There is a place in Bangor, Maine where Jack Torrance’s ax can be kept. It’s a bookstore with a unique type of books and an endless collection of objects related to the same books. Its name is Gerald Winters and Son Rare Books, ie Gerald Winters and Son Rare Books, although it is popularly known as the souvenir and novel shop of its most famous neighbor in as many and varied editions as one can imagine: Stephen King (Portland, 75 Years). The shop at 48 Main Street looks like a small, unofficial museum – it can recreate an animal cemetery or exhibit Georgie Denbrough’s bloodied raincoat and a collection of locked doors – perhaps King himself dropping it from time to time.
The Shiloh Temple in Durham, Maine, United States was the inspiration for The House of Marsten, written by the vampire Kurt Barlow in Salem’s Lot (The Mystery of Salem’s Lot) (1975), Marsten’s second novel. inhabited is Stephen King, later adapted for television.James Rajotte
Yes, King spends part of the year in Bangor. His mansion stands there, with a 19th-century door forged from iron – and bats. At 47 Broadway Street. But the protagonists of It, A Bag of Bones, Insomnia, The Dreamcatcher and some of 11/22/63 also live in Bangor. Because Bangor is Derry, one of the three fictional towns in Maine – Castle Rock and Salem’s Lot being the other two – that King invented by going to the other side of his own mirror: the one that allowed him to see everything see what didn’t exist in the boring world of his childhood actually existed. No, King didn’t want to live in a monster-free Maine. So he created his own Maine, one where everything is the same and terrifyingly different at the same time. Starting with Thomas Hill standpipe.
Durham Methodist Church (now disused) stands near the house where Stephen King lived as a boy. Durham is the hometown of the author’s mother, James Rajotte
The huge water tower that King gazed at from the bench, where he sometimes stopped to take notes, is where Pennywise is said to live, or rather where he comes out of in the novel. Yes, the evil mutant clown, capable of embodying every little monster and fear imaginable – in a sense, as Bret Easton Ellis put it, “the Ulysses of Terror” – is levitating down there. The statue of Paul Bunyan, the giant, superheroic lumberjack, myth of American and Canadian folklore, ridiculous to a degree, harmless, inevitably disturbs anyone who remembers how they were possessed by some kind of demon – one of those fears transformed into monsters – and attacks the funny Richie Tozier. The statue also plays a small role in Insomnia.
Long Lake, the lake where a mysterious fog shrouds the city in The Mist (1980) James Rajotte
The lake from which the ghost emerges in A Bag of Bones is one of the more than likely destinations of the river that crosses Derry, and is certainly the same one that crosses Bangor. The abandoned barns and lonely soccer fields that Carrie White lives with in Chamberlain – a tiny town in real Maine, a necessarily deformed copy of the existing one – were also found in Castle Rock, a town said to be 200 kilometers from Derry – the Epicenter of The Dead Zone – he was born with it in 1979 -, Cujo, The Dark Half, The Store, a handful of stories and even the most recent Elevation. The author must have encountered Plymouth Fury – the future and bloody Christine – simultaneously in his idyllic and claustrophobic youth.
A statue of Paul Bunyan, an icon of the timber industry, brought to life in the novel It (published 1986).James Rajotte
Because if there’s something about the Maine landscape, from the other Maine, the Maine, that only began to exist in the mind of a child who refused to live in a world without monsters – “Who would live in a world without monsters want? ?” the author has asked more than once — and eventually becoming the creator of Monsters, is the kind of perfect blending that has made his work a classic of the genre. Let’s take the innocent mind of a child like the innocent mind of a place , let’s turn off the light and open the door to the unknown. It will happen that nothing and nobody will ever be the same again. Not the place, not the child. King transformed his city into his own opposite by playing all sorts of things He cursed them with the power of fiction to the grim fate of all.
Thomas Hill’s standpipe in Bangor, Maine. In It is the place where the protagonist Stan Uris first meets Pennywise the clown. James Rajotte
Homes alongside Route 9 that runs through Durham.James Rajotte
A 1970 Cadillac for sale along Route 9 in Durham, Maine.James Rajotte
A soccer field adjacent to Route 9 which runs through Durham.James Rajotte
Old books in Durham Methodist Church. Fairy Tale, the latest novel (number 64) by Stephen King, who turned 75 in 2022, was published in Spanish in September. James Rajotte
The fictional town of Castle Rock featured in King’s novels is inspired by the Maine towns where the writer grew up. James Rajotte
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits