Okay, the author has a habit of adding tidbits to his stories, tidbits which refer to his earlier stories. I haven’t read everything he’s writting but I’m pretty sure that It contains the most references to earlier works. It’s been a while but I remember the background on Derry mentioning it’s black population and the local all-black military base. I don’t recall if the cook is mentioned by name but he’s clearly Hallorann from The Shining. There’s also an antagonist returning to Derry in a red & white '58 Plymouth (Christine) after the moon had been talking to him (The Stand?). I’m pretty sure there’s a reference to Firestarter at the end. There must be more that I don’t remember and some I never even noticed.
Of course, The Tommyknockers contained references to It and Firestarter. What other Stephen King stories are connected?
I think there’s a whole website for these references. I’ll try to find it some time.
Until then…Here’s another one:
Ace Merill is a teen delinquent in “Stand by Me” who terrorizes the kids, and he comes back as a pathetic forty year old delinquent debt ridden druggie in “Needful Things.”
He’s made repeated references to “The Blue Ribbon Laundry”, which makes me think King worked in an commercial laundry at some point.
He also wrote some screenplays for a short-lived TV series called Tales From the Darkside in 1984. The “Sorry, Right Number” episode featured a successful writer who at one point identifies himself to a telephone company worker, who immediately starts gushing and swooning. He hangs up on her.
Yes, Stephen king frequently connects his works like that. I went through a stage a few years ago where I read most of the stuff he had written, and as I recall I found an indirect connection that resulted in a contradiction…let me see if I can remember how it went…
In Dark Tower 2: The Draw of the Three, the movie The Shining is referenced. In the Shining, there is a character named Dick Holloran (or something like that), who also appears in IT. Some of the events that happenend in IT are referred to in Insomnia, which takes place in the same town Derry. In Insomnia, there are numerous references to the Dark Tower series, including the character Roland. So what we have here is a world in which the story of The Shining took place, and yet somehow it was also a movie…
And in Dark Tower 4: Wizard and Glass (I’ll not go into how amzing this book is) there are mentions of Captain Trips, the desease from The Stand, as well as the name of the Bad Guy from that book (which I can’t recall) as being important as to why the “world has moved on.”