Mike Thorn 

The contemporary world all too often looks like nothing but a series of breathlessly converging existential crises: far-right autocracies, genocides and wars, intensifying climate disasters, the sweeping threats of generative AI, and the online erosion of collective truth. Two new books use literary horror both to explore our world’s widespread evils and to imagine other ways of being. Connections do not immediately announce themselves between Stephen King and Peter Straub’s Other Worlds Than These and Dr. Raymond Thoss’s Rebellion Against the Conspiracy Against the Human Race; the first is a sprawling dark fantasy epic whereas the latter is an intensely confessional work of pessimistic autotheory. However, these books share a set of core concerns about morality, narrative, and speculative “worlding.” Both titles offer not so much competing positions on the existence of evil as differing perspectives on its limits. Thoss, Straub, and King all agree that evil exists: Rebellion calls it the Monster; Other Worlds calls it the Gullet. Both books explore multiversal metaphysics, not in a Marvel Comics “shared universe” fashion, but in a manner of reflection on evil’s boundless potential proliferations. Where King and Straub most starkly differ from Thoss is in their belief that maybe, just maybe, a multiversal metaphysics might contain true antidotes to evil. Terrifying as they might be, King and Straub’s literary imaginations lean toward hope, whereas Thoss—whose autotheory builds upon the cosmic horror and pessimistic philosophy of Thomas Ligotti—is almost unilaterally hopeless.

Despite these differing authorial worldviews, Other Worlds and Rebellion both use literary horror to speculate broadly on the relationship between evil, human existence, and the cosmos. The books have many overlapping fixations that encourage examination, including the ramifications of childhood trauma, the potential for healing in horror and dark fantasy literature, and above all the allegorical implications of multiversal narrative.

Other Worlds Than These is the final instalment in an ambitious, decades-long collaboration between two defining voices of American Gothic literature. After Peter Straub’s death in 2022, Stephen King revisited his late friend and collaborator’s notes for the planned third entry in their co-written trilogy, which began with The Talisman (1984) and Black House (2001). King drew on Straub’s ideas to write the third and final novel, which is somewhat Straubian in its narrative sprawl and thematic complexity but Kingian in its pared-down, conversational prose style.

Other Worlds catches up with Jack Sawyer, the protagonist of The Talisman and Black House. In The Talisman, a twelve-year-old Jack embarked on a treacherous quest to retrieve the magical talisman (a kind of multiversal lynchpin in the form of a magical orb) to cure his dying mother. The novel saw Jack learning to “flip” between America and another dimension he called the Territories, finally revealed in Other Worlds Than These to be the Mid-World of the Dark Tower saga. Black House followed Jack as a thirty-something retired detective in pursuit of an interdimensional serial murderer: an Albert Fish imitator the press called “the Fisherman.” Jack entered Mid-World to kill Mr. Munshun, the demon possessing the Fisherman’s human host. At the novel’s climax, Jack was shot by the wife of a murderer he arrested many years prior. Jack soon learned that he could heal his wounds if he stayed in the Territories (or Mid-World), and that he could only flip back to America for brief periods without his wounds quickly re-opening.

Other Worlds Than These

Other Worlds Than These finds a widowed, sixty-something Jack living in a municipality called Dezi in Mid-World’s Mejis Barony. He becomes aware of new dimension-crossing killers who, like the Fisherman, invoke real-world American criminals; a cult of teenagers is murderously rampaging across America and Mid-World in honor of the 1950s serial killer Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate. In tribute to their redheaded idol Starkweather, the marauding teens dye their hair: first with Mid-World birdberry juice, then later with their victims’ blood. In sequences of Kingian and Straubian horror, the dye streams down their faces like garish warpaint as they brutally lay waste to innocent families and communities. Jack learns that these teens are possessed and driven by the Gullet, an eerily sentient gash between worlds, located on the edge of the Blasted Lands (the Mid-World equivalent of a nuclear wasteland). Jack’s final task is to stop the Starkweather worshippers and close the Gullet before it destroys all worlds.

Other Worlds takes its title from a seminal line in the first of Stephen King’s genre-blending Dark Tower novels, The Gunslinger (1982). In his obsessive pursuit of the mysterious Dark Tower, The Gunslinger’s antihero Roland makes a terrible choice that causes a young boy named Jake to die; before falling to his death, Jake tells Roland, “Go then, there are other worlds than these.” The Dark Tower series fulfils Jake’s cryptic promise in its third entry, The Waste Lands (1991), when the boy returns in a confused paradox of living-death that drives him nearly mad. While Black House introduced the Talisman trilogy’s connections to the Dark Tower, Other Worlds fully augments and expands on those connections. This final Talisman entry is of a piece with King’s magnum opus, both in terms of its slyly circular narrative structure and its central themes: multiple realities, narrative recursions, and story as ontology. Other Worlds crucially underlines how Jake’s dying words suggest that multiversal narrative might be an opening into more imaginative and compassionate ways of being—that perhaps there’s a world in which Roland makes the right choice, sacrificing self-interest to save Jake.

The final Talisman novel calls constant attention to the concept of echoing, specifically how past choices and misdeeds manifest in the present—sometimes as lessons, often as scars. Jack begrudgingly discovers that prophecy has deemed him an echo of Roland: just as Roland once saved the Dark Tower’s beams to prevent the death of all worlds, Jack must now close the apocalyptically dangerous Gullet. Jack, whose mission is eerily similar to Roland’s, collects his own unlikely ka-tet (the Mid-World term for a group bound together by fate, or ka). And, like Roland, Jack realizes he cannot achieve his final goal without ka’s decree that he lose every member of his ka-tet along the way. Like Song of Susanna and The Dark Tower—which feature Stephen King himself as a central character—Other Worlds Than These is explicitly metafictional and fundamentally concerned with story itself. The novel contains interludes in which Jack rereads excerpts from his journal that recount his traumatic childhood: memories which, despite their intensity, have sometimes vanished from his memory like bad dreams. Like the similarly tormented writer Scott Landon in King’s favorite of his own novels, Lisey’s Story (2006), Jack finds a balm in his Territories—a reprieve from the reality called America that nearly killed him. However, much like the otherworldly myth-pool of Lisey’s Story, Mid-World is as much a space of danger as of rehabilitation. King and Straub are not blindly naïve optimists. They see boundless potential within narrative, both destructive and restorative: for forgetting or remembering, for harming or healing.

Rebellion Against the Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Raymond Thoss’s pseudonymously penned Rebellion Against the Conspiracy engages with the philosophy of dark speculative fiction and multiversal narrative to reach very different conclusions. Rebellion is an explicit response to Thomas Ligotti’s pessimistic treatise, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010), which draws on cosmic horror (namely the works of H. P. Lovecraft and his literary progeny) and philosophical pessimism (particularly the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Peter Wessel Zapffe) to argue that anti-natalism is the only sensible ideological response to the “parent of all horrors”: human consciousness. Thoss agrees with Ligotti’s basic tenets, based largely on his personal experiences as a psychologist specializing in child trauma, and as a survivor of extreme long-term childhood abuse (Thoss discloses having experienced nine of the ten Adverse Childhood Experiences on Felitti and Anda’s metric).

Thoss draws on a wide range of scholarship, philosophy, and fiction—including references to King’s The Green Mile (1996), It (1986), and The Shawshank Redemption (1994)—to articulate his philosophical dialectics: he argues that America’s cultural “Fetishization of Normality” draws on “Ontological Gaslighting” to trick the populace into believing that the world is fundamentally sane and good. In true Ligottian fashion, Thoss believes by contrast that the world is fundamentally cruel, governed by what he calls Monsters: wielders of power who feed on pain and fear. Thoss argues that humans sustain Monsters’ supremacy by denying that Monsters exist, thereby maintaining the social illusion of “sane normality.” The author proposes that only demigods called monsters (former Monsters who have morally evolved to embrace empathy and connection) have the capacity to resist Monsters.

In the final chapter of Rebellion—“The World as Will and Desolation”—Thoss echoes a crucial pivot in the final, eponymous Dark Tower novel wherein King addresses the reader directly before revealing the tragic conclusion of Roland’s Sisyphean quest. “You can stop here,” King writes; “Should you go on, you will surely be disappointed, perhaps even heartbroken.” Thoss prefaces his outro with a similar disclaimer: “I advise that you not read this, that you skip it. I am irrelevant; only you matter. Learn that if nothing else. Only Rebellion matters. I am nothing. I am a ghost, a fiction, an echo, an artificiality.” This warning precedes Rebellion’s most intuitive connection to the Talisman trilogy, when Thoss describes his childhood ability to “jump” into a frightening other world while asleep (indirectly evoking Jack Sawyer “flipping” into Mid-World). Thoss describes a demonic being named “Marshal(l),” who directed him through these nightmarish nocturnal voyages, a terrifying entity akin to Black House’s Mr. Munshun. Relaying these psychologically scarring experiences, Thoss offers a quote by the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick that’s almost the explicit shadow of King’s Go then, there are other worlds than these: “If you don’t like this world, you should see the others.” Recalling his childhood “jumps,” Thoss notes that this world is “far and away the lesser evil” of the cosmos. In stressing that the “key word in that phrase is not ‘lesser,’ it’s ‘evil,’” he exemplifies his belief that our world is fundamentally evil.

Ultimately, Rebellion Against the Conspiracy Against the Human Race and Other Worlds Than These are more alike than initial appearances might suggest. Much like the Territories’ world of dark fantasy heals Jack—and not for its lack of monstrous threats—Thoss finds profound reprieve in the fictions of Thomas Ligotti. In his book’s introductory section, Thoss goes so far as to confess that Ligotti “literally saved” his life. Thoss notes that, when everyone else told him he was merely “depressed” or “mentally ill,” Ligotti told him, “No. You are not. You are awake.” King and Straub’s Jack Sawyer, similarly, has made his final retreat from the “sanity” of America for the “unreality” of Mid-World: he, too, is awake in a landscape of “fiction.” In the final chapter of Rebellion, Thoss grants a rehabilitative potential in speculative fiction that extends beyond Ligotti, citing Olga Trujillo’s work on Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), specifically the ways that she has used fantasy stories, including Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Series, to “help reintegrate herself”; similarly, Thoss “used weird fiction and all its relatives to help ‘anchor’” him for his “jumps.” Thoss might align with Dick’s pessimism over King and Straub’s conditional hope, but what if his Marshal(l), like Mr. Munshun, could be vanquished? What other worlds, then, might his jumps reveal? If Rebellion shares anything in common with Other Worlds, it is a question rather than a conclusion: can we not imagine better worlds than this?

Related: Black House: Ecohorror and Influence in Stephen King and Peter Straub’s Underrated Novel by Andy Hageman and Ryan Gjerde.

Mike Thorn is a fiction writer and horror scholar. He is the author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and Peel Back and See. His writing has appeared in American Gothic Studies, The Weird: A Companion, American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper, Uncertainties VIII, Augur, Nightmare Magazine, The NoSleep Podcast, and elsewhere. He is a postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University, and he holds his Ph.D. in English (Creative Writing) from the University of New Brunswick. He co-hosts Craftwork, a writing-themed podcast, with Miriam Richer.