While a lot of literary cartography focuses on the mapping of fictional places, sometimes a profound sense of place comes through navigating the un-mappable. This is particularly true of stories that take King’s protagonists into contemporary versions of the Gothic wilderness, evoking memories of the deep dark forests of fairy tales long past. These places aren’t literally “un-mappable,” of course—someone with enough time, the right tools, and a fixed geographical position with which to orient themselves could presumably create a map. But even if a map were made, the wilderness itself would remain unknowable and uncontainable. 

As I reread King’s O. Henry Award-winning short story “The Man in the Black Suit” (published in The New Yorker in 1995; collected in Everything’s Eventual in 2002), I found myself thinking—as I so often do—of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” I teach these two stories together on a regular basis, talking with students about how the authors work with key literary elements and exploring these variations on the characters’ trip into and transformation by the Gothic wilderness. In both cases, Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown and King’s Gary leave places of civilization, encounter a malefic figure in the woods, and have their entire worldview upended. Questions linger about whether these ecoGothic encounters really happened or whether they were just a dream (a more unsettled question in Hawthorne than in King, where the evidence is pretty darn conclusive), and even years after their encounters with the Devil, Brown and Gary fear seeing that familiar face again at the end of their lives. 

Hawthorne tells his readers that as Brown sets out, he quickly finds himself on “a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind. It was all as lonely as could be” (53). Gary’s walk into the woods is similarly solitary, though far more pleasant, as “the double shadow fell over the road and it was cool and fir-smelling and you could hear the wind hissing through the deep needled groves” (41). These characters’ differing perceptions of the wilderness are undeniably shaped by their intentions in venturing into the woods: Young Goodman Brown has gone specifically to meet the Devil, while Gary is set to enjoy a leisurely afternoon of fishing when the Devil takes him by surprise. Brown ventures out from his Puritan village and Gary from his family’s isolated farm house; Brown heads to the forest at night, while Gary goes under the light of a bright summer sun. But regardless of these differences, danger waits in the woods, a place away from “civilization,” a wilderness in which all bets are off. 

Trisha McFarland in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) finds herself even more fundamentally lost than either Young Goodman Brown or Gary. While Brown and Gary may lose sight of themselves and have their understanding of the world around them shaken, when Trisha wanders off the trail while hiking with her mom and brother to go take a pee and gets lost, she cannot find her way back, instead wandering further into the wilderness. In “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Man in the Black Suit” the Gothic wilderness is largely symbolic—it is dangerous, it is outside the characters’ frame of daily experience, but they can navigate it. If they are able to elude the dangers they face, they can find their way home. This is not the case for Trisha, who as a result ends up developing a much more intimate understanding of and connection with both the gifts and the horrors of the wilderness as she determines which wild foods are safe to eat and where it is safe to sleep, all while trying to elude the creature that follows her and watches her from the shadows. Trisha’s Walkman and the live call of the Red Sox games she is able to tune into with it are her remaining tie to civilization, and one that tethers her to the real world beyond the forest and keeps her hope alive. 

In each of these three cases, the characters project and bestow meaning on the wilderness they encounter, whether in connecting it with their own perceptions and experiences or identifying particular points of navigation. When Young Goodman Brown arrives at the witch meeting in the heart of the forest, he sees “a rock, bearing some rude, natural resemblance to either an altar or a pulpit, and surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting” (60), viewing what he sees her through his established frame of religious reference. Gary knows not to go any further into the woods than the place where the Castle Stream splits (39-40), and even in the extremity of her physical distress, Tricia mentally marks out one section of her evening’s camp as “Tricia’s Pukin’ Place” (124), establishing what order she can, even when the world and her own body prove uncontrollable. Separated from civilization and doubting both themselves and their perceptions, Brown, Gary, and Trisha filter their experience of the wilderness through spatial awareness and characterization as a way of making sense of their nightmares. 

(Pet Sematary is another King novel in which the Gothic wilderness and characters’ navigation of it are of central importance, but that’s a journey all its own that we’ll return to later). 

While sometimes it’s the journey and other times it’s the destination that is significant in charting literary cartography, in these stories, it is instead the unfixed state of the characters that is the most profound. They are lost in the wilderness, whether literally or metaphorically, and must overtly position themselves within and navigate these dangerous spaces to find their way home and back to themselves. 

[Page numbers are from the Scribner 1999 hardcover of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the Pocket Books paperback edition of Everything’s Eventual (“The Man in the Black Suit”), and Plume’s 1996 American Gothic Tales collection (“Young Goodman Brown”)]