While official cartographic maps of Derry will never tell the whole story—they don’t mark the secret places where the Losers Club finds safety or the horrors no one lives to tell about—they can be a powerful tool in navigating and potentially even surviving Derry itself. In Andy Muschietti’s IT Chapter One (2017), for example, it is the combination of Ben’s map of old Derry and the sewer map Bill filched from his dad that reveal some of Pennywise’s secrets and give them the knowledge they need to fight against It. 

As with the maps of King’s Maine in general, several artists and fans have created their own maps of Derry inspired by King’s novels, film adaptations, or a combination of the two. These attempts to map the streets of Derry give us an opportunity to explore King’s city, as well as consider what each one’s design reveals about its intended audience, purpose, and engagement with the text(s). Through their chosen design, level of details, textual information (or lack thereof), and the sites they chose to include or exclude, we can understand Derry a little differently through each of these maps.

Beginning with the most mass-produced of the maps we’ll look at today, Spirit Halloween has a merchandising tie-in sign for IT Chapter Two (2019). The sign features a detailed, sepia-toned map of Derry, with two map keys and a silhouette of Pennywise below. The style and visual details echo the map the Losers use in the film, tying it to their experience and that particular representation. This map is also firmly invested in that world, showing signs of the Losers’ practical use through the blood spatter imagery in the upper-left corner and around the figure of Pennywise. The characteristic of this map that is the most notable and indicative of practical use, however, is the doubled navigation key: while the first, more traditional key identifies public landmarks like parks, the elementary school, and the Paul Bunyan statue, the second handwritten key provides an additional layer of spatial significance, by incorporating sites that are important to the Losers themselves, including several of their homes, the House on Neibolt Street, and the sewer opening where Georgie was killed. While there are some historical notations—including the location of the Kitchener Ironworks and the site of the Black Spot—the focus is largely on contemporary significance and usefulness for the Losers themselves. This palimpsest effect is further amplified through the inclusion of locations that held no meaning for them as children but become important when they reunite as adults, like the Jade of the Orient restaurant and Secondhand Rose, where Bill rediscovers Silver. This layering of imagery and complementary texts highlights the distinctions between the “official” Derry and the “real” Derry, while also incorporating how the Losers’ subjective experiences of Derry are different as children and as adults. 

Dreamforger Studios’ map of Derry similarly keeps the Losers Club and their active use of the presented map at the forefront, with its “For the Use of Losers Only” admonition across the top edge of the map. A contemporary, detailed representation of Derry’s streets is less important in this map, though the main thoroughfares are clearly marked, as well as landmarks like the Paul Bunyan statue. Inset panels identify sites of historical violence in Derry, like the Kitchener Ironworks explosion and the massacre of the Bradley Gang, bringing past and present together in the Losers’ spatial experience of Derry. This sense of time and interconnection is further emphasized by the handwritten timeline in the lower center portion of the map, part of the “newer notes made by the adult Mike Hanlon when he realized IT had returned.” This map also includes handwritten notes of places significant to the Losers, including their homes and the clubhouse in the Barrens. The map’s design is beautiful, with details that indicate both the original map’s age (including coloration, creases, and weathering), as well as those that reflect the Losers’ active, practical use of it. In addition to the layers of text and meaning provided by the original map, the Losers’ additions, and Mike’s own annotations, this map also draws together multiple versions of IT, including King’s 1986 novel and the television and film adaptations, providing the opportunity to consider not just Derry itself but how the town has been engaged with and reimagined throughout multiple adaptation processes, including both those elements they each share and those that are unique to a particular version and vision of Derry. 

Finally, this fan-made map of Derry, featured on Reddit and the Stephen King Wiki, extends the scope of this mapping beyond IT to include key sites from Insomnia (1994), “Fair Extension” (novella included in 2010’s Full Dark, No Stars), and other Derry-based horrors. As with the previously-discussed maps, there are clear distinctions between public sites such as the library and the Paul Bunyan statue, which are marked in red, and the more personal locations, like individual characters’ homes, which are marked in gray. In addition to situating Derry more firmly within King’s larger canon beyond IT, this map also offers a more expansive spatial scope than some of the others, with arrows pointing off-map to denote the locations of places like Derry Home Hospital and the Hanlons’ and Bowers’ farms, clearly contextualizing Derry within King’s larger Maine landscape. The art of this map is less elaborate than the other two considered here, but the clear text and bright colors that denote different locations make it easy to read and navigate. 

Each of these maps provides their readers with a different way of envisioning and navigating Derry, as well as the opportunity to consider the active negotiations of space both by the characters within the text and by those who adapt and reimagine it. These maps each simultaneously present and question the efficacy of “official” maps of Derry, drawing our attention to what doesn’t get depicted and the secrets that get buried, revealing the deeper meanings of each map and bringing us closer to the truth of Derry’s horrors.