Stephen King owes us nothing at this point. Since the publication of his debut novel Carrie in 1974, he has averaged more than a book a year, several of them—The Stand (1978), The Dead Zone (1979), Pet Sematary (1983), It (1986)—among the great works of fiction, let alone horror fiction. Even so, a new Stephen King is not necessarily something to get excited about these days. Now in his late seventies, he is still churning out the novels, but they are 500-page crime novels rather than 1,000-page horror epics—and works of half the imagination, too.
His return to the epic—Other Worlds Than These, which came out last week, tops 850 pages—is also the third instalment of his “Talisman Trilogy”, which means that it’s not the return many would have hoped for. Co-written with Peter Straub, author of the 1979 horror classic Ghost Story, the series began with 1984’s The Talisman. A work not of horror but of fantasy, this was the story of Jack Sawyer, a 12-year-old boy who “flips” between the America of our world and a magical version called “the Territories” on a quest to save his dying mother.
Poorly paced, full of lapses in logic and with, in Jack, a frankly quite boring protagonist, the book has never been widely loved—certainly not compared with King’s other long-running fantasy series, The Dark Tower. At the time of The Talisman’s publication, there was only one Dark Tower novel, The Gunslinger (1982). By the time he and Straub got round to a Talisman sequel, however, there were four—and almost all of King’s writing, new and old, was feeding into them. The “man in black” whom Roland Deschain chases across the desert in the famous first line of The Gunslinger, for instance: in a later instalment, he is revealed to be Randall Flagg, antagonist of The Stand.
In the case of Black House, The Talisman’s 2001 sequel, King and Straub retconned the Territories as just another term for The Dark Tower’s Mid-World. Set 20 years after the original, the book found Jack enjoying a very early retirement from the LAPD when a string of Territories-related child murders forces him back into uniform. Spending most of its 800 pages in our world, the novel avoided many of The Talisman’s issues of logic. And while Jack remained tediously heroic, a great supporting cast and some suspenseful set pieces more than compensated. It was a much better book than The Talisman.
So why the 25-year wait for Other Worlds Than These? In a 2006 interview Straub said that he and King had “agreed years back that we would do a third one … because Black House virtually sets up, and all but promises a follow-up”. Over the following decade, he and King made several similar statements of intent without anything materialising. At first scheduling difficulties were cited, then health reasons. When Straub died in 2022, it looked as if we would never get an end to Jack’s story.
And yet here we are—with a book penned solely by King but credited to both writers. As King explains in his afterword, the story was inspired by ideas Straub sent him in an email in 2013. “I didn’t have his email – that only showed up while I was deep into the novel … but the seed was there, and I channeled Peter throughout like a mad mother. I hope he would approve of what I’ve done.”
I think readers will approve. For a start, Jack is no longer the faultless dreamboat of previous novels, but an irritable 57-year-old haunted by the ghost of his late wife. He is also working for Mid-World’s equivalent of Donald Trump, using his ability to flip to “America-side” to feed his boss’s addictions to Coke, hardboiled crime novels and Nicolas Cage memorabilia. His latest assignment is to find out what he can about “the Great Gorge”, a “place of growing danger” in a distant part of Mid-World. It should be a journey of a few days; but when Jack flips to Nebraska and gets embroiled in a murder case, he finds himself on a quest to save not only our world but all worlds.
King’s prose—as pared down as in his crime fiction—is purely a vehicle for the story here; we get none of the style that Straub brought to the collaboration. Two thousand pages into the series and he is also still having trouble clarifying the rules of flipping. For the most part, though, King’s talent for grand-scale storytelling remains undimmed. A master of the memorable minor character, he has this time surrounded Jack with an alcoholic soothsayer, a New York mobster and a singing car called Mrs Talbot. On the monster front, we encounter vampires, giant vultures, mutants, wolfmen. And while there are some great emotional highs, there is also none of the sentimentality that has blighted King’s recent books. He really puts Jack through hell.
A word of warning. King’s publicity team claims—as I suppose it has to—that the novel can be enjoyed as a standalone story. I am not so sure. Though it takes rather laborious pains to summarise the events of the previous Talisman books, Other Worlds Than These feels more like a conclusion to the (unsummarised) Dark Tower. Indeed, its title is a phrase that first appeared in The Gunslinger, while that series’ invented languages of Low and High Speech—never a feature of the other Talisman novels—are all over this one. Some googling of the lore and events of those eight Dark Tower books may therefore be advisable before jumping in. Or just read them. They’re a lot more fun than The Talisman.
