King’s synthesis of real-life Maine locales with his own invented towns like Derry, Castle Rock, and Jerusalem’s Lot makes his universe particularly inviting for cartographic mapping, which many fans and scholars have done in their engagement with King’s literary geographies. 

While there are a wide range of maps of both the state of Maine and specific towns for us to consider, we’ll start with two artists’ interpretations of King’s Maine: Tatiana Keiko’s Stephen King’s Maine and Helen Cann’s A Taste of Stephen King’s Maine (which is featured in the introductory section of Castle Rock Kitchen). These two maps have different artistic styles, but both provide readers with a concrete way of visualizing and spatially situating themselves through cartographic engagement through these maps. 

Cann’s is arguably a more “traditional” map, with the main focus on town positions and natural geographic features like rivers (the Androscoggin and Penobscot are featured here), lakes, and mountain ranges. The real towns of Portland, Bridgton, Augusta, and Bangor appear alongside King inventions including Castle Rock, Chamberlain, Jerusalem’s Lot, Dark Score Lake, Haven, and Derry. Cann clearly establishes the surrounding geography as well, noting borders with New Hampshire, the Atlantic Ocean, and Canadian provinces. There are a handful of King-specific icons—a red balloon near Derry, Cujo near Castle Rock, a dome over Chester’s Mill—as well as illustrations of Maine staples like lobster. Most of the real-life locations are denoted with a black dot, while King’s fictional locales have a white dot, though there is some discrepancy here, as Bridgton has a white dot but is an absolutely real Maine town. 

Keiko’s map of King’s Maine doesn’t bother so much with these distinctions between fiction and reality, presenting readers with a cohesive King universe in which real-life and fictional towns are synthesized and represented side-by-side without differentiation. While Cann chose just a couple of iconic King images to pair with his fictional towns, Keiko’s artistic interpretation is much more overtly focused on these King ties, both visually and textually. Keiko’s map includes a King-inspired icon for almost all of the charted towns, including Food City in Bridgton, Cujo and the Needful Things storefront in Castle Rock, a sign for the pet sematary in Ludlow, an empty coffin in Jerusalem’s Lot, and a red balloon and the Standpipe in Derry. There are even images that allow the viewer to engage with uncharted territories, with Trisha McFarland’s hat and a bear isolated in the northwestern part of the state, echoing the girl’s experience lost in the woods in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) and the base of The Institute (2019) in the far northeastern corner denoting its isolation and secrecy, far from prying eyes and potential intervention. In addition to the visual representation of key King elements, Keiko also includes a textual key in the lower-left corner of her map, with listed King works and corresponding numbers to facilitate viewer identification and engagement. Unlike Cann’s map, Keiko’s does not include information beyond Maine’s borders, leaving King’s universe to stand alone, with just a single red N in the upper-right corner providing the traditional compass-based sense of direction. 

Keiko’s map includes a few more connections to King’s work than Cann’s does, with the aforementioned Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and Institute locations, and Kashwakamak from Cell (2006) key among these. One discrepancy between the two maps is where their respective artists chart Ludlow, the setting of King’s Pet Sematary (1983). King’s Ludlow is inspired by Orrington, which is located just south of Bangor, where King and his family lived when he was a writer-in-residence at the University of Maine at Orono in 1978. However, the wilderness that surrounds the Creeds’ home and Jud’s warnings about the dangers of straying off the path would suggest that King’s Ludlow is likely further north. This is where Keiko situates Ludlow on her map, in the northeastern part of the state. Cann places her version of Ludlow significantly further south and west, north and a bit west of Bridgton; however, it seems likely that Cann simply interposed Ludlow and Lovell, the latter of which is a central location in both King’s life and in the Dark Tower series and located near where Cann has positioned her version of Ludlow. 

This error aside, however, both Cann and Keiko’s maps provide two different cartographic versions of King’s Maine for readers to reflect upon and engage with, placing many of King’s iconic fictional locations side-by-side with real Maine places, and offering a dynamic and thought-provoking opportunity for visually engaging with King’s literary geographies.