“On a brisk autumn day, a thirteen-year-old boy stands on the shores of the gray Atlantic, near a silent amusement park and a fading ocean resort called the Alhambra. The past has driven Jack Sawyer here: his father is gone, his mother is dying, and the world no longer makes sense. But for Jack everything is about to change. For he has been chosen to make a journey back across America–and into another realm.”
The Territories, for the few who’ve not read this book in the last forty-two years, is a parallel world physically smaller than the world from which Jack comes. Throughout the novel, Jack uses the size differential to travel quickly across the country. The eastern region, corresponding to the Eastern Seaboard, is the most densely populated and is governed under a feudal system headed by the Queen. The central regions, roughly corresponding to the American plains, are a grain growing area known as "the Outposts." Beyond them, the western region of the Territories is a destroyed area known as "the Blasted Lands" (analogous to the American Southwest – primarily New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was tested). It was apparently wrecked by radioactivity and has dangerous mutants and occasional fireballs.
Jack begins his quest at the New Hampshire hotel called the Alhambra (a notable location in King's novel The Tommyknockers), where he meets Speedy Parker who tells him he must go on this quest to save both his mother and Queen Laura. So Jack sets off to seek the mystical Talisman in this parallel world, with help and encouragement from Speedy Parker. Parker warns young Jack that Morgan of Orris, the enemy of the free people of the Territories, will be after him, as will his uncle in the real world, Morgan Sloat, the business partner who probably caused Jack's father's death, who wants Jack dead. So both versions of Morgan are hunting for Jack, and both are aware of his nature, as well as their own.
Back when King and Straub wrote The Talisman, I do not think King intentionally connected this book to the wider DTU. The Gunslinger had been released in 1982 (which was a combination of five short stories he wrote between 1978 and 1981 and The Drawing of the Three was still five years away). However, there are many things within this book that would be revisited in many of King’s other books, just not the Dark Tower (the idea of the train and the blasted lands would be reused in King’s fourth Dark Tower Universe book Wizard and Glass).
Consciously or not, there are many references throughout the book that make rereading this novel feel like The Territories is just a small part of some bigger multiple universes.
Even Jack’s Dad notes to his brother-in-law Morgan Sloat:
“And should I tell you another crazy thing?”
“Why not?” Sloat answered.
“That’s (the Territories) are not the only world out there.”
Another example comes from Wizard and Glass book again; where Roland’s ka-tet visits a version of the world has been depopulated by the influenza from the novel The Stand. As Jake points out in that book, in his version of 1980’s New York from which he comes from, they never encountered Captain Trips (this is also a clever way to explain the differences between King’s original version of the book, which is set in the late 1970s and the updated, extended version, which moved the dates up to 1986). Roland ponders that Jake’s universe is "another when. Then adds, “There are other worlds than these.”
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