"Tommy had begun to hallucinate; as he drove up Wentworth Street, he thought he saw a clown grinning up at him from an open sewer manhole—a clown with shiny silver dollars for eyes and a clenched white glove filled with balloons."
I love when King mixes his books, I found a lot of references in Insomnia as well.
by Night__lite
33 Comments
I think It is heavily mentioned in 11.22.63 too
IIRC the same thing happens in *Dreamcatcher*.
King is famous for cross-referencing his books
I bet you’d like reading his The Dark Tower series
If you read the dark tower series it’s basically just a gritty walkthrough of a bunch if his books.
Excellent book! One of the very few that ever actually scared me. This was true horror.
King has said that he was completely fucking bonkers on cocaine while he was writing the Tommyknockers
Flagg, or Randall Flag is a recurring bad guy in several of King’s works. Dark Tower, Eyes of the Dragon, and The Stand iirc.
This is the main reason why when I started reading his books I made sure I read them in chronological order.
I wonder how responsible steven king is for coulrophobia?
Definitely keep reading Dark Tower series. So many characters from across his books come in. Amazing series.
If you liked that, definitely check out Needful Things. It’s seriously underrated, and it contains a lot of references to the rest of his work.
Desperation and The Regulators are mostly the same cast, but switched into different roles and they can be read opposite or together. Really, really interesting! For example, the evil villain in one is the good guy in another and vice versa. Children from one book are adults in another etc… It’s worth a read, even the covers go together in certain editions
Pretty sure he references himself as a “hack writer up in Bangor” somewhere in Tommyknockers as well. It’s been a long time, might have been another book of his..
Yeah most of Kings books take place in a shared universe and I love it so much
I never understood, why people disliked this book. Its one of my favorites of his (fiction) works (next to his short story anthologies and The Stand)
Read The Stand, Salems Lot, The Dark Tower (Series), 11/22/63 and you’ll get plenty of cross references. In one, a character finds the book that they were in, causing them to question their own reality.
It’s always fun when he does stuff like that.
Tommyknockers gets such a bad rap. I loved it.
Read the Dark Tower. It will all make sense then.
It’s all ka
Someone put together a flowchart:
https://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3432490/insanely-detailed-flowchart-connects-entire-stephen-king-universe/
There’s a book called *The Stephen King Universe* that delves super deep into the connections among his works. It’s both out of date and out of print (last I checked anyway), but if you could find a copy, you’ll find it very interesting.
And a string to swing it on…loved Tommyknockers
A lot of crossovers between The Stand, The Dark Tower series, and a few of the Richard Bachman books (Desperation being one of them).
The more you read King, the more you see of the “King Universe”. Hint, don’t read the Dark Tower series until you’ve read a significant portion of his stories (especially his earlier works).
Ka is a wheel.
All of them tie into Eye of the Dragon in some way.
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My favorite cross reference is Dick Hallorann from The Shining saved Mike Hanlons dad from being killed in the fire at the Black Spot in IT. I was really hoping that story would make it into the second IT movie, Mikes dad was an intelligent respectable man that they downgraded into a meth head 😕
Almost all his books are connected
Tommy sees Pennywise in a fever dream
All things serve the fucking beam
In The Institute, the main character remarks, “They looked like twins in some weird old horror movie.” I nearly fell off my chair haha
King’s incorporation of various characters across his books culminated in him naming the “device” that permits this in the Dark Tower series. Roland calls it a “thinny,” which seems to be a window or soft space between worlds that can permit them to bleed into each other. I always thought this was the coolest concept in how simple, yet still unknowable and magical, it allowed his books to become the first real shared universe (see MCU – Marvel Cinematic Universe).
It also gave a new meaning to my favorite King story – Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut. Go read it if you haven’t. Especially those who suffer daily through a brutal commute.