The Complete Stephen King Universe: A Guide to the Worlds of Stephen King

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 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.]

SECTION ONE

The Worlds of The Dark Tower and The Stand

The Dark Tower series is the core of the Stephen King Universe, and the axis upon which our entire thesis for this book rotates. Though the majority of the author’s work takes place in the parallel reality dimension that contains King’s fictional towns Castle Rock, Derry, and others, the parallel reality of Roland the Gunslinger—and by extension that of The Stand—is much more fundamental.

Just as, in the series itself, The Dark Tower is the point of time, space, and reality where all dimensions meet, the spindle of creation, so are most of King’s works then an outcropping of the Dark Tower series, which was conceived as early as 1970. Nearly all of King’s heroes and all of his villains, scattered across the various parallel realities, are involved in a single cosmic conflict, with the Tower as the ultimate prize.

Although Stephen King worked on the Dark Tower series for three decades, consciously and unconsciously weaving it in and out of his other writings, a great many of his readers are likely to have missed its prominence. Just as the Tower itself binds all realities together, this series of stories and concepts is the center of the Stephen King Universe, the many fictional worlds he has created.

And it all started with a poem.

King read Robert Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (1855) for a class assignment in his sophomore year (1967/68) at the University of Maine at Orono. In March of 1970, the year he graduated, he began the first novel in the series, The Gunslinger. He continued to work on that novel over the course of the next twelve years, even while he was writing some of his best-loved works, including ’Salem’s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), and The Stand (1978).

Did he realize, then, at the start of the process, that it would be all of a piece, all bits of a single story? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

But it is. In the fourth volume, Wizard and Glass (1997), he at last came to that conclusion. In the afterword, he states:

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 … 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.

In the latter volumes, the truth of this collision of worlds becomes incarnate, as characters from ’Salem’s Lot, Hearts in Atlantis, and others all enter into the saga as significant characters, all from different worlds, and as Stephen King himself is drawn into the series as a character, the author a part of his own magnum opus. It is all of a piece.

Herein, we shall discuss the books in this series and those related to it, how they are interrelated and interconnected, and how they touch upon and are likewise touched upon by other of the author’s works.

The history of the Dark Tower series is this:

In a place called Mid-World—which might be the future of a world much like our own, or a separate reality entirely—the land is divided into Baronies, some ruled by an honorable rank of men called gunslingers, much like knights. One of the jewels of Mid-world is Gilead, whose lord is Steven Deschain, a gunslinger descended from the bloodline of Arthur Eld, who had united much of Mid-world in ancient times (King Arthur, of course).

But during Steven’s time, a new threat arises. John Farson, called the good man, has begun to incite a rebellion among the peasantry and even some nobility against the Affiliation, the governments of the various Baronies that have banded together. Traitors and spies abound. Marten, a wizard advisor of Steven’s, seduces the lord’s wife and flaunts that intimacy in front of Steven’s son, Roland, a gunslinger-in-training. (In order to become gunslingers, the young students have to best their teacher in battle.) Marten hopes to force Roland to an early test against his teacher so that he will fail, and be killed or banished from Gilead.

Marten’s scheme works, but only partially, for Roland does best his instructor in single combat.

Roland is shocked to find that his father is aware of Marten’s machinations, and Steven prevents him from going after Marten. He tells his son that Marten is working with Farson (though in fact Marten will eventually be revealed to BE Farson), and in order for him to be certain Roland is safe, Steven sends his offspring incognito to a seaside Barony called Mejis, along with his two best friends—Cuthbert and Alain—neither of whom are full gunslingers yet.

In Mejis, however, they find that Farson’s plans have stretched even further, and the local authorities are in league with the rebellion. It is evident that Farson, though pretending to be the hero of the people, has had sinister intentions all along. Soon enough, a dark magician called Walter shows up in Mejis; the mage apparently works for both Farson and Marten. Once again, however, it seems this creature has many faces, and is in fact yet another facet of the same man. Walter is Farson and Farson is Marten, all one and the same. There are many other faces to this being, whom we may alternately refer to as Flagg or Legion.

Roland falls in love with Susan Delgado in Mejis, and though their love is doomed (as is Susan), it will be the one real love of his life. During his time by the sea, Roland comes into possession of a glass ball, a powerful magical tool that is part of Maerlyn’s Rainbow. In it, he sees a vision of the future, much of which he cannot remember later. One thing remains clear to him: the Dark Tower at the center of all things, the spindle upon which reality turns, has been somehow tainted. It is being corrupted, and Roland decides instantly that he must devote his life to a quest to save the Tower.

Before he may do that, however, he returns to Gilead, where he is tricked by a witch into killing his own mother. The time subsequent to that is shrouded in mystery. All that is known is this: Farson’s efforts cause the destruction of the Affiliation and the devastation of Gilead, which only hastens the changes that are coming to the entire world. The world, as Roland says so often, is moving on. It is ending, growing barren and empty. The only way to stop that is to save the Tower, and so Roland and his friends set off on a quest to find it. During that mission, all of his associates, his ka-tet, die, until only he remains.

Many years later, he catches up with Walter, the man in black, and learns a little about the true nature of the Tower. Thereafter, he begins gathering a new ka-tet from various worlds connected to his own: Eddie and Susannah Dean and Jake Chambers become gunslingers in their own right over the course of the quest.

The new ka-tet faces many adventures and hardships during their time together. They cross over from one world to another and then back, through thin places between those worlds. In the New York City that Jake is from there is a rose that is the physical embodiment of the Tower before it became tainted. The agents of chaos, or of the Beast that now guards the Tower, the Crimson King, want it destroyed; Roland and the others will have to save it.

They meet Flagg on their journey, and it is revealed that he is also Marten (Walter/Farson/Legion), who serves the Crimson King. As noted, the specific chronicle of Roland is the centerpiece, but a great many of King’s other works have direct or indirect ties to it. Flagg originally appeared in King’s landmark novel The Stand, still widely considered to be among his best. In that book, a U.S. military research facility investigating biowarfare accidentally unleashes a virus that kills 99.4% of the population of the Earth. In America, the survivors are plagued with dreams of a kindly old woman serving the side of light, and a dark man with blazing red eyes who serves the cause of darkness. This is Flagg. Over the course of the novel, the survivors join one side or the other, and eventually those serving light must make a final stand against those serving darkness. Flagg is defeated, and society and civilization begin again.

At the time of The Stand’s publication, Flagg’s part in Roland’s story was unclear. In fact, the next time Flagg appeared as a major figure was in The Eyes of the Dragon (1987). In that fairy-tale-like story, Flagg is a wizard serving a king in a medieval landscape filled with magick, a land that seems somewhat similar to but not necessarily the same as that of Roland the Gunslinger. (Flagg was noted to have returned to that particular city many times over the ages.) The heroes of that tale eventually defeat Flagg but he escapes, prompting two of them, Thomas and Dennis, to go on a hero’s quest to destroy the wizard. That is a story as yet untold.

In the novella The Little Sisters of Eluria, King clearly connects Roland’s world with that of The Eyes of the Dragon, unmistakably making them one and the same. In The Dark Tower IV, Roland and his ka-tet pass through a parallel dimension that is clearly that of The Stand, just before they finally meet Flagg face to face.

A major theme of the Dark Tower series is that due to the machinations of The Crimson King, the beams of power that emanate from the Tower and hold all time, space, and reality together are being broken down and corrupted. This phenomenon has affected all of those realities, causing the barriers between them to begin breaking down and allowing for some travel from one to the next.

Consider these few examples:

• In Insomnia (1994), a young boy has a vision of Roland, and the main characters find themselves up against the Crimson King. They save the life of that boy, who is going to be vital to Roland’s battle against the Crimson King. If Patrick Danville dies, the Tower will fall. Thus, Ralph and Lois and Patrick Danville are allied with Roland against the forces of chaos represented by the Crimson King and Flagg, among many others.

• Roland recalls having met Dennis and Thomas, from The Eyes of the Dragon, who are on a mission to destroy Flagg.

• Father Callahan, of ’Salem’s Lot, plays a major role in the final three volumes of the Dark Tower series, though Callahan is from a world that is clearly not that of the series.

• In It (1986), there is a great deal of discussion about the Turtle (a benevolent being in opposition to the Crimson King), a clear reference to Roland’s saga.

• In Hearts in Atlantis, it is revealed that the Crimson King employs humans with psychic abilities as breakers, forcing them to use their mental powers to aid in the shattering of the Beams that bind the worlds together, the center of which is the Dark Tower. Once the Beams are shattered, the Tower would come completely into the Crimson King’s control and he would then be able to manipulate all realities to his liking.

• Also in Hearts in Atlantis, there is a very oblique reference (see "Hearts in Atlantis) that indicates that Randall Flagg himself is interfering in the lives of the characters in the book. His purpose is unclear, but is likely related to their relationship to the Breaker" they meet early in the story. It seems likely that the protagonists of the book may also find themselves allied with Roland and his comrades in the final battle.

• In Rose Madder (1995), the world that exists inside the painting seems likely to be Roland’s world, as there are references to the City of Lud.

• In Black House (2001), the sequel to 1983’s The Talisman (both coauthored with Peter Straub), Jack Sawyer runs afoul of Breakers and the Crimson King.

All of this reinforces the idea that all beings in the various parallel realities of the Stephen King Universe—his main protagonists and antagonists in particular—are involved in one enormous struggle for the fate of the Dark Tower. Within the Dark Tower series, King introduces the idea that the Beams have cosmic guardians whose avatars are animal in nature, including the Turtle, a cosmic being who actually plays a part in It. In another form, the lingering power of the Turtle plays a vital role in the final arc of the series.

With all of the connections above in place, one might then move further out into King’s works, making the links to the various stories set in Castle Rock, Derry, and Haven. Take, for instance, The Tommyknockers (1987). With references to John Smith of The Dead Zone (1979), it is tied to all of the Castle Rock books and stories. With mentions of Derry, it is linked to It and Insomnia, and therefore to the Dark Tower saga. There are more associations, but the foregoing simply serves to illustrate that all of King’s stories are indeed of a piece, and that the Dark Tower series, as noted, is the center. These heroes and villains—almost all of King’s central characters—are merely soldiers and pawns, or at the very least innocent bystanders, in the grand battle to determine the ultimate fate of the Tower.

What follows is a guide to each individual work in the corner of the Stephen King Universe that contains the parallel realities of the Dark Tower series and The Stand. Each segment includes a discussion of the work in question and a guide to the key characters, as well as places or items, where appropriate.

1

THE DARK TOWER: THE GUNSLINGER

(1982)

**revised edition (2003)

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

So begins Stephen King’s longest work. Not The Gunslinger itself, but The Dark Tower, the series of which this novel is merely the first installment.

It is within the pages of this first installment, however, that the many threads of the Stephen King Universe begin to be drawn together. The quest of Roland—whose journey and epic significance to his world give him numerous opportunities to explore other parallel universes, traveling through space and time—mirrors our own quest to understand the Stephen King Universe as a whole.

As the story goes—becoming its own sort of myth, in a way—King began the saga of Roland the gunslinger in March 1970, and continued to return to it when the tale called to him over the course of the ensuing twelve years. It was inspired by Robert Browning’s epic romantic poem, Childe Roland (1855), which was in itself inspired by the legends surrounding the August 15, 778, death of the real-life Count Roland, nephew of Charlemagne.

The Gunslinger is comprised of five long chapters, all of which were published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction between 1978 and 1981. The story defies genre classification, melding horror, fantasy, science fiction and mystery together into what King designed to be a sort of romantic epic, but which became far more.

Roland’s world may once have been similar to our own, but what civilization there once was has been all but forgotten. The old society, crumbled so long ago that it is little more than myth, was then replaced by a feudal system reminiscent of mythical England before Arthur brought unity to that land. The equivalent of the King Arthur myth in our world is the tale of a man called Arthur Eld in Roland’s. Roland is the last surviving descendant of Arthur Eld.

In the time of Roland’s youth, the land of Mid-World was organized into a collection of Baronies called the Affiliation, but we learn that all of that has passed on; the world is deteriorating rapidly, and much of what remains is barren wasteland. Time and space have little meaning, making compasses useless. Roland has lived for an indeterminate period of time, and while not immortal, it seems now that with the slippage of time, age means little.

As a hero, Roland is perhaps King’s most single-minded, implacable creation. When we first meet him, he has long since lost everything that ever meant anything to him. The world, as we are reminded time and again, has moved on (though it will be some time in the series before King begins to explain precisely what that means). Roland pursues the sinister man in black, a wizard called Walter, not merely to punish him for his offenses, but to discover more about the Tower itself. The Tower is revealed to be the cornerstone of all existence, holding the meaning to life and the universe (or the multiverse). Roland hopes that at the Tower, he will find … what, exactly? Answers? Enlightenment? An odd thing, really, for such a single-minded hero to seek enlightenment, for one so stolid and hardened to search for the secrets of the universe.

Yet that is what we have here. King doesn’t let Roland dwell too much on the metaphysical nature of his quest, but it’s there just the same.

And Roland is effective. It is only logical to extrapolate from the dialogue between Roland and Walter at the end of The Gunslinger that a powerful entity has recognized in Roland the potential to do precisely what he plans. Interestingly enough, however, the force does not appear determined to stop him. And why should it? Nothing can interfere with ka, the word, in Roland’s world, for destiny.

There is more to Roland than even he knows.

As the narrative evolves, Roland must struggle with the focus and callousness he was taught as a gunslinger, as well as his great capacity for love, a part of him that he regularly denies. Still, he places his quest above all else, even at the cost of the life of the boy, Jake Chambers.

But Roland is a product of his world, a place that had already moved on (begun to deteriorate, suffering greatly from natural—or perhaps forced—entropy) when he was a boy, but now has broken down even further. It seems that all that is good and noble has gone out of the world. Just as another modern version of the romantic epic hero, Luke Skywalker of Star Wars, is the last of the Jedi Knights, so is Roland the last of the gunslingers, until, like Skywalker, he himself searches out, discovers, and begins to train more.

King’s boyhood home, Durham DAVID LOWELL

But while George Lucas’s creations take the stage a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, King’s characters feel much closer to home. There are startling similarities between Roland’s world and what we’ll call the Prime Reality, in which novels such as The Shining (1977) and ’Salem’s Lot (1975) take place. Some time in the past—as evidenced by old songs and artifacts and the words of Walter—Roland’s world was almost identical to the Prime Reality of the Stephen King Universe, the one that includes Castle Rock and Derry.

PRIMARY SUBJECTS

ROLAND: A member of the warrior caste called gunslingers, Roland is the son of Gabrielle and Steven, the rulers of Gilead, the Barony where Roland grew up. Gilead was the shining star in the Affiliation, a group of baronies that made up the core of Mid-World civilization. Thanks to the machinations of the sorcerer Marten (a.k.a. Walter, a.k.a. the man in black), the Affiliation was shattered and civilization crumbled. The world moved on, suffering the predations and deterioration of entropy. The gunslingers died off or were killed. Roland is the last of them.

Roland’s quest, at first, is twofold: first, to find the man in black and have vengeance upon him for his evil doings, and second, to journey to the Dark Tower, and there find the answers to the questions of the universe, including the very nature of reality itself. His quest to find the Tower is not merely for curiosity’s sake, however. He believes it to be his destiny—his ka—and also believes that the universe is unraveling because of some malevolent force gnawing at the Tower and at the Beams that bind all of reality together, and that this must be stopped.

During this journey, Roland meets Jake Chambers for the first time. Jake is one key to the evolution Roland must undergo on his journey, but when he is faced with the choice of letting the boy die or losing the trail of the man in black, he chooses to pursue his quarry, and Jake dies. For now.

Later, Roland spends ten years entranced by the man in black on a mountaintop, after Walter has told his fortune. Roland’s quest, though he has already been at it for a very long time, is merely beginning.

WALTER/MARTEN/FLAGG: Also known as Walter O’Dim and the man in black. Though we are not yet aware of it, Walter is merely one face for a being we refer to (as King has referred to him) as Legion. He is also Marten Broadcloak and Randall Flagg, among others.

Walter is a powerful sorcerer who manipulates and topples rulers, spreads his influence, and perpetuates evil in the service of a Master we are not yet familiar with. Walter manipulates Roland’s life and leads him on a chase across the desert and to the mountains, where he reads Roland’s fortune and gives him a psychic vision revealing the true nature of the secrets within the Tower, before apparently dying himself, having served his purpose.

As Marten, he was a sorcerer and enchanter who manipulated Roland’s father, Steven, and seduced the man’s wife, a series of events that led to the ruin of Gilead. As Flagg, he has performed many heinous deeds throughout the multiverse.

THE CRIMSON KING: Though we see very little of the Crimson King at the outset of Roland’s tale, it is implied that he is the gunslinger’s true enemy, and all others merely his servants.

JAKE CHAMBERS: Jake is not from Roland’s reality, but rather, some other dimension. After he is murdered by being pushed in front of a car in his own reality, he is somehow transported to Roland’s world, where he briefly joins Roland on his quest. When Roland is forced to choose between catching the man in black or letting Jake fall to his death, however, Roland lets the boy die.

Jake will return, though, for he has a continuing role to play in the journey of the gunslinger.

STEVEN DESCHAIN: Father to Roland, husband to Gabrielle, lord of Gilead, he is betrayed by his wife and his confidant, Marten. It costs him his life.

CORT: Cort is the instructor who teaches the boys of Gilead everything they need to know to become gunslingers. He teaches them how to use their weapons, as well as hand-to-hand combat and strategy. In order to graduate, a gunslinger must defeat Cort in brutal single combat. If the young man cannot defeat his teacher, he is banished from Gilead. Roland becomes the youngest gunslinger ever to defeat his teacher.

CUTHBERT: During their youth, Cuthbert was Roland’s best friend. In time, he became a gunslinger. Cuthbert was part of Roland’s original ka-tet and would one day become a casualty of his quest for the Tower.

DAVID: In order to defeat Cort and take his place among the ranks of gunslingers, Roland must choose a single weapon. He selects his falcon, David.

GABRIELLE: Roland’s mother, Gabrielle, is wife to the ruler of Gilead.

She betrays her husband by sleeping with Marten, the enchanter. She is later accidentally killed by her own son.

HAX: A cook in the service of Roland’s father, he turns out to be a traitor, and is hanged by the Gilead authorities. Roland attends the execution.

SUSAN: The one girl Roland ever loved, Susan was a part of his life many years ago. She was burned to death in Mejis, a tragedy of which we shall learn more in subsequent volumes.

THE TOWER: The Tower is the axis upon which all time and space, all of reality, spins, and from which the Beams that bind reality together, just like spokes from a wheel, emanate. It is Order placed upon the necessary and infinite Chaos of the multiverse. Within the physical existence of the Tower lies all the knowledge, magickal and otherwise, in existence. Roland is determined to find it.

THE DARK TOWER: THE GUNSLINGER: TRIVIA

• The Gunslinger was originally published in a limited hardcover edition of ten thousand copies. Perhaps because King deemed it so very different from his other work, years passed before it became available to the general public in any other edition.

• The revised edition of The Gunslinger was published in 2003. In addition to adding length and texture to the original, King altered and clarified certain story elements, providing fresh hints regarding the overall mythology of the series.

2

THE DARK TOWER II: THE DRAWING OF THE THREE

(1987)

In the first volume of the Dark Tower series, 1982’s The Gunslinger, Stephen King introduced his loyal readership to Roland of Gilead. At the time of its release, initially only a limited edition, the first book was an oddity, a fantasy novel with a western motif by the acknowledged master of horror. Even five years later, when this second volume was released, also only in a limited edition, readers were unaware that King had embarked upon the greatest literary journey of his career.

In the comparatively brief first volume, The Gunslinger, we are introduced to Roland as he travels across the desert in pursuit of the man in black, who turns out to be a wizard named Walter. Walter had a part in the destruction of the entire civilization Roland had known throughout his life, including the society and nobility of the barony of Gilead, of which Roland’s father was lord. The gunslinger set out after that destruction on a quest to find the Dark Tower, which others insist is only a myth but that Roland believes is not only real, but holds the secrets of the universe. At the Tower he believes he will find an explanation for the manner in which his world has fallen apart or moved on, as he so often thinks of it.

Believing that Walter can offer information about the Tower, and in an effort to have revenge upon the wizard, he tracks the man in black and finally confronts him. Walter did provide certain information about the Tower, though all of it vague, and told Roland’s fortune, again vaguely, before dying. At the end of that premiere installment, Roland was still on his quest.

King’s West Broadway mansion in Bangor VINTAGE POSTCARD

The Drawing of the Three was first released in 1987 in a limited edition from Donald M. Grant, Publisher—which has published the hardcover editions of each of the books in the series—and in 1989 in a trade paperback version from Plume Books. While The Gunslinger introduced us to Roland, his quest, and the basic concepts of his world, this second volume does not really advance him along his journey very much. Rather, it spends its time doing precisely what the title implies, drawing together his team, in the same way that bands of adventurers have gathered around heroes throughout myth and popular fiction. They are Robin Hood’s Merry Men. They are the apostles. They are the X-Men.

They are ka-tet.

For that is what The Drawing of the Three is really about, though we, as readers, don’t quite understand it early on. In Roland’s world, ka-tet means a great many things, one of which is family. It can be a group of people—usually without actual blood relationships—bound together by duty, obligation, love, and common objectives. But in many ways, it is even more vital and real than family, because there are other definitions of ka-tet. More than those aforementioned values, it is a group of people bound together by destiny. Fate has inextricably linked them together, for better or worse. This may define an alliance, or it may explain the hatred of sworn enemies—they are destined to oppose one another until one falls.

In this case, however, we are speaking of the former.

Over the course of this volume, Roland travels from his reality (or dimension) into others through mystical portals that appear inexplicably on the beach, placed there by some unknowable universal force (referred to later in the series as the White) that is attempting to help him. By way of these portals, he enters the minds of individuals in other worlds, and can assert control over them physically. He is even able to bring things back from those worlds. Things … and people.

He visits three variant realities in this fashion—or, quite possibly, simply three different time periods of the same reality. During these trips, Roland abruptly abducts two people who will in time become part of the new order of gunslingers, part of his new ka-tet.

Eddie Dean comes from a New York City in 1987. Odetta Holmes, a legless woman with multiple personality syndrome, comes from a New York in 1963. The third person drawn, as per the title, is apparently Susannah, Odetta’s other