While writing The Dark Tower series, Stephen King was nearly killed when he was hit by a car. On June 19, 1999, King was walking along Maine State Route 5 near Lovell, Maine, when a light-blue Dodge van struck him from behind. He suffered severe injuries, including a collapsed lung, multiple fractures, and a broken hip.
The accident became part of the fiction of The Dark Tower. In the seventh and final main-volume novel, The Dark Tower, published in 2004, King appears as a character in the story. Roland Deschain and his companions travel to a version of Maine in 1999 and discover that King is about to be hit by a van.
The scene turns a real-life trauma into a metafictional plot point: the characters believe that saving King is essential because his writing helps sustain their world and their quest. The accident is also discussed in King’s memoir On Writing. The book’s version is fictionalized, but the underlying event—the author being struck by a vehicle while walking—is real.