STEPHEN KING
The Dark Tower and IT are looming. Louise Blain tumbles down the rabbit hole of Stephen King’s multiverse...
With The Dark Tower and IT on the way, we delve into the books of an author you may have heard of.
What if all your nightmares were connected? if every single one of your deepest, darkest dreams had a door that would lead onto the next? if you read stephen King, they already are. even if you run far, far away from the shape-shifting horrors beneath Derry, chances are you’ll probably still find yourself hunted by a rabid st Bernard, or stumbling into a musty shop where the owner might just offer up something you could be willing to kill for...
Whether you’ve only occasionally dabbled in the horror maestro’s works or consumed every one of his books with the insatiable desire of a man cursed by weight loss, you’ll have experienced King’s effortless intermingling of worlds. the incredible thing is, you might not even have noticed. as the big-screen adaptation of his Dark Tower series (the very epicentre of King’s imagination and the interlocking hub for all of his stories) arrives next month, it’s time to look at the extroadinary way the author has built this multiverse. one thing is clear: you’ll never escape. sorry, mCu, you’ve got
nothing on stephen King. look at a map and you’ll quickly realise that if the maine tourist board isn’t sending stephen King an enormous hamper every Christmas, then something is very wrong. the majority of his books are scattered across the state, set in a number of fictitious towns where it’s frankly a surprise that anyone is still brave enough to call them home. the first stop on our tour is Derry – no, please don’t stick your arm out of the vehicle window, it won’t end well for any of us, thank you.
first appearing short story “the Bird and the album” all the way back in 1981, and best known as the infamous hideout of IT’s Pennywise the Clown, Derry is a thinly disguised version of King’s own hometown of Bangor. While he’s changed some names along the way – Bangor’s Bass Park becomes Derry’s Bassey Park for instance (we see what he did there) – there are plenty of real locations to confirm they’re one and the same. Just like the book, the storm drain where IT’s georgie Denbrough meets his grisly fate waits innocently at the corner of Jackson and Witcham streets, while the standpipe water storage facility that floods Derry is the thomas hill standpipe in real-life Bangor.
But this fictitious town doesn’t just hold the fear chameleon that is IT who has, incidentally, been scaring us since 1986. Derry is also home to alien invasion thriller Dreamcatcher,
Insomnia and sequences from 2011’s time travelling 11/22/63. it’s important to note that these books don’t just share a location, they share the same air and the very same horrifying world. it doesn’t matter how many years come between King’s words. the bricks of this universe have been patiently placed through the decades. Dreamcatcher’s grim mr gray visits the aforementioned standpipe where a plaque commemorates the loss of life caused by
IT’s flood of 1985, complete with graffiti scrawled across the metal that declares “Pennywise lives,” while Insomnia blurs the lines even more. in the 1994 book, Derry’s Civic Center becomes the target for a suicide mission, but not before we find out it was designed by IT’s Ben hanscom, once a member of the loser’s Club, now a world-renowned architect. Insomnia also links effortlessly into the Dark Tower series, handing over the first mention of the villainous Crimson King and a challenging narrative that can only be fully understood once you’ve dived into the dusty world of the gunslinger himself. Whether it’s tiny easter eggs or enormous character links, King must have one hell of a flow chart.
IT follows
it, literally, doesn’t stop there. Derry’s grasping fingers stretch across dozens of stephen King’s books. The Shining’s overlook hotel might seem isolated in the mountains but it turns out that chef Dick hallorann had escaped a flaming Derry nightclub after it had been set on fire by a group of white supremacists under the influence of IT’s power. and if you thought
Misery’s Paul sheldon was unlucky meeting psychotic nurse annie Wilkes? all you need to do is look at his hometown of Derry to wonder if he’d always been cursed for a life of hobbling and typewriters with missing keys. Countless Derry references across dozens of King’s books only further cement the town as the beating, oozing heart of his version of maine.
Jump back on the tour bus, minding the gaaaaaahp of course, and our next stop is the town of Castle rock. incidentally this is also the name of the newly announced hulu show with JJ abrams on executive producer duties. a psychological horror series set firmly in King’s multiverse,
Castle Rock’s 10 episodes will apparently bring together King’s most iconic works. the town of Castle rock itself is home to a grim collection of the author’s stories. here you’ll find Cujo’s dog kennel, leland gaunt’s shop needful things, and the boys of the short story “the Body”, best known as rob reiner’s movie Stand By Me. Just like Derry, Castle rock is constantly mentioned across all of King’s books. Pet Sematary references the insanity of Cujo, “rita hayworth and the shawshank redemption”’s narrator calls the town home and if you’re looking for the town of Chester’s mill, that’s just down the road, but you might have to turn around when you reach the Dome. even the smallest town creeps across multiple stories. Jerusalem’s lot, best known as the vampire-filled Salem’s Lot, bleeds through the pages of Dolores Claiborne, The Shining and The Dark Tower to name but a few. and it’s not just fictional places that King has claimed for his own either. Carrie’s hometown of Chamberlain is easily found on google maps while “the mist”’s Bridgton is equally touchable in concrete form. you might want to pick up some supplies at the supermarket as you pass through though, just to be sure. locations are only the beginning of this web. King’s multiverse doesn’t just share postcodes but characters and villains. even if you’ve only picked up a couple of his books, you might have experienced the ominous-
THE FICTITIOUS TOWN OF DERRY IS THE BEATING, OOZING HEART OF KING’S MAINE
sounding “the shop”. a nefarious government organisation, the us Department of scientific intelligence makes The X-Files’ Cigarette smoking man’s syndicate sound like a group of inept scouts. the shop is responsible not just for the relentless testing on the pyrokinetic andy and Charlie mcgee of Firestarter, but also finding a cure for the apocalyptic outbreak of The Stand, and the accidental breaking into another dimension and unleashing the monsters of “the mist” upon Bridgton. the latter is understandable, what with the “release lovecraftian nightmare” button being so close to the coffee machine in the lab.
like the final jigsaw piece, the Dark Tower series completes King’s multiverse, slotting into place perfectly. “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, a place of strange atmosphere, crazy landscape, and savage gravitational pull,” says King in his afterword to Wizard And Glass, the fourth book in the saga. “Dwarfs the others, did i say? i think there’s more to it than that. i am coming to understand that roland’s world (or worlds) actually contains all the others of my making.”
CARRIE ON SCREAMING
in an almost extraordinary leap that somehow makes complete sense, The Dark Tower – now complete after eight books and 33 years since the publication of The Gunslinger – exists in its own world but is entangled in every story of King’s. Characters travel from book to book but they all somehow end up caught in the web of the journey of gunslinger roland Deschain, played by idris elba in the upcoming movie.
Insomnia’s villainous Crimson King shows up in King and Peter straub’s work Black House before taking a key role in the Dark Tower series. the equally nefarious randall flagg first appears in The Stand before moving onto The
Dark Tower. the covers of novels cannot contain these relentless characters. King seemingly must do their bidding. multiple realities are at work here. The Dark
Tower is like zooming out on a map of King’s words. Close up, the links between his books are granular with shared towns and games of spot the easter egg, but look across his back catalogue and everything has its place. the majority of his books take place in one realm but parallel worlds exist in tandem, leaking through into the next. somehow the monsters of The Mist are simple when you realise that the shop just opened a door – what King likes to call “a thinny” when there is a weak spot – into the next world and could let in whatever lives there. terrifyingly, King has written a multiverse without the majority of people even noticing and that’s a wonderfully scary thing. no really, it’s behind you.
The Dark Tower is out on 18 August. IT is out on 8 September.