Like The Dead Zone, Cujo takes place in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine, and more than one character from the former story appears or is referenced in the latter-not as a figment from a book by Stephen King, but as a part of the town’s fictional fabric.
But then there’s Cujo, King’s 10th novel, which came out in 1981. But Carrie and The Dead Zone don’t share a reality in the latter book, the events of the former are fiction, just as they are in ours. In his seventh novel, 1979’s The Dead Zone, King has a character reference “that book Carrie,” his debut novel from 1974. But elements of intertextuality crept into his output early. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint when King started consciously creating his secondary universe, and King, who at 70 is busy still speedily expanding it, declined a request to discuss its foundation. “With a single image-for example, the red rose in an abandoned lot-he can bring into the story all of the power implicit in half a dozen other stories that share the same image,” Collings says, adding, “It gives a moment of connection, of understanding possible ways that this story might fit into its universe, justifying and clarifying actions, characters, and landscapes.”Ī 2017 flowchart of King’s interconnected creations by designer Gillian James For readers who’ve followed him closely during that decades-long construction project, a motif like the rose serves as a “super-allusion,” as Michael Collings, one of several King scholars who’ve spent much of their careers indexing and analyzing King’s work, calls it.
Tolkien called an ambitious “secondary world,” which in King’s case started as a dark, distorted vision of the Maine he knew and grew to encompass a universe. Because King has also created what J.R.R. A rookie reader can dip a toe in anywhere and succumb to the same narrative riptide that keeps King veterans from escaping his pull.īut King, whose every book becomes a best seller and, now more than ever, gets optioned for the screen seemingly the moment the manuscript is submitted, is as much of an outlier in the world-building department as he is in his popular success and unflagging pace of production. Most of King’s work isn’t explicitly serialized and doesn’t depend on knowledge of any other entries in his catalog. Constant Readers likely make up a minority of the enormous audience that King has cultivated over the past 45 years, a period during which his estimated lifetime count of book copies sold (more than 350 million) has easily exceeded the current population of the United States. It’s completely OK, and not uncommon, to like King and not find it fitting that the bodega on the real-life 46th and Second has roses for sale. The King Chroniclers and the Reimagining of an Icon of American Letters
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