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One of the odd things about Stephen King’s work is that he’s arguably one of the most successful literary authors to dip his toes in the realm of continuity. If you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, what I mean by continuity is the idea that characters, events, and elements of a world are consistent across multiple stories that aren’t necessary sequels to each other. Marvel Studios has more or less made their bread and butter with continuity, trusting that story elements like SHIELD or the Infinity Stones can appear in Thor 2 or Incredible Hulk and audiences will know and accept these films as being in the same universe.
This has long been the case in comic books but it’s rare in literary circles, mainly because connected books tend to just be sequels but that’s definitely not the case with King. He’s concocted a vast web of interconnecting books that are in no way framed as sequels to each other, mainly through shared geography of fictional Maine towns. Stories like IT, Tommyknockers, The Dead Zone, Stand By Me, Shawshank Redemption, Cujo all take place in the same fictional Maine county with its core being the town of Castle Rock, and in 1993 Castle Rock finally got its starring horror movie story in Needful Things.
