The Stephen King multiverse is vast so vast that some diehard horror fans still haven't
fully explored it but we're going to do our best.
Here's a brief explanation of the King multiverse, from its origins to its various realities.
Stephen King's work now spans over 60 novels and dozens of short stories, many of which
have been adapted to the screen in one form or another.
His work has influenced pop culture in ways that most authors only dream about.
"I'm your number one fan."
Throughout his work, King has created a full-fledged multiverse.
This multiverse is touched upon mainly in his Dark Tower novels — a saga that offers
a potentially limitless number of alternate dimensions, pocket realities, and portals
between worlds.
Unfortunately, one of those worlds gave us The Dark Tower film adaptation, but that's
a story for another time.
Sadly, there isn't a Stephen King novel that clearly lays out every single aspect of this
multiverse... but a careful reader can slowly start putting the pieces together.
The multiverse began with a darkness known as the Prim.
From that Prim came a creator a being called Gan whose name we first hear in The Dark Tower
series.
Hard to say what Gan looks like.
For our purposes, let's say Gan looks like George Burns in Oh, God!
"I could even be a woman."
Gan is the creator of All-World, the reality in which much of The Dark Tower saga takes
place.
But he's also the creator of all worlds, having built the seemingly infinite planes of existence
that form King's multiverse.
He also created the Dark Tower, a massive structure that exists physically in All-World
and symbolically in all dimensions, serving as a linchpin for all of reality.
It's kind-of a big deal.
The plot thickens: In the final novel of the Dark Tower series, the hero of the tale Roland
Deschain suspects the Dark Tower is actually a physical manifestation of Gan.
That's certainly some food for thought.
We know that Stephen King is fond of setting his stories in fictional towns… but are
places like Jerusalem's Lot and Castle Rock connected to some larger fictional universe?
After all, some of his novels seem to be related to one another in mysterious ways.
Remember when a character in The Dead Zone mentions Carrie, Stephen King's first novel?
Well, in The Dark Tower series, King really embraces the idea of multiple universes in
his work.
In fact, the more he worked on the saga, the more he came to realize that much of his work
is connected in one way or another.
As he wrote in the foreword to the fourth Dark Tower book, Wizard and Glass:
"I am coming to understand that Roland's world (or worlds) actually contains all the others
of my making."
While writing the later volumes in his Dark Tower series, King laid out a kind of cosmology
for these various worlds.
A great many of them connect or intersect, with the Dark Tower novels serving as a kind
of nexus.
As Stephen King's body of work expanded, so did his fictional multiverse.
In the realm of The Dark Tower, this multiverse is vast enough to include potentially infinite
worlds, and that level of vastness means there must be spaces between those worlds, too.
"Mid-world.
One-way destination."
King's novel It explores this idea further.
In fact, the book retroactively becomes part of the Dark Tower multiverse and that's all
thanks to an ancient turtle spirit known as Maturin.
Who knows what Maturin looks like?
For our purposes, let's say Maturin is a dead ringer for Morla in The Neverending Story.
Anyway.
Maturin and the creature known as It both originate from a place called the Macroverse,
which exists on a plane of reality outside of Earth.
The Macroverse is home to a variety of powerful entities, and it even helped spawn the universe
that contains King's more mainstream stories.
In the first Dark Tower novel The Gunslinger, Roland meets a young boy named Jake Chambers,
who evidently arrived at All-World after dying on his own version of Earth.
In The Drawing of the Three, the second Dark Tower novel, Roland travels through a trio
of magical doors that allows him access to that version of Earth, which has come to be
known as "Keystone Earth" in the larger Dark Tower mythos.
"They're just like the quakes back home."
"Yeah, what happens in one world echoes in others."
In the overarching story of The Dark Tower, Keystone Earth is what we call the "real world."
Roland visits the real world at various times and through the eyes of different people,
which helps him gain knowledge of our world and how it works.
Many of Stephen King's stories seem to take place on Earth — rather than, say, the Keystone
Earth of the Dark Tower novels.
We're thinking of novels like The Shining, It, The Dead Zone, Carrie, and a bunch of
others.
Well, in The Dark Tower mythology, we learn that Earth was apparently spawned by Maturin
the ancient turtle, who vomited up our planet following a terrible stomach ache.
Interestingly, several not-so subtle references in the Dark Tower books link the story to
a few of King's standalone novels... including allusions to the monstrous Cujo and Misery's
Paul Sheldon.
Meanwhile, Danny Torrance quotes The Dark Tower in the novel Doctor Sleep, the sequel
to The Shining.
And we should mention the idea of "shining" is brought up in The Dark Tower film, too.
"His Shine is beyond anything I've ever seen."
There was a six-year gap between the publication of the fourth Dark Tower novel, 1997's Wizard
and Glass, and the fifth novel in the series, 2003's Wolves of the Calla.
And there's a very good reason for that.
In 1999, Stephen King was struck by a van while taking a walk near his home.
The accident almost killed him.
As he told The Bangor Daily News in 2014:
"I was in a lot of pain, and when you're in that situation, you don't feel much like writing."
Following this near-death experience, King decided to add a new layer of metafiction
to the Dark Tower mythos: He wrote himself into the story as a fictional character — a
mind-blowing move.
In the sixth Dark Tower novel, Song of Susannah, Roland actually meets Stephen King.
We soon learn that King is feeding Roland the knowledge he needs to complete his quest.
And if this version of Stephen King dies, Roland's quest will end in failure.
Out of all the film and TV adaptations of Stephen King's work, only The Dark Tower and
Castle Rock have really embraced the idea of a multiverse.
In The Dark Tower film, plenty of characters take jaunts between All-World and Keystone
Earth.
And in the first season of Castle Rock, the show introduces the multiverse as a key concept.
It seems as though the TV version of Castle Rock exists in some alternate reality that's
distinct from the Castle Rock featured in novels like The Dead Zone.
One thing we know for sure: As long as Stephen King keeps writing, his multiverse will continue
to expand, offering us plenty of alternate realities to explore.
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