Stephen King’s fiction abounds with richly-detailed settings, from slightly skewed versions of real-life places to the fictional locales of Derry, Castle Rock, Jerusalem’s Lot, and the Dark Tower series’ Mid-World. From geographic descriptions and local history to the darkest secrets and innermost thoughts of their residents, King’s descriptions of these places invite readers into this universe, investing these fictional worlds with the ring of truth, familiarity, and recognition. As the narrator of Needful Things (1991) notes in the novel’s opening line, “You’ve been here before.” And we have. 

While the heart of King’s literary geographies lie in his descriptions and explorations of these uncanny places, the lines between the imaginary and the real are fluid and porous. Fans regularly make literary tourism treks to Bangor, Maine to see Derry’s familiar sites, like the statue of Paul Bunyan and the Standpipe. Several fans and artists have taken their own crack at creating a map of King’s Maine, visualizing his universe and situating his fictional towns within the objective, established geography of the state, and Cemetery Dance’s 2016 deluxe special edition of ‘Salem’s Lot (1975) features a beautifully detailed map of that doomed town. Sensory experiences like smell and taste often create a strong sense of place, including how specific places are experienced and remembered, and  Theresa Carle-Sanders’ cookbook Castle Rock Kitchen: Wicked Good Recipes from the World of Stephen King (2022) delves into this sensory experience, bringing together place, fiction, and food. Castle Rock Kitchen and its connections with King’s fictional worlds and works offer a unique opportunity for readers to engage with and experience the worlds King has created, highlighting the ways in which food and cooking are central to identity, place, meaning, and memory. 

Our journey here will take us through these places of convergence and overlap, traversing the blurred, liminal spaces where the real and the imaginary meet, in order to explore the ways in which King’s fictional worlds reflect, respond to, and influence the one in which we live and read. Combining literary analysis, literary geography and cartography, tourism, and food studies, we will cook our way through Castle Rock Kitchen, walk the streets of Derry, and navigate the literary geographies of Stephen King.