While many of King’s fictional places—like Derry, Castle Rock, and Jerusalem’s Lot—have clear geographical markers to situate them and put them in close proximity to real-life Maine locations, the Outer Islands are a world all their own. There are still clues that allow the reader to orient themselves within the real world, such as familiar place names across the water, but King’s fictional islands like Goat Island (“The Reach”), Gennesault Island (“Home Delivery”), and LIttle Tall Island (Dolores Claiborne, Storm of the Century) feel more removed from that larger landscape, a place where just about anything can happen. 

The islands’ geographic isolation is fundamental in this sense of separation: the real world is there across the expanse of water and there is regular back and forthing between the two, with islanders taking the ferry across to the mainland for school, work, shopping, and medical care, among other things. In “The Reach,” Stella Flanders reflects on that expanse of water, thinking of the definition “any fisherman knew by rote: a Reach is a body of water between two bodies of land, a body of water which is open at either end” (549, emphasis original). And while this is objectively true, there’s a lot more to this separation than can be articulated with conventional measurements. Life on the islands is different, the people are more self-sufficient than their mainland counterparts, and they’re good at keeping secrets, both their own and those of their fellow islanders. The mainland might be visible from the islands’ shores, but it’s a whole other world. 

This is particularly evident in situations where the islands are cut off from the mainland and become even more insular and self-sustaining communities than they usually are, like in Storm of the Century and “Home Delivery.” In Storm of the Century, it is impossible for the people of Little Tall Island to escape to or seek help from the mainland, as they are cut off by the intersection of two major winter storms that makes the water between the two impassable. In “Home Delivery,” when the dead begin to rise, it may be possible to get to the mainland, but there’s absolutely no reason to do so, and with “the island cut off—thankfully cut off, in the opinion of the residents—from the rest of the world, old ways had reasserted themselves with unspoken but inarguable force” (397-8). Gennesault Island (Jenny Island to locals) is a heck of a lot safer than the outside world, and Jenny has only one cemetery. 

With this isolation, the islanders are left on their own to deal with supernatural threats, forced to make difficult decisions, live with the consequences, and keep those secrets. In Storm of the Century, the Devil comes with the storm, striking a hard bargain with the islanders: he will let them live, but only if they give him one of their children. There is no escaping the Devil’s dark bargain and under their isolated, desperate circumstances, the residents of Little Tall agree, with families participating in a lottery to determine whose child will be lost. The isolation and insular nature of islanders are both a blessing and a curse here: they are able to pull together to do what needs to be done, though that is little comfort to Mike Anderson, whose son Ralphie is the chosen child. In the process of coming to this decision, the islanders’ true natures become apparent as well, with all social niceties laid aside as they do what they feel they need to do to survive. 

Similarly, in “Home Delivery,” Maddie Pace is an expectant mother and a young widow, whose husband died at sea. When the dead begin to rise, the men of Jenny Island mount a defense around the island’s only cemetery, taking care of the newly-risen dead with guns, chainsaws, and fire, even when those risen dead are their own lost loved ones. Similarly, when one of the island’s elderly residents, Frank Daggett, feels a fatal heart attack coming on, he holds his fellow island men accountable for making sure he does not rise again, demanding that three of them shoot him before the heart attack kills him. While they are horrified at the necessity of this action, they are able to follow through, and “All three of them fired, and both Cal Partridge and Bob Daggett fainted, but Frank never did try to get up and walk” (410). The men come together to support one another through these necessary horrors in destroying both the living and the dead. Maddie herself proves similarly capable of tackling these hard tasks and even better at keeping the secrets, never telling anyone that her dead husband Jack returned or what she had to do to protect herself and her unborn baby. 

In “The Reach,” there is a similar isolation, though this one is individualized rather than collective, with Stella Flanders, an elderly woman who has never seen any reason to leave Goat Island. As she imagines telling her grandchildren, “I have always had everything I wanted right here on Goat” (552, emphasis original) and if she ever yearned for any of the experiences or conveniences of the mainland, “I wanted this more … This is my place, and I love it” (555, emphasis original). In “The Reach,” Stella’s most profound experience of the supernatural comes when she finally (quite literally) steps off of the island, deciding to walk across the frozen ice that separates Goat Island from the mainland. Her dead husband Bill has been calling to her for months, inviting her to make the crossing, and when she finally sets out into the snow and the darkness of the Reach, she finds not only Bill but all her other friends and fellow islanders who have died before her. Stella does make it to the mainland, where her frozen body is found, but her real destination is her reunion with those lost loved ones and her passage into whatever lies beyond, which she finds on the Reach. 

Islanders prove themselves capable of protecting their own and exacting their own kind of vigilante justice as needed. Dolores Claiborne takes advantage of the momentary darkness of the total eclipse to lure her husband Joe St. George to his death in a disused well as retribution for his sexual abuse of their daughter Selena, and while Dolores speculates that “Everybody on Little Tall” (22) knows she killed him, what they don’t know is why. In “The Reach,” there is a similar kind of vigilante justice enacted, when a man hired to help some families with labor on the island begins molesting some of the island’s young girls. A group of the island’s men go to talk to him right around the time he has a bad accident, falling over the edge of Slyder’s Point and “tumbling all the way to the bottom. His neck was broken and his head was bashed in” (560, emphasis original). The man is memorialized, buried in the local cemetery, and never spoken of again. The islanders take care of their business and of one another. 

King’s Outer Islands are liminal spaces—of the real world and yet undeniably separate, places where the boundaries between the realistic and the supernatural are often thin and permeable. The threats they face may be ghosts and monsters or the all too real threats of domestic and sexual abuse, but the islanders handle them together, and what happens on the island stays on the island. 

[Page numbers for “The Reach” are from the Signet paperback edition of Skeleton Crew and page numbers for “Home Delivery” are from the Viking hardcover edition of Nightmares & Dreamscapes]