Exploring the birthplace of Stephen King’s most terrifying creation
You’re in a small town in the American north with its dense forests, white picket fences and storm drains just wide enough to swallow a child whole. The winding roads paint thick black tarmac lines flanked by thick green foliage which is vast enough for someone to get lost in. It feels familiar. You’ve seen it revisited by many characters over time. Four friends with an unusual bond are caught in the crossfire between the military and something, otherworldly in Dreamcatcher. A time hopping English teacher has a mysterious mission to change history in 11/22/63. And, of course, a group of losers struggling with the very personification of what they fear most: IT.
The town is Bangor, Maine. Or more accurately, Stephen King’s version of Bangor known by its more popular name; Derry. Derry is one of many invented places the author has used as a backdrop for his horror. It exists alongside Castle Rock and Jerusalem’s Lot as fictionalised Maine towns each haunted by multiple sinister evils plaguing his pages and characters.
Derry is most famously the setting of King’s 1986 opus IT which was recently adapted into a hugely popular film. IT is a story of childhood fears and, in particular, the childhood fear of growing up and losing innocence. The novel’s antagonist and the titular IT of the story is the embodiment of this fear. Whether it’s form is a werewolf, a leper or, most famously, Pennywise the Dancing Clown, IT always feeds off the fear felt by the central characters that make up The Losers Club.
The most famous scene in IT is the opening exchange between IT in his favourite form of Pennywise and the ill-fated Georgie Denbrough. It sees a six-year-old Georgie chasing a small paper boat made for him by his brother down a rain logged street, the picture of childhood innocence. Then his boat veers left sharply and he loses sight of it. By the time he recovers sight of the S.S. Georgie it has made its way into one of the many storm drains that line the streets of the small town.
This particular storm drain isn’t just capturing the flow of water off the streets. This storm drain is a portal into IT’s world. Soon the young Georgie is the latest victim of Pennywise, killed in a fashion so brutal and arresting that it sets the reader on edge for the duration of the novel.
This storm drain is one of many places in Derry, and indeed the King-verse, that hold particular importance. The storm drain might literally be the bridge between Pennywise and the world outside but it also shows the reader that Pennywise and Derry are so closely bound together as to be inextricable. The novel establishes that Derry was built around and out of the amorphous character of IT, with its sewer system and storm drains providing easy access to its prey and with the famed House on 29 Neibolt street being its home. Place, in Stephen King’s fiction, is almost always bound up in the horror.
Soon the young Georgie is the latest victim of Pennywise, killed in a fashion so brutal and arresting that it sets the reader on edge for the duration of the novel.
It might be The Overlook Hotel and its omnipotent evil driving Jack Torrence to madness and murder or the Dark Tower at the heart of his nine book magnum opus of the same name. Derry is Pennywise and Pennywise is Derry. In the recent film adaptation, the Losers examine a map of the town with a detailed blueprint of the sewer system overlayed on top. The claw like sewer system isn’t unlike the claws that protrude from Pennywise’s white gloves when he readies for attack.
Walking through Bangor is like walking through a Stephen King novel. You are struck by the abundance of storm drains. You feel that at any moment a hand might slide out of its many roadside drains and grasp your ankle, swallowing you into the darkness beneath. The town, which was incorporated in 1834, exists in a part of the American north-east bound up with stories of colonisation, where place, folklore and evil were bound up in events such as the Salem Witch trials. It’s easy to see how King, a native of Portland, might have found inspiration in the landscape turning an unassuming part of America into a treasure trove of the macabre.
Beneath the fictional depiction of Bangor exists a beautiful, diverse town upon which King has overlaid the fears of childhood in his fictional Derry. Derry is a porthole into a multidimensional hell where monsters live. In all of King’s many references to the town throughout his fiction the place always produces an ominous recall in the mind of the reader. The very mention of Derry conjures images of blood pouring from sinks, paper boats leading children to their doom and red balloons floating uncannily through the air. For King, it is in these small American towns that real evil lives and it is an evil he would revisit again and again throughout his fiction.
This is the first in a three part series entitled ‘Stephen King and Place’ which will explore the three most famous locations from the authors books. Part two will explore the town of Castle Rock.
