Twinners

I guess, being an only child, I'm fascinated by twins. My aunts, Dad's sisters, are twins. I've known various twins throughout my school years. Sydney from "The Pretender" is a twin (in the show), as is Ms. Parker/Mr. Lyle. And there's Fred and George Weasley, and Parvati and Padma Patil, all from the Harry Potter series.

Then, of course, there's Stephen King.

There seem to be two different types of twins in Stephen King's work: true twins and interdimensional twins.

1. True twins are like my aunts, the kids at school, etc. They're born on the same day, look a lot like each other. Most of King's twins are good - typically innocents, like Thad Beaumont's children in "The Dark Half", or the twins of the Callas in the Dark Tower series. Some are idiots, like the "Pus Sisters" from King's novella, "The Sun Dog".
Then there's the exception to the rule: George Stark. He started out as an unborn twin, absorbed into Thad Beaumont at birth. When Thad turned eleven, George started manifesting himself as headaches. His physical presence was discovered in Thad's brain during surgery - by physical presence, I mean an eyeball, and other little bits of body. Those bits were excised, and forgotten. As an adult, Thad began to write crime novels under the pseudonym George Stark - what he didn't know was that George Stark was a separate, darker personality. And when the pseudonym was identified, and attempted to be buried... he gained cohesion. George Stark became a man, brutal and crazy and steadily dying unless Thad began writing his stories again. Stark was conducted back to the land of the dead by the sparrows that Thad summoned.
George Stark, by the way, was one way of interpreting the relationship between Stephen King and his "dark half", Richard Bachman. Richard is dead now (cancer of the pseudonym)... but like Stark, doesn't always seem to want to stay dead.

2. Interdimensional twins, or Twinners, are first explored in King's collaboration with Peter Straub, "The Talisman". In it, a young man named Jack Sawyer travels across the United States by "flipping" between our world and a parallel world called The Territories. During that time, he encounters many Twinners - his mother, for instance, has a Twinner who is the queen of The Territories, and Jack is trying to save them both. Jack was a Twinner once, himself, but his Twinner, Jason, was killed as a baby. Jack, however, did not die in his world, and thus gained a unique ability to go between worlds without adverse side effects.
This idea of Twinners is explored further in the sequel to "The Talisman", called "Black House", a little bit further in "Rose Madder", and further still in the last few books of the Dark Tower series. In this multiverse, many of our favorite characters are Twinners of each other, from different dimensions (or levels of the Dark Tower). Unlike true twins, who tend to gain separate personalities and interests through time, Twinners tend to be very similar people on whichever dimension they inhabit. Thusly, heroes are always heroes, villains are always villains, and the order of things is sustained.

The idea that there is a similar reflection of me on these levels is rather comforting.

But what if there's a dark reflection on this level of the Tower? What if I have a twin, maybe not by blood or age, but in some other less concrete way? Similar experiences, similar emotions... yet turning out completely differently? Not quite Beaumont and Stark, and not quite Twinners - somewhere in between?

Is that why I understand so well, and yet hardly at all?

For your consideration,
Grety