Other Stephen King works employ alternate realities. In Rose Madder (1995), Rosie, a battered wife, enters an oil painting and finds an angry, powerful version of herself, who takes revenge on her homicidal husband. In The Wastelands: The Dark Tower, Book 3 (1991), Roland's sanity is threatened because he holds in his mind incompatible memories from two different realities: in one the boy Jake had died when he was pushed in front of a car; in the other Jake is still alive. However, other than their use of the alternate reality convention, these novels are not very similar thematically to The Regulators.

The King work closest in conception to The Regulators is the novella, "The Library Policeman" (Four Past Midnight, 1991). The librarian, Ardelia Lortz, resembles Tak in that she is both a demon and a vampire who possesses a human host. At the end of both stories, a small...