Stephen King is one of the most commercially successful and widely read authors of his time. With over sixty novels, dozens of short stories, and even a few screenplays under his belt, King has cemented himself as a pop culture icon, due in part to the tremendous depths he goes into writing each and every one of his stories. While passing readers of King’s work may have noticed the occasional callback and knowing wink, which they may have dismissed as nothing more than amusing easter eggs for eagle-eyed readers, diehard fans (such as myself) are well aware that his stories all take place in the same multiverse, or Macroverse, to use the proper King vernacular.
King’s Macroverse includes a potentially infinite number of parallel dimensions, pocket realities, and gateways between worlds. It is so vast and comprehensive that not even King’s Constant Readers (how King refers to his most loyal of fans) have yet to fully explore it, but I’m going to do my best to provide you with a brief explanation on what it entails. While there is not one Stephen King’s story that clearly lays out every aspect of the Macroverse, a careful reader could piece together the little bits of information strewn throughout King’s work and come up with a relatively detailed explanation on what the Macroverse is and how it works.
As with most creation tales, existence in King’s Macroverse began with darkness. Known as the Prim, from it birthed a being called Gan, who then created all else, including the Dark Tower, a massive structure that exists physically in All-World (where the Dark Tower series predominantly takes place) and symbolically in all others, and is the linchpin that holds all of creation together.
King’s Macroverse emerged gradually over the course of his career, which means various concepts and key characters are often not present for long stretches, and King himself has only retroactively inducted certain works into his multiverse. Still, as the multiverse came together more clearly in King’s imagination, he laid out certain key concepts that function as primal forces within the various stories, one of these being ka.
A word that appears throughout the Dark Tower series and other works, it’s from the High Speech, the fictional language of Roland Deschain’s people (the main character of the Dark Tower series), and it essentially means fate. There is also the Todash space, a limbo reality between dimensions populated by all manner of Lovecraftian horrors, and it’s where all of King’s monsters come from, entering the worlds through fissures in the fabric of reality called thinnies.
There is far, far more about the Stephen King Macroverse, too much information to include in this article, but we know that it’s also far from complete, for with each new novel King publishes, he expands on the already extensive connections in his strange fiction.