Photo Credit: Nicolas Doumani
The town at the heart of many of King’s best novels is perhaps most famous for its role in a group of friends’ search for a body
The year is 1960 and Ray Brower is missing. Locals in a small town in Maine believe Brower is dead.Twelve year-old Gordie Lachance and his friends are no different. After the youngest friend, Vern, overhears his brother talking about the possible location of Ray Brower, the four set out on a “rite of passage” in search of a body.
Their town is small. A junk yard with a vicious dog. A set of potentially murderous train tracks. A small town hall and streets baking in the summer sun. This town isn’t just home to Gordie and his friends, however. This is the town of Castle Rock and it’s a place bursting with mystery and macabre tales.
The second in King’s trifecta of Maine towns, Castle Rock sits somewhere in the vicinity of Woodstock, the home of the famous music festival. The town is prototypical in King’s canon, that is to say, it’s small, somewhat isolated and home to any manner of horrors.
The difference between Castle Rock and King’s other famous creation, Derry, is in the stories he chooses to set within its suburbs and streets. Derry is home to otherworldly horror, it’s the resting place of IT. Castle Rock is home to far more human horrors. It’s the birthplace of bullies in the novella The Body, serial killers in The Dead Zone and a vicious, rabid dog in Cujo.
Castle Rock, one of King’s most well-known creations, takes its name from the mountain fort in William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies. It is fitting that one of the most famous stories set in Castle Rock is The Body; a novella about coming of age and the evils children inflict upon each other. The novella itself may not be as publicly well-known as IT or Carrie, but it has a lasting hold over popular culture thanks to its timeless adaption in Rob Reiner’s classic Stand By Me.
Much like IT, The Body is about a small group of pre-adolescents coming to terms with the idea of adulthood and how the evils of the world around them attempt to arrest their development into adults. In The Body, King uses the very human evil of Ace Merrill (played in the film adaption by a young Kiefer Sutherland) and his gang of bullies who terrorise Gordie and his friends.
Castle Rock represents an anchor in the lives of Gordie and his friends. It’s a place he feels both reverence and disdain for. At the stories end. he describes those years as the best of his life as he tells the tragic fates of the friends he once held dear. Their quest to find a body represents their loss of innocence. The further out from the town they get, the further from the tracks they stray, the closer to that loss they become. Eventually they find the body but they discover much more; namely, about life and the loss of innocence.
Geordie and his friends are kids when the story starts, but by the end they’re changed irrevocably. Unlike in IT, their innocence isn’t lost to the town, it is lost to the people who live within it.
Where Derry is itself a town with teeth, a monster swallowing childhood into oblivion, Castle Rock is more of a photo frame capturing the innocence of youth and the journey of a group of friends who set out to find a body, but also leave their childhood behind.
This is the first in a two 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. For part one on Derry click here.
