Read an excerpt from the first chapter of Other Worlds Than These—the final book in The Talisman Trilogy from bestselling authors Stephen King and Peter Straub. 
Other Worlds Than These

A Talisman Novel

By Stephen King and Peter Straub
Illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez

Jack Sawyer, a beloved and enduring King protagonist, returns in the final book in the Talisman Trilogy, the #1 New York Times bestselling collaboration between “master craftsmen” (The Washington Post) Stephen King and Peter Straub.
 

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Chapter 1 
1 
 
Right here and now (as an old friend used to say), we are in the fluid present, so see this and see it well. 
 
It’s a man standing on a balcony, behind a waist-high balustrade made of pink stone—what’s called kinna stone in this part of Mid-World. He’s wearing faded jeans and an equally faded tee-shirt advertising Kingsland Ale—which, according to the slogan, is THE KING OF ALES. This man has sampled many bottles of Kingsland and is more than willing to vouch for the slogan. Not just because it’s good, but because dear friends of his used to brew it in a town called French Landing. That town is in another world. 
 
We know this man. He’s not the boy of twelve we met in September of 1981, but the resemblance to that boy, first encountered in the town of Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire, is undeniable. That boy was at the start of a great adventure, although he didn’t know it. All he knew in September of 1981 was that his mother was sick. How sick, he didn’t know, but an interior voice whispered Very sick, very sick.  
 
It’s not the steady Atlantic he’s looking at today but the Clean Sea of Mid-World’s Mejis Barony. Yet with his hands deep in his pockets and his hair blowing back from his forehead in the breeze, so the gray doesn’t show, he could almost be that boy. 
 
He should look more like the man he was in French Landing, because he’s closer to that person in age, but life doesn’t always work that way. The boy was worried about his sick mother, but otherwise untried. This man has been tried in all sorts of ways, and his face shows it. Deep lines descend from the corners of his mouth. There are crow’s feet—likewise deep—around his eyes. His hair, salt and pepper when he first came to this seaside town, is now almost entirely salt. The town is called Dezi, which looks like it should be pronounced Dezzi but is actually pronounced DEEZ-eye. The man likes the name. To him it sounds like desire.  
 
There are reasons why this man is so thin and pale, both like the boy he once was and unlike the man who lived in French Landing, Wisconsin. While attending a press conference in that town with his brewmeister friends and a cop named Dale Gilbertson, a woman with a grudge, Wanda Kinderling by name, shot this man in the chest. The bullet nicked his heart. He should have died and didn’t because another friend, Speedy Parker, took him to another world, this world, where he was healed. Which was a miracle.  
 
This man can go back to his country—a place of town fairs, freeways, school shootings, and Fourth of July parades—but only for short periods. If he stays long, old wounds will break open, including the one in his wounded heart. His head will ache, his muscles will weaken, his skin will break out, he’ll have trouble swallowing and catching his breath. Yet he has to go back from time to time. There’s a price to be paid for miracles. For living in the lovely and quiet seaside town of Dezi, and he pays it not just for himself but for others.  
 
In Mid-World, which this man called the Territories when he was a boy, there is a word for those bound together by fate and circumstance: ka-tet. The man doesn’t like to use that term for the four men and one woman who have come to depend on him, but sometimes admits to himself—usually in the dark of night, when he can’t sleep—that it fits all too well. How it happened, how this burdensome tet formed, isn’t much of a mystery. Long story short, he couldn’t help what happened.  

 

The Talisman Trilogy

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© Shane Leonard

Stephen King

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Never Flinch, the short story collection You Like It Darker (a New York Times Book Review top ten horror book of 2024), Holly (a New York Times Notable Book of 2023), Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. 

Photo by Kyle Cassidy

Peter Straub

Peter Straub (1943–2022) was the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen novels, including A Dark Matter, The Talisman, and Black House, which he cowrote with Stephen King. He has won the Bram Stoker Award for his novels Lost Boy Lost Girl and In the Night Room, as well as for his collection 5 Stories. Straub was the editor of the two-volume Library of American anthology The American Fantastic Tale.

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