1In the monograph Genetic Criticism: Tracing Creativity in Literature, Dirk Van Hulle discusses how the day-to-day routine of an author often entails working on several texts concurrently (Van Hulle 2022, 113). Pierre-Marc de Biasi’s influential model (de Biasi 1996) for the study of literary writing processes, according to Van Hulle, has shaped the methodological trend in genetic criticism of focusing on a single work and analyzing its genesis in isolation. Van Hulle wishes to introduce “a principle of concurrent writing or creative concurrence in genetic criticism, which implies reconstructing the everyday reality of how a work, in all its draft versions, interacted with the other works that populated the author’s writing desk at any given moment” (Van Hulle 2022, 113). Moreover, creative concurrence cannot be studied without its diachronic counterpart, creative recurrence (92): a genetic approach to the recurrence of certain creative ideas on the level of the oeuvre – the aim being to lay bare connections between works that have become invisible on the surface level of the published texts. In what follows, I will apply this method to a pivotal stage in Stephen King’s writing. The period contains intense collaboration with another author, Peter Straub, which allows this essay to contribute to the emerging field of sociology of writing, a growing subdivision of the sociology of texts introduced by Van Hulle, which suggests viewing writers not as “self-contained units” but as parts of a “collaborative ecology” that impacts their writing processes (Van Hulle 2021).
2During the nineteen-eighties, King was in the habit of working on two different texts daily. In the mornings, he would write the first draft of a new work at a pace of six new pages per day (Underwood and Miller 1989, 75; Cobb 1980, 25). Then, “for the rest of that day and that night”, he would “rewrite for about two and a half hours”, always turning his attention to a different text than the one he had worked on in the morning (Underwood and Miller 1989, 169–70). Between 1980 and 1985, King wrote two drafts of IT: he worked on the first between August 1980 and June 1981 and started the second draft in the second half of 1984. He collaborated with Straub on the first draft of The Talisman between late spring 1982 and July 1983, and whenever The Talisman was in Straub’s camp, he worked on the first draft of The Tommyknockers (starting in the second half of 1982 and finishing in May 1983). A journalist for The Boston Globe visited King in the first half of 1983 and reported that draft versions of The Talisman, The Tommyknockers, and The Eyes of the Dragon (titled The Napkins in its first draft form) were on his desk (De Pina 1983, 44). Although The Eyes of the Dragon will occasionally be mentioned, particularly in connection with The Talisman, it is not included in the main analysis because its influence on the development of IT, The Tommyknockers, and the first books of the Dark Tower series is minimal.
3Most novels in King’s oeuvre are set in the world as we know it – with the addition of several fictional towns, such as Derry or Haven, the primary locations in IT and The Tommyknockers. But King has also set stories in other worlds and, importantly, has made it clear that these worlds are all part of one multidimensional universe (King [1997] 1998, 843), with a shared origin and history, and with characters moving from world to world and across times. King’s universe has become so rich and interconnected that a (unofficial) five-hundred-page guide to the subject was published (Wiater, Golden, and Wagner 2006). However, during the period under discussion, that fictional universe was still nascent.
4In The Talisman, King and Straub created the Territories, a parallel world with a geography similar to the United States of America, whose inhabitants rely on magic instead of technology. The Eyes of the Dragon takes place in the fairytale kingdom of Delain. Central to The Tommyknockers is a buried flying saucer, crashed into earth by alien monsters who died millions of years ago. They turn out to be aggressive “interstellar gypsies” (King [1987] 1988, 530), who had destroyed other worlds before with the radiation-emitting technology that eventually became their own doom. Their technology is so powerful, for instance, that their gadgets are capable of transporting people to Altair-4, a place described as a “cosmic warehouse” (350).
- 1 King later revisited Roland’s world in The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012). He also announced on Th (...)
5Another “otherworldly” work that occupied King’s time for brief periods between 1980 and 1982 was The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger. It was the first book of a series which has since come to lie at the center of his fictional universe. Inspired by fantasy sagas and spaghetti westerns, the Dark Tower series tells the tale of Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, and his quest to reach the Dark Tower. King wrote the first sentence in 1970 and completed the series in 2004 with the publication of book seven, titled The Dark Tower. The saga is set mainly in a place called Mid-World.1 As the series progressed, King made more and more connections between Mid-World and his other fictional worlds, stating in 1997: “I am coming to understand that Roland’s world (or worlds) actually contains all the others of my making; […] and why not? Mid-World was here first, before all of them, dreaming under the blue gaze of Roland’s bombardier eyes” (King [1997] 1998, 843). King’s phrasing, “I am coming to understand”, is telling: the creation of this interconnected fictional universe was a gradual process, spread out over many years of discovery, and involved creating retroactive continuity with the previously published works. However, when working on his first drafts of the three novels under discussion, he was not so far along in this process.
6King’s work on the first draft of IT was finished before starting the first drafts of The Talisman and The Tommyknockers, and he undertook the second draft of IT after they were completed. But even though IT never occupied his writing desk concurrently with the other two, I will argue that the development of this novel continued even when the draft was momentarily in stasis in a cupboard.
- 2 To indicate the possessive form of the character named It – “It’s” or “Its” – I will follow the exa (...)
7In its published form, IT contains the first cosmological origin story that King conceived for his fictional worlds. The entity It is revealed to be a primordial being, existing since time immemorial in a void which It calls “the macroverse”. There, It witnessed the creation of the universe and, after a long time, It traveled to earth. Another being was there alongside It, a giant turtle who appeared to be dead “for a billion years or so” but suddenly “vomited the universe out whole” (King 1986, 1007). For all of Its existence, It had assumed that the Turtle and Itself were the only beings in the macroverse.2 However, the unsettling threat posed by the novel’s seven young protagonists caused It to think that there may be an Other, and that the children were agents of that Other (King 1986, 1008). In the novel’s climax, the Turtle communicates to Bill Denbrough that the Other exists and dwells in a void beyond the macroverse. The Other “was, perhaps, the creator of the Turtle, which only watched, and It, which only ate. This Other was a force beyond the universe, a power beyond all other power, the author of all there was” (1053–1054). After Bill killed the monster, he heard the voice of the Other: “Son, you did real good” (1094).
- 3 King’s literary papers are still in his own possession but from time to time he will grant research (...)
8The cosmology and the ritual of Chüd, through which It transports Bill and Richie into the macroverse in an attempt to destroy their minds, read as an homage to H.P. Lovecraft; it “brings to mind Lovecraft’s eldritch alien species […] entities from a larger universe at best disinterested in (at worst inimical to) humanity” (Collings 1997, 18). With IT being King’s self-proclaimed “final exam” on horror (Underwood and Miller 1989, 171), it stands to reason that in writing its apotheosis he would honor the author he viewed as “the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale” (Wohleber 1995) by revealing that a Lovecraftian entity lies behind Its many masks. Interestingly, the name King gave his Lovecraftian universe, “macroverse”, is wholly absent from the first draft. As synonyms of what became the macroverse, It speaks mostly of “Outside”, of the cosmos (SKP box 72, folder 5, fol. 1001r), and once of the Universal Constant (SKP box 72, folder 5, fol. 1054r).3 This means that the word entered the second draft of IT after King completed his drafts of The Talisman and The Tommyknockers. Writing those other novels may very well have played its part in King’s discovery of the term.
9The first draft of IT speaks of the creation of the universe and what exists beyond it, but parallel worlds and travel between dimensions are not mentioned. King developed such a concept in his collaboration with Peter Straub on The Talisman. Wiater et al. describe the novel as a combination of story elements that are “very Straub” and “very King”, and “[a]mong the elements that are ‘very King’ is all the talk of multiple dimensions and the thinning of certain places between them” (Wiater, Golden, and Wagner 2006, 64). The King critics are careful not to suggest that these elements originated with King — and I will refrain from doing so as well — but it cannot be denied that multiple dimensions became “very King” in his later work on the Dark Tower series.
- 4 Peter Straub transferred his material to the Special Collections Library at NYU: the “Peter Straub (...)
10The first draft of TheTalisman was started in late spring 1982 and completed in the summer of 1983. Shortly thereafter, King and Straub rewrote the text based on the notes from their editor, Alan Williams. The numerous documents that comprise the genetic dossier of The Talisman are scattered across the authors’ archives.4 They worked out the major story events over a series of meetings and letters, well in advance of the actual writing. In May of 1981, Straub assembled their ideas into a twenty-eight-page outline typescript that detailed the events of what they had then planned as the first half of the novel: Jack Sawyer, twelve years old, sets out on a quest to find a magical object, the Talisman, that could cure his dying mother. Jack learns of this object from Speedy Parker, an old black blues singer, who becomes his guardian and mentor. Speedy also tells him about the Territories, the magical parallel world that Jack can “flip” into by drinking from a potion Speedy gives him. The Talisman is on the west coast, and Jack is in a coastal town in New England, so he must cross the entire United States (or Territories) to retrieve it. The outline describes the events that bring Jack all the way to the doorstep of the black hotel in Point Venuti, California, where the Talisman is imprisoned. King picked up from there in a letter dated June 12th, 1981, sharing his ideas on how the story could unfold inside the hotel. Jack’s taking possession of the magical orb was intended to mark the novel’s halfway point. King and Straub had rough ideas about the events of Jack’s return journey across the country to his mother in the second half of the book, but when they started writing, they had not yet added these to the outline of May 1981.
- 5 Peter Straub: “[King] transmitted his pages to me, and I picked up from his last sentence. We went (...)
11The first chapters were drafted together at Straub’s house, after which they would each write in turns for about a month and send the new segments to one another over a modem connection between their word processors.5 On November 25th, 1982, when the authors celebrated Thanksgiving together, Jack still hadn’t reached the black hotel. King and Straub had already accumulated six hundred pages of manuscript (Winter 1985, 65), and four lengthy “incidents” in their outline were yet to be written before Jack would. They talked deep into the night, making drastic changes and cuts to their plan. Later, in interviews, they called it “the great Thanksgiving putsch”. The four incidents were replaced by one much shorter segment, and after the confrontation at the black hotel, Jack would simply be driven across the country to his mother in a limousine. King typed up their discussed changes in a six-page document titled “OUTLINE REVISIONS ON THE TALISMAN / As of November 25, 1982”. They had a meeting in February 1983, resulting in another “OUTLINE REVISIONS TO TALISMAN / As of 19 February 1983”, typed by Straub this time. Three months later, on June 24th, King wrote a short letter to Straub: “All is looking well here. Jack has fought the knights. Tomorrow he gets his hands on the Talisman at long last”. Not long after that, Straub travelled to Maine, and, as they had done with the novel’s incipit, they wrote the final chapters together, taking turns at the keyboard (Wiater and Anker 1985, 10).
12There are many thematic similarities between The Talisman and IT. Both deal with the battle between forces of good and evil, forces that, in both climaxes, turn out to be cosmic and eternal. The human evil in The Talisman, Morgan Sloat, dominates most of the plot, but the much more dangerous evil presence is revealed to be the black hotel. In both novels, the young hero must enter the lair of the evil entity. During the final confrontations, good and evil communicate directly into the minds of Jack Sawyer and Bill Denbrough, and the forces of good (the Talisman and the Other) give them the strength to succeed. Jack realizes that the Talisman is the “axle of all possible worlds. […] A universe of worlds, a dimensional macrocosm of worlds” (King and Straub 1984, 516). The words “macrocosm” and “universe” occur in close proximity here, perhaps a trigger for combining them into “macroverse” in the second draft of IT. Holding the Talisman for the first time, Jack Sawyer understands that it is “not just the axle of all possible worlds, but the worlds themselves — the worlds, and the spaces between those worlds” (591). At that moment, “Jack Sawyer was everywhere; Jack Sawyer was everything” (591).
- 6 I do not wish to suggest that The Talisman was the first King story to feature parallel worlds and (...)
13The letters and outlines, of course, only recorded a fragment of the dialogue that took place between King and Straub. Nevertheless, they do contain a few noteworthy remarks by King, specifically on the root of the connection between the two worlds. Early on, in a letter dated March 17th, 1981 — the first draft of IT still underway — King raised the question of “where the final basis of this ‘other world’s’ existence lies — in the kid’s mind? In an alternate reality?” At that moment of creative concurrence, King’s ponderings might have served both novels equally. The question was not properly addressed in the outline of May 1981, but in King’s letter of June 12th — in which he also announced that he had “just finished IT” — he wrote: “[the Talisman] shows [Jack] scenes from the history of the Territories, and suggests there may even be more worlds to flip through”. A few paragraphs down, King put forward that, during a stretch of his return journey, Jack could wear a t-shirt which says: “REALITY IS THINNER IN ARIZONA”. At the great Thanksgiving putsch, a year and a half later, they hashed out the details of the Talisman’s true nature. As King put it in his summary of that evening’s discussion, the Talisman was “the nexus of all worlds”. The “outline revision” document from February 1983 served as a precise roadmap for the chapters that remained to be written. As previously quoted (“Tomorrow he gets his hands on the Talisman at long last”), it was King who wrote the first draft of the scene in which the Talisman descends into Jack’s hands. The narration is “very King” indeed and reminiscent of the Other speaking to Bill: “Don’tworry, Jack, a voice whispered. That voice was warm and clear. Down it came, a globe, a world, all worlds — it was glory and warmth, it was goodness, it was the coming-again of the white” (582). This phrasing of “the white” has become well-known to readers of King’s work; it is a recurring name for the force of good, most notably in the Dark Tower series.6
14During the three-year collaboration briefly outlined here, Peter Straub was part of King’s “collaborative ecology” (in Van Hulle’s terminology). There is no doubt that the ideas bounced back and forth in their correspondence radiated through King’s other writings at the time.
15The Tommyknockers is another text that is interwoven with the genesis of IT. The following passage from the extended cosmology in the first draft of IT is remarkable:
Inside. All of Inside. The Universe.
It went Inside the Egg, and began to wander the Universe It was sure It had, as the only God, created. It crossed galaxies and fed on worlds. […] Before coming to [the earth] Earth Its longest stay had been on a world of the Altair star-system; that had ended in the fierce gorging of human energy — hate and anger and fear and despairing, fading pain — that had come with a global thermonuclear conflict.
(SKP box 72, folder 5, fol. 1002r)
- 7 This interview was originally published in May 1983, while King was writing The Talisman and The To (...)
16Written over a year before starting The Tommyknockers, this passage contains the nucleus of King’s idea for that novel. The casual reference to a global thermonuclear conflict on a world in the Altair galaxy in IT was the first expression of what he would shortly thereafter reconceive as an entire novel. A first draft of The Tommyknockers was completed in 1983, and King subsequently cut the reference to the Altair star system in his second draft of IT. The Tommyknockers became a cautionary tale against our uncritical dependence on technology and nuclear power in particular. As the protagonist Bobbi Anderson digs to uncover the ancient spacecraft, the inhabitants of the fictional town of Haven turn more and more into the alien monsters still inside the craft; they instinctively start building powerful gadgets (capable of sending people to Altair-4), become a hive-mind that communicates telepathically, and suffer from what is clearly radiation poisoning. If the story’s heroes had not intervened, the gadgets would have caused a nuclear disaster. The dangers of nuclear technology played on King’s mind at the time, as he told interviewer Edwin Pouncey: “I’m afraid that we’re going to have nuclear meltdown. We’re going to have a bad nuclear accident somewhere and we’ll lose 40 to 50 percent of one of our states” (Underwood and Miller 1989, 62).7
17King’s preoccupation also came through in his ideas for The Talisman. In the letter to Peter Straub of June 12th, 1981, he put forward that the Talisman could give off “a sort of psychic radiation”. When Jack holds the object, “[i]t […] suggests there may even be more worlds to flip through. To do so […] would also destroy his own world — our world — very, very quickly […]. The talisman is a dangerous, seductive object, and by the time JACK gets home, he will be fighting utter madness” (PSP MSS 185, box 6, folder 11). Straub and King eventually decided against the notion that the Talisman was dangerous even to Jack, not only because the Talisman was to be an unambiguous force of good, but also because the concept of “psychic radiation” had become essential to The Tommyknockers (which once again highlights the sociology of writing).
Figure 1
Page 648 of the first draft of The Tommyknockers.
Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
18It is never revealed where the alien species of “Tommyknockers” originated, only that they, like It, had visited many other worlds before crashing to earth long ago. When Bobbi Anderson and Jim Gardener uncover the hatch through which to enter the spacecraft, they find a symbol pressed into the metal: “Running his fingers over this almost Chinese symbol, he thought: A creature who lived under the glow of a different sun conceived this mark. […] I […] am touching a symbol made and struck by God only knows what sort of being across a black distance of light-years” (King [1987] 1988, 418). The same symbol is on the small door to the lair of the monster in IT, published a year before The Tommyknockers. This connection places the aliens firmly inside the fictional universe created in IT, with its cosmological origins. It is clearly affiliated with the forces of evil of the highest level. The symbol is represented graphically in the published text of IT (King 1986, 1032) but not in The Tommyknockers. King confirmed in an interview in 2023 that the two symbols are the same and stated that, at the time, he found some Chinese ideographs, chose one that meant something like “beware” or “don’t trespass”, and changed it (King and McRobert 2023, 40:10).
19Remarkably, King did not draw the symbol in the relevant passage of his first draft of IT (SKP box 72, folder 5, fol. 1030r). Instead, he initially designed the symbol as part of the first draft of The Tommyknockers (PSP MSS 185, box 76, folder 2, fol. 648r; see Figure 1). He then used it in IT and removed it from The Tommyknockers.
- 8 The novel was dedicated to King’s daughter Naomi and Ben Straub, the oldest of Peter’s two children (...)
20While King’s morning sessions were occupied with the first drafts of both The Talisman and The Tommyknockers in the second half of 1982, he had the idea to write a fairytale story for his then fourteen-year-old daughter Naomi, who disliked horror but enjoyed fantasy: “I played with the idea over a period of four months or so, and finally began in longhand one night in January of 1983 […]. I worked on it mostly in the evenings, which is the time I reserve for my private amusements” (King 1985, 4). In many ways, The Eyes of the Dragon was an ode to the friendship that had grown between the King and Straub families.8 Seen against the “serious” backdrop of their work on The Talisman, with its multimillion-dollar contract and fast-approaching delivery date, this simple tale set in the medieval world of Delain reads as a light-hearted companion piece. In fact, Douglas E. Winter, who conducted long interviews with King in 1982 and 1984 for his seminal study The Art of Darkness (1984), states: “The Eyes of the Dragon is set in the Territories […] although it occurs in a different place and time than Jack Sawyer’s quest” (Winter [1984] 1989, 199). There is nothing in the published texts of The Talisman and The Eyes of the Dragon to substantiate this claim, but in the first draft of The Talisman, Delain is mentioned once as a barony in the Territories: “not mahogany from Ceylon but ironwood from the East’rd Barony of Delain” (PSP MSS 185, box 6, folder 10, fol. 1155r), which was changed in the published text to “not mahogany from the West Indies but ironwood from the Territories” (King and Straub 1984, 573).
21In summary, by 1984, King had expanded his fictional universe considerably from what it was in June 1981, when he finished the first draft of IT. The alien species known as Tommyknockers was a direct product of the universe originating from the story in IT and was linked to It by a mysterious symbol. The Talisman had contributed that the worlds in this universe were actually part of a “dimensional macrocosm of worlds”, a chain of parallel realities, with the Talisman as the “nexus of all worlds”. The first draft of The Talisman shows that the Territories and Delain are part of the same parallel world.
22It was against this backdrop that King made the second draft of IT, introducing all six occurrences of the word “macroverse” that are in the published text at this stage. I have not been able to find any statement from King on his inspiration for the term. Much more than Outside, the term “macroverse” emanates an ambition grander than IT alone, ready to serve as the name for an architecture that could house his entire fictional universe; that there were forces of good — the Turtle and the Other — actively counterbalancing the monster needed to be foreshadowed. King did this throughout the second draft by adding quick references: characters notice turtle shapes, and the enigmatic phrases “the voice of the turtle” and “the turtle couldn’t help us” flash through their thoughts. King decided to expand the role of the Turtle after completing the first draft. That summer, he delivered a photocopy to Straub’s door. Straub sent a letter with words of admiration soon afterwards. In his reply, dated August 17th, 1981, King wrote: “I want to do something with that turtle, but first I have to decide what tone it represents, if you see what I mean”. As it turned out, this intention transcended the novel IT.
- 9 Since the publication of IT in 1986, King has used the word “macroverse” in his work only once, but (...)
23With the publication in 1991 of The Waste Lands, the third book in the Dark Tower series, the Turtle entered the cosmology and mythology of Mid-World. In the fifteen years that followed, King established that Roland’s world (or worlds) did in fact contain all the others of his making. With The Dark Tower (2004), that task was fully accomplished: “My idea was to use the Dark Tower stories as a kind of summation, a way of unifying as many of my previous stories as possible beneath the arch of some über-tale” (King [2004] 2005, 843). The origins of the universe and the role of the Turtle diverge significantly from their descriptions in IT, making the two cosmologies almost incompatible. The coda to book six of the series is a “writer’s journal” with entries from 1977 to 1999: a fictional reconstruction of how and when the ideas came to King. In a journal entry from 1986, supposedly during his work on The Drawing of the Three (book two), the “fictional King” says: “it seems to me that a lot of the other things I’ve written (especially It) are like ‘practice shots’ for this story” (King [2004] 2017, 418). By 2002, when this passage was written, King had devalued the story of the Other who created the macroverse, It, and the Turtle, to a practice shot in preparation for the real cosmology behind his fictional worlds.9
24In its original magazine publication in 1978, the story “The Gunslinger” concludes: “Thus ends what is written in the first Book of Roland, and his Quest for the Tower which stands at the root of Time” (Vincent 2004, 337). Roland’s quest takes place in a world that “has moved on”, a world with a long history that now seems to have entered into a dark age. The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (1982) contains no information about the events that led to that dark age, about
25Roland’s past, or the cosmic origin and mythology of the world and the Tower — except, famously, that “there are other worlds than these” (King 1982, 191). In the afterword to book one, presumably written around the time of submission in late 1981 or early 1982, King put his cards on the table regarding his knowledge then of the future of the epic:
I’m never completely sure where I’m going, and in this story that is even more true than usual. I know […] that his world is indeed moving on because Roland’s universe exists within a single molecule of a weed dying in some cosmic vacant lot (I think I probably got this idea from Clifford D. Simak’s Ring Around the Sun; please don’t sue me, Cliff!) […] But what of the gunslinger’s murky past? God, I know so little. […] When it’s time, those things […] will roll out as naturally as tears or laughter.
(223–224)
- 10 As King recalls it in the foreword to the Dark Tower Concordance, he had handwritten forty pages of (...)
26An important addition to Roland’s (yet unnamed) world in book two is the spiritual concept of “ka”, which Roland explains as “duty, or destiny, or, in the vulgate, a place you must go” (King [1987] 2012, 198). Book two, The Drawing of the Three, was written in 1986 (Vincent 2004, 13) and published a year later.10 But King first used the word “ka” in his work in 1982, on page 95 of the first draft of The Tommyknockers, in a sentence that later appeared verbatim in the published text: “It was as if they [the audience] would eat him [Gardener] up with their eyes. Suck out his soul, his ka, his whatever you wanted to call it” (PSP MSS 185, box 76, folder 2, fol. 95r King [1987] 1988, 57)). Both The Tommyknockers and The Drawing of the Three were published in 1987, but the fact that the throwaway reference to the Old-Egyptian concept of “ka” in The Tommyknockers was written four years before the first use of “ka” in The Drawing of the Three places an interesting asterisk next to this connection between the books.
27The mysterious force is described as “the wheel of ka” in book three of the series (King [1991] 2005, 317). Its meaning is best articulated in book seven: “ka is the wheel to which we all are bound, and when the wheel turns we must perforce turn with it” (King [2004] 2005, 534). Robin Furth in her (authorized) concordance to the Dark Tower series writes: “The spin of ka always brings us back to the same place, to face and reface our mistakes and defeats until we can learn from them” (Furth 2012, 4). It was in IT that King first developed this idea of the cyclical nature of life, also describing it as a wheel. The notion is formulated clearly in the novel’s penultimate sentence, first drafted in June 1981: “To think that what has looked forward must also look back, and that each life makes its own imitation of immortality: a wheel.” (SKP box 72, folder 5, fol. 1147r).
28Roland’s world finally receives its name, Mid-World, in book three. Previously, Roland had “drawn” two people from our world into Mid-World to form part of his “ka-tet”, a group unified by fate, by ka. Early in book three, he explains to them that there are portals between the worlds. From Robin Furth’s concordance:
In The Waste Lands, Roland drew a metaphysical map of MID-WORLD. The map was circular and looked like a clockface, but its circumference contained twelve X’s rather than twelve numbers. Each X designated a PORTAL into and out of Mid-World. The twelve Portals were connected by six magnetic BEAMS. Each Beam, in turn, was guarded by two animal totems, or GUARDIANS. At the center of this map, in the place where all the Beams crossed, was the Thirteenth Gate or DARK TOWER, the linchpin of the macroverse.
(Furth 2012, 166)
29Mid-World is shaped like a wheel, the Beams being its spokes, with the Dark Tower as the linchpin at the center not just of Mid-World but of all worlds and of the macroverse itself. One of the guardians is the Turtle. Roland remembers a poem about the Turtle that starts with: “See the TURTLE of enormous girth! / On his shell he holds the earth” (King [1991] 2005, 53). The poem heralds the new cosmic origin story that is told in books six and seven. As Furth summarizes it:
In the beginning there was only the Prim, the magical soup of creation. From the Prim arose Gan, spirit of the Dark Tower, who spun the physical universe from his navel. Gan tipped the world with his finger and set it rolling. This forward movement was Time. The magical tide of the Prim receded from the earth but left behind it the Tower and the Beams, the fundamental structures which hold the macroverse together.
(Furth 2012, 619)
30The creator Gan bore the world and moved on. The world would have fallen into the abyss if it hadn’t been for the Turtle, because it landed on its back (King [2004] 2017, 311). This is a serious departure from IT. Whether the Turtle from IT and the Turtle from the Dark Tower series — where it receives the name “Maturin” in book five — are indeed the same entity is for the readers to decide for themselves. The same can be said about the Other and Gan. However, according to the fictional Stephen King, IT was just a practice shot.
31The phrase “Roland’s universe exists within a single molecule of a weed dying in some cosmic vacant lot” from King’s afterword to The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (King 1982, 223–224) is reminiscent of both The Talisman and The Tommyknockers: objects also have twins in the Territories and the “cosmic vacant lot” resembles the “cosmic warehouse” that is Altair-4 in The Tommyknockers. Simak’s Ring Around the Sun is never referenced in Straub and King’s letters and outlines as inspiration for the notion of parallel worlds in The Talisman but this phrase from the outline revisions typed by King after the Thanksgiving putsch comes close to Simak’s depiction of parallel worlds in a tight ring around the sun like the beads of a bracelet: “[Morgan Sloat] veers between feverish visions of ruling both the Earth and the Territories (plus all the other worlds running forever in both directions? Perhaps)” (PSP MSS 185, box 6, folder 10, “OUTLINE REVISIONS”, p. 5, 25 November 1982).
- 11 King has made no further references to Altair in his work, not as a galaxy nor as a place between d (...)
32Many elements of The Talisman and The Tommyknockers also found their way into the substratum of the mythology of Dark Tower. Roland’s world is postapocalyptic. The apocalyptic event dates back to the Great Old Ones, an ancient people who “had a god-like knowledge of technology and the workings of the universe but they were also a violently destructive people” (Furth 2012, 243), which matches with the aliens, the Tommyknockers, who destroyed whole worlds with their dangerous technology before destroying themselves — which can, in turn, be traced back to the mention in the first draft of IT of a global thermonuclear conflict on a world of the Altair star-system (quoted above).11 The waste lands and the mutants that populate Mid-World in the Dark Tower epos similarly point to a nuclear disaster in its history.
33Traveling between worlds in The Talisman is only possible for a handful of people who can flip wherever they wish. Book two of the Dark Tower revolves around three doors through which one can travel between Roland’s and our world; book three adds the twelve portals located at the edges of the Beams — thirteen including the Dark Tower itself — and book four introduces “thinnies”: places “where the fabric of existence is almost entirely worn away” (King [1997] 1998, 81). King’s suggestion in a letter to Straub in 1981 of having Jack Sawyer wear a t-shirt that says “REALITY IS THINNER IN ARIZONA” jumps to mind, as does the mention in The Talisman of “the thin places between worlds” (King and Straub 1984, 426). When Jack Sawyer used the Talisman, the nexus of all worlds, to heal his dying mother, it disappeared. It is the Dark Tower that has taken its place as the nexus. King described the Tower as “standing at the root of Time” in 1978, “at the nexus of time” in 1991 (King [1991] 2005, 1) and “the nexus of all where and when” in 2003 (King [2003] 2012, xiii).
- 12 There is one occurrence of “mayhap” in The Talisman (King and Straub 1984, 443).
34Giving the macroverse, the Turtle, the Territories, and the kingdom of Delain all a place within a unified fictional universe, with the Dark Tower at its center, was an undertaking that spanned more than a decade. King collaborated with Straub for the second time in 2000-2001 on the sequel to The Talisman, Black House (King and Straub 2002). Remarkably, it was Straub’s suggestion to bring the Dark Tower mythos into Jack Sawyer’s twin worlds (Vincent 2004, 215) — another example of how the sociology of writing impacted the development of King’s fictional universe. The world of the Territories looks and feels more like a part of Mid-World in Black House than it does in its predecessor. The people from the Territories use Mid-World expressions such as “Thankee-sai”, “to make palaver”, and “mayhap”, which they did not do in The Talisman.12 After Black House, King wrote the three remaining Dark Tower books in succession between 2001 and 2003.
35In books six and seven, Roland moves between worlds and through time to visit and speak with Stephen King himself. This introspective aspect is fascinating. For King, completing the Dark Tower series was as much about examining his own creative process as it was about Roland reaching the Tower. Although IT, The Talisman, The Tommyknockers, and the first two Dark Tower books were separate creative undertakings at the time, they overlapped and interacted enough to fit into one fictional universe, retroactively, even though some of them had to be demoted to practice shots.
36The genetic approach taken in this essay demonstrates the benefits of including in the study of a work’s genesis the drafts of other works that occupied the author’s writing desk concurrently or between drafts. Concepts and themes that appear distinct and separate in different published works often turn out to be more connected in the genetic documents. In the case of The Talisman, for which King at times physically shared a writing desk with his co-author, the exchange of ideas beforehand and during the drafting process clearly influenced the other novels he was working on. Although many of the connections discussed in this essay have not become wholly invisible on the surface level of the published texts, the passages from drafts and correspondence decisively contribute to documenting how these novels were created as part of one “wave” in King’s development between 1980 and 1985.