The Prime Reality, Part II: Castle Rock
The small New England mill town of Castle Rock, Maine, was for many years, without a doubt, the geographical center of the Stephen King Universe. Located in southwestern Maine—ten miles south of Rumford and about thirty miles west of Augusta—the unusually tragedy-stricken town figures in several short stories (such as “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,” “Nona,” “Uncle Otto’s Truck,” and “It Grows on You”), two novellas (The Body and The Sun Dog), and four novels (see below). Much more than a mere setting for King’s tales of the strange and macabre, the site also effectively functioned as a scale model of contemporary American society.
King began experimenting with the idea of the small town as a “social and psychological microcosm” as far back as Carrie (1974) and became more ambitious with the concept in ’Salem’s Lot (1975). He did not hit his stride, however, until The Dead Zone (1979), his first novel to feature Castle Rock. There, psychic Johnny Smith is asked to lend a hand in tracking down the infamous Castle Rock Strangler. Smith reluctantly agrees, subsequently revealing the killer to be Frank Dodd, a popular local law enforcement officer. Dodd’s crimes, and subsequent suicide, make national headlines, beginning what many locals consider to be nothing less than a curse on the town.
Clearly, King knows the town intimately. How intimately? Well, in the introduction to The Sun Dog, the author refers to his own wealth of unwritten knowledge about the town, noting examples including “how Sheriff George Bannerman lost his virginity in the back seat of his dead father’s car.”
As the years passed, the author “became more and more interested in—almost entranced by—the secret life of this town, by the hidden relationships which seemed to come clearer and clearer” to him. Castle Rock had become his town, the way “the mythical town of Isola is Ed McBain’s town and the West Virginia village of Glory was Davis Grubb’s town.”
Unlike the town of Derry, or for that matter ’Salem’s Lot, King has not revealed much of the Castle Rock’s history before the turn of the 20th century. In fact, the most ancient history he’s related has been in the short stories “The Man in the Black Suit” and “Uncle Otto’s Truck.” For all practical purposes, the history of Castle Rock as it relates to the Stephen King Universe began with the aforementioned The Dead Zone.
As previously mentioned, many residents believe Frank Dodd’s actions cast a spell of evil on the town. The evidence? Since 1979, Castle Rock has certainly had more than its share of tragedy. In 1981, Joe Camber’s two-hundred-pound St. Bernard, Cujo, went rabid and killed several people (see the chapter on Cujo). In 1989, famous writer Thad Beaumont was attacked by a madman claiming to be George Stark, a man who couldn’t possibly exist (see the chapter on The Dark Half). Beaumont never fully recovered from the incident, first separating from his wife, then later committing suicide. And in 1990, Reginald “Pop” Merrill, a fixture of Castle Rock’s business community, died in a fire of suspicious origin (see the chapter on “The Sun Dog”).
The most disturbing incident, however, has to be the hysteria and madness that gripped the entire town in the fall of 1991, coincident with the grand opening of the store called Needful Things. Spouses killed one another, neighbor battled neighbor to the death, and rival churches fought tooth and nail in the streets. The town was nearly destroyed in the chaos, as several buildings were dynamited by known criminal Ace Merrill (see the chapter on Needful Things).
By 1990, King had decided to “close the book” on Castle Rock, the quirky little community where so many of his favorite characters had lived and died, triumphed and suffered. And close the book he did. As one can see from the events described above, Castle Rock went out, not with a whimper, but with a bang.
Although King had seemingly cut all ties to the town in Needful Things (which was boldly subtitled “The Last Castle Rock Story”), he is still drawn to its familiar environs every now and then. For instance, there is the putative epilogue to that book, a short story called “It Grows on You,” which appeared in Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993). The town was also mentioned in passing in 1996’s tale “The Man in the Black Suit,” and in 1999’s The Girl
Who Loved Tom Gordon. Former townspeople have also appeared in subsequent stories, the most recent example being former Castle Rock deputy Norris Ridgewick’s cameo at the conclusion of Bag of Bones.
Castle Rock, with its constant struggles between good and evil, seems to have been almost a microcosmic version of the much grander cosmic conflict going on in the Stephen King Universe as a whole. Though that certainly does not mean that the seemingly minor skirmishes in Castle Rock are not also a part of that larger struggle.
The town has served as a setting for King’s ongoing examination of the eternal struggle between good and evil, detailing the conflicts between Johnny Smith and Frank Dodd, Donna Trenton and Cujo, and Thad Beaumont and George Stark. The battle described in Needful Things, however, provides the best example of this theme. Leland Gaunt is obviously of the same breed of monster as other evil denizens of King’s Universe such as Randall Flagg (The Stand, The Eyes of the Dragon), Andre Linoge (Storm of the Century), Aredelia Lortz (“The Library Policeman”), and Kurt Barlow (’Salem’s Lot), and the troubles he caused in the town a tiny reflection of the battle that rages between the Random and the Purpose mentioned in Insomnia.
One could even characterize the human combatants in Needful Things—Alan Pangborn, Polly Chalmers, and Norris Ridgewick—as a ka-tet, similar in structure to the one Roland leads. This drives home the point that although evil exists, it is always opposed by good.
Another recurring theme is that evil lingers, as proved by the legacy of Frank Dodd, which King detailed in Cujo and has mentioned several times since. Again, however, King points out that the forces of good are just as resilient, that a champion always arises in a time of need.
Perhaps the most telling physical evidence that Castle Rock is a key part of the Stephen King Universe is the map of Maine contained in the novels Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game. There, readers can easily see that Castle Rock is part of King’s Maine, sitting as it does to the south of towns like Bangor, Derry, and Haven. Bolstering this evidence are the many references King makes to events in Castle Rock in other books (for instance, Frank Dodd’s suicide made national news, and was mentioned in passing in It), and his frequent mentions of such fictional Maine landmarks as Shawshank Prison and the mental institution known as Juniper Hill.
Obviously very resilient, the people of Castle Rock have rebuilt their town and continue with their daily lives. Perhaps the conflagration that nearly destroyed the Rock has cleansed the town of evil, allowing its denizens to live out their days in peace. Perhaps, though, evil still lingers
there, waiting for the proper moment to inflict additional horrors on the unsuspecting populace.
CASTLE ROCK: TRIVIA
• As noted in the Introduction, Castle Rock also figures in the fiction of King’s wife, Tabitha King. One example of this appears in her 1993 novel One on One. There, Castle Rock is depicted as a sports rival of Greenspark Academy, the school that two of her main characters attend.
• Like Derry, Castle Rock has spawned more than its share of working authors. Besides the unfortunate Thad Beaumont, the town is also the birthplace of writer Gordon LaChance (an incident from Gordie’s childhood is told in the 1982 novella The Body).
• King took the name Castle Rock from a favorite novel of his youth, William Golding’s 1954 classic Lord of the Flies. The name in turn was used by Rob Reiner, director of Stand by Me, as the name of his production company.