At the beginning of *Wizard and Glass*, the fourth *Dark Tower* book, the interdimensional crossover is with Stephen King’s *The Stand*.
Roland Deschain and his ka-tet enter a version of Kansas that has been devastated by a superflu. The setting recalls *The Stand*, King’s 1978 plague-apocalypse novel, in which a disease called Captain Trips kills most of the world’s population. In *Wizard and Glass*, the connection is made through details such as the abandoned landscape, references to the epidemic, and a newspaper mentioning the catastrophe.
This is not a retelling of *The Stand* or a meeting between Roland and its principal characters. Instead, it establishes that the Dark Tower multiverse contains worlds resembling settings from King’s other fiction. The crossover is especially memorable because it appears early in the novel, after the ka-tet’s encounter with the sentient train Blaine.
Readers sometimes confuse this connection with later Dark Tower links to *The Shining*, *’Salem’s Lot*, and *The Eyes of the Dragon*. Those books also matter to King’s wider fictional universe, but the opening Kansas sequence specifically echoes *The Stand*.