On Easter Sunday, the Kitchener Ironworks explodes during an Easter egg hunt, resulting in 102 deaths.

  • 1930: The Black Spot, a Negro social club, is burned to the ground by the Maine Legion of Decency. Dozens perish.

  • 1958: One hundred and twenty-seven children, ranging in age from three to nineteen, were reported missing in Derry.

  • 1985: Nine children are murdered; their killer is never apprehended. Also the year of the “Great Flood,” which results in millions of dollars of damage to the town.

  • 1994: Feminist Susan Day is killed when Derry resident Ed Deepneau—driven insane by an otherworldly being named Atropos—launches a kamikaze attack on the Derry Civic Center as Day addresses a capacity crowd.

  Stephen King aficionados already know that many of these tragedies were caused by It, the creature who used the town as its own private killing ground for centuries (readers will recall that the events of 1958 and 1985 are chronicled in 1986’s It, originally titled Derry). King used the town as a setting yet again in 1994’s Insomnia, where Derry resident Ralph Roberts becomes embroiled in a battle between the cosmic forces King has named the Purpose and the Random (Order and Chaos, essentially), and in 1998’s Bag of Bones, which presented a less cosmic view of the town.

  Paul Bunyan statue in Bangor VINTAGE POSTCARD

  The fictional Derry is closely patterned on Bangor, Maine (its neighbor, according to King’s invented geography of that state). In fact, a standard map of Bangor would prove useful in identifying many of the landmarks described in It, such as the Barrens, the Standpipe, the statue of Paul Bunyan, the Derry Public Library, and West Broadway, where the rich families of Derry make their homes (coincidentally, King lives on just such a street—it is even named West Broadway—in Bangor).

  Like Castle Rock, another fictional town of King’s creation, Derry also seems to have more than its fair share of writers (all also invented by King). For instance, 1990s midlist writer Mort Rainey, author of two novels and a short story collection, resided there with his wife until their divorce drove him mad (see “Secret Window, Secret Garden”). William Denbrough (It), famous for his fictions about “the Outsiders,” also hails from Derry. Finally, there is bestselling author Mike Noonan (Bag of Bones), who, despite a successful career, seemingly abandoned writing in 1998.

  Derry seems destined to play an important part in the saga of the Dark Tower. In It, King mentions the Turtle, which is also called one of the Guardians of the Tower in the Dark Tower series. The title monster itself, a creature from beyond our reality, is certainly one of the can-tak, the monsters of the multiverse, who serve chaos (or “the Random”).

  In Insomnia, the author introduced the Crimson King, whose appearances there and in subsequent works imply his status as a pivotal player in the cosmic chess game between order and chaos. In that novel, the Crimson King tells its main character, Ralph Roberts, that he has been working in Derry for centuries, and as Insomnia reveals, events in the town impact the life and existence of Roland the Gunslinger.

  While the connections to the Reality of The Dark Tower are fairly obvious, the connections to other worlds and realities are sometimes a bit more subtle, but there nevertheless. The Tommyknockers (1987) is set in Haven, which is just above Derry in King’s fictional Maine. In that novel, denizens of Haven see and hear It while traveling in Derry, even though the creature was supposedly destroyed a year before. The Tommyknocker connection is significant because it clearly links Derry to The Shop (see “The Prime Reality: Tales of the Shop”). It is also evoked in Dreamcatcher (2001), as, on a statue dedicated to the lost children of Derry, someone (or something) has spray-painted the words “Pennywise Lives.”

  Other connections to King’s Maine exist. For instance, in It, Beverly Marsh is clearly aware of Frank (the Castle Rock Strangler) Dodd’s infamous exploits as detailed in The Dead Zone. It is also clear that Bag of Bones’s Mike Noonan is familiar with the lives of Castle Rock natives Thad Beaumont and Alan Pangborn, whom readers met in The Dark Half (1989). Mike Noonan also owns a home at Dark Score Lake, the summer community where Jessie Burlingame of Gerald’s Game (1992) was molested by her father.

  Insomnia and It are also connected in other ways to the Prime Reality. One example is the picture of Susan Day that hangs in Anna Stevenson’s office in Rose Madder. Another link from the pages of Insomnia is the fact that Atropos, a supernatural (or, perhaps more accurately supranatural) servant of the Random, has kept Gage Creed’s (see Pet Sematary) sneaker as a macabre trophy. It is connected to Misery in that the latter novel’s Paul Sheldon has personal knowledge of Eddie Kaspbrak of It.


  Another, perhaps unintentional connection are the appearances of hotel and motel rooms numbered 217 in The Shining, Apt Pupil, and It. A final tie linking the realities is Dick Hallorann’s presence in both The Shining (in the 1970s) and It (in the 1930s).

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  IT

  (1986)

  In size and scope, It is a monster of a book. At 1,138 pages, it is the second-longest novel King has published to date, bested only by the unexpurgated version of The Stand.

  It constitutes King’s final examination of themes he felt were covered exhaustively in his prior novels—i.e., kids and monsters. Kids, in that it deals with the rite of passage from child into adult, and the mythic power that childhood holds over our imagination. Monsters, in that It knows what scares people, and is willing to use that against them. It is an amorphous being from beyond the reality we know whose myriad forms are shaped by our own fears and imaginations. Thus, It is sort of a pop culture Monster Mash, with cameos from the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Mummy, Dracula, Jaws, the Crawling Eye, Frankenstein, Rodan, and the Teenage Werewolf, among many others.

  There’s an intimacy about It that previous King books did not display, perhaps due to the fact that the members of the Losers Club, focal characters in this book, are contemporaries of their creator, who was born in 1947. They’ve experienced the same things King has lived through; one can imagine them sitting in the same dark movie theater King frequented in 1957 when the manager stopped the film to announce that the Russians had just launched Sputnik, an experience King would describe in Danse Macabre (1981). Their coming together twenty-seven years later probably echoed King’s experiences at high school reunions. The story of a group of friends getting together after the death of one of their number is not unlike the movie The Big Chill (1983), only with monsters added into the mix.