Other Worlds Than These by Stephen King and Peter Straub review, a self-indulgent finale to the Talisman trilogy

There are moments of shivering joy as the protagonist of two enduring classics, Jack Sawyer, returns, but this time his journey feels endlessly repetitive

B ear with me, because there is some backstory to get through before we can talk about the book I am actually here to review. Back in 1984, Stephen King and Peter Straub collaborated on the fantasy novel The Talisman. Like all the best King stories, it follows a young boy: in this case Jack Sawyer, 12, whose mother, Lily, is dying. Jack learns that a magical object called the Talisman might save her, if he can find it in a parallel world known as the Territories. Straub and King followed this up in 2001 with Black House , in which an adult Jack investigates a series of child murders that turn out to have disturbing links to the Territories.

The books are very different: one a coming-of-age cross-country quest, in which Jack flips back and forth between two versions of the US; the other a fantastical and horror-inflected murder mystery. Both are brilliant and enduring classics which will always have a place on my bookshelves, I reread both of them, all 1,800-odd pages, to prepare for Other Worlds Than These and was as swept away and delighted as the first time round.

So: in 2013 Straub had an idea for a final volume in the Talisman trilogy, drawing as Black House does from a real-life series of murders, and returning Jack (previously left on a bit of a cliffhanger) to the fray. King didn’t pick up on it back then, and Straub died in 2022 . Now King is 79, and, as he writes in a somewhat valedictory afterword, “it’s time to think about tidying up, as much as such things are possible for a writer whose mind is still crammed with cool ideas”. So he went back to that old idea, the original email lost, but the concept of a “series of motiveless, brutal crimes” in the Far West of the Territories, as Straub put it, at the story’s heart.

Jack, “his tide … going out”, is now 57. An aimless, lonely émigré to the Territories, he is sent on a mission by the two-bit despot he now depressingly reports to. He’s to travel through the toxic Blasted Lands to gather information on the Great Gorge, a mysterious area of “growing danger” that Governor Youngblood wants to know more about. Flipping back and forth between “America-side” and the Territories, Jack learns that an old policeman friend has gone missing on the trail of a pair of “murderin’ kids” who have been leaving a swathe of bodies in their wake in Nebraska. These kids are, he’s told, “infested” by demons, and the infestation is spreading to the children of the Territories.

For the true King fan (the “Constant Reader”, as he puts it), there are moments of shivering joy in Other Worlds Than These, not least in the title, which draws from a key scene in King’s The Gunslinger. I could never not find pleasure in a billy-bumbler (a dog-like creature), or in memories of Wolf, a wonderful creation from The Talisman, or in references to chief gunslinger Roland Deschain from the Dark Tower series. As befits King, there are moments of true horror too, and good ones, as the teenage infection spreads across the Territories.

But I cannot recommend that anyone who is not a Constant Reader embark on this 800-plus-page tome. For one, it would be pointless to read it without previously having read The Talisman and Black House (and if I’m honest, probably the seven-volume Dark Tower sequence too). And even for the Constant Reader, this is really not vintage King. I would have said that I’d follow Jack Sawyer anywhere, but as Ole Travellin’ Jack crisscrossed his way across the dry desert land of the Territories, his journey started to feel endless, and endlessly repetitive. As Jack’s crew are gearing up to cross yet another rickety bridge over yet another gaping chasm, one character even makes this point when they spot it. “Oh God … talk about repetition.” I hear you, fella! Jack himself does it: “Another echo. They’re becoming tiresome,” he says, in a rather too on-the-nose comment about the eerie (not so eerie the nth time they’re mentioned) similarities between the US and the Territories.

Is this deliberate? Yes, undoubtedly: “ka [destiny] is a wheel”, as we’ve been told (more than once); Jack, as Roland did before him, is treading the path laid out for him in an endless cycle. But this time round, it all gets a little portentous, self-referential and self-indulgent, and, dare I say it, boring.

I still think Stephen King is a genius. I still think The Talisman is the perfect coming-of-age dark fantasy novel. So thank you for the endless hours of reading pleasure, Mr King. But unlike its predecessors, Other Worlds Than These will not be going on my reread shelf.