Other Worlds Than These is the third Talisman novel, a late-return fantasy quest in which an aging Jack Sawyer, widowed, haunted, half-exiled in Mid-World, and physically endangered whenever he returns to America, must help stop a reality-wound called the Gullet before it tears the world apart. It wants to be a completion, a tribute, a Dark Tower bridge, a road novel, a grief novel, a western, a horror story about murderous teenagers, a nostalgia machine, and a metaphysical closing of the circle. Mostly, it is a swollen fan-service pilgrimage through old names, old phrases, old mythologies, old songs, old genre moves, and a very tired insistence that everything is ka.
The novel opens in Dezi, a pretty coastal town in Mid-World built of pink stone above the Clean Sea. Jack Sawyer is no longer the boy who crossed America and the Territories to save his mother in The Talisman, or the former detective who fought the Fisherman in Black House. He is an older man living under the rule of Edward Youngblood, the vulgar local oligarch known as the Big Kahuna. Jack stays in Dezi less because he belongs there than because his wife Sophie, the Shadow Queen, is buried there. He speaks to her ghost in the house they shared, letting the memory of her become a substitute for life.
Youngblood controls Dezi through money, trade, relics of the Old People, and access to a door between worlds. He uses Jack as an errand runner for America-side luxuries: Coca-Cola, old paperbacks, signed crime novels, and whatever other trinkets amuse him. He also keeps a group of displaced Americans from 1976 around him like pets or specimens. These “losers,” as the book repeatedly frames them, include Pay Orville, a failing comedian; Mary Klee, a fake-or-real psychic with tattooed eyes on her palms and a serious drinking problem; Ryall Connors, a mob-connected New York tough who has become Dezi’s cook and thug; George Elgin, an incompetent efficiency expert; and Larry Magruder, a manic spinner and movie buff. They have been abducted into Mid-World by Ayden Hestin, Youngblood’s eerie bald factotum, and Jack feels responsible for them even while resenting the obligation.
