Peter Straub died in 2022 with a third Talisman novel still gestating — a concept he'd floated to King in 2013, built around a series of motiveless brutal crimes deep in the Territories. King, now 79, retrieved the idea and finished the job alone. The result is Other Worlds Than These, a valedictory 800-plus-page close to a trilogy that began brilliantly in 1984 and continued brilliantly in 2001. The question isn't whether King can still write. He can. The question is whether this book earns its place beside its predecessors. It doesn't, quite. Jack Sawyer is now 57, an aimless émigré to the Territories, his tide going out — King's own phrase. He's dispatched by a two-bit governor across the Blasted Lands to investigate the Great Gorge, while back on the America-side an old police friend has gone missing on the trail of two murder children whose demonic infestation is spreading. The dual-track structure mirrors both predecessors and the mythology of the Dark Tower cycle. Structurally, this is the correct shape for a Talisman novel. The problem is that the journey is endless. Jack flips between worlds; he crosses rickety bridges over gaping chasms; he notes the eerie echoes between America and the Territories; he crosses another bridge. The book knows this — a character literally says 'Oh God... talk about repetition,' and Jack himself mutters that the echoes are 'becoming tiresome.' King intends this as thematic: ka is a wheel, the cycle is the point. But the deliberateness of the repetition doesn't make it less exhausting. Portent and self-reference accumulate to a weight the narrative can't fully support. For Constant Readers — the King faithful who have also navigated all seven Dark Tower volumes — there are genuine pleasures here. The title draws from a pivotal moment in The Gunslinger. Billy-bumblers appear. Wolf, the magnificent creation from the original Talisman, is remembered with warmth. The horror sequences, when the teenage infestation takes hold across the Territories, land with real menace. King hasn't lost the nerve for the dark stuff. But 'has pleasures for the devoted' is not the same as 'earns its place in the canon.' The reviewer who prepared for this book by rereading all 1,800-odd pages of The Talisman and Black House — and found both as sweeping and alive as ever — is the right reader, and even she found Other Worlds Than These unlikely to return to her reread shelf. That is an honest verdict from inside the fan base, and it should be taken seriously. Straub's absence is felt not as a gap in plotting but as a gap in discipline: a collaborator who might have pushed back on the seventh bridge, the ninth echo. King's afterword describes this as a tidying-up — a closing of loops for a writer whose mind is 'still crammed with cool ideas' but who is thinking about finishing. That valedictory spirit is touching and probably explains a lot about why the book is what it is. It's not a triumphant capstone. It's a generous, self-indulgent gift to the people who have followed Jack Sawyer's world for four decades, wrapped in more tissue paper than strictly necessary.
