After spending so much time in recent weeks with King’s Little Tall Island, soaking in the details of that fictional geography, I decided to try my hand at literary cartography again. I have based my map on details provided in Dolores Claiborne (1992), “Home Delivery” (in Nightmares and Dreamscapes, 1993), and the miniseries Storm of the Century (1999). Overall, I feel a good deal less confident and had to take much more creative license in order to create this map than I did with the one for Cujo, where King provides specific road names, directions, and left- and right-hand turns to help orient the reader in that space, even if the awareness of it remains peripheral to the larger conflicts and concerns of the novel. 

With Little Tall Island, I took the general shape and placement within the larger coastal Maine landscape from the map of the eclipse featured in the early pages of Dolores Claiborne. The placement of a few elements was pretty straightforward: the dock for the Island Princess and the larger, working docks would almost certainly be on the mainland side of the island, both for direct transportation and protection from the open ocean, and the Harborside Hotel (where many Little Tall Islanders and vacationers gathered to watch the eclipse from the roof deck) would be near the harbor. 

King describes Dolores’s house as being on East Lane, near East Head, and while Dolores’s house is farther from the main settlement of Little Tall Island, as she plans Joe’s murder, she does worry that “we still had three neighbors along that stretch of East Lane—the Carons, the Langills, and the Jolanders” (198). When Dolores is thinking through her alibi, she plans to tell people that after she and Joe fought, she walked to Russian Meadow to watch the eclipse on her own. The search for Joe begins in Highgate Woods and works toward the meadow, coming closer to the well. Dolores recalls walking down the “rickety stairs” (361) on East Head to think things over after Vera’s death and the call from her money manager, who tells Dolores that she has inherited Vera’s fortune. There are few details about the location of Vera’s house, but given that she liked the ocean breeze to dry her sheets (regardless of the season), I have placed her house on the eastern, ocean-facing side of the island. 

Being a relatively small island, it makes sense for the Main Street to run directly through the center of the island and this is where several key businesses are located like Anderson’s Market (Storm of the Century), the Little Tall Police Station, the greenfront where Dolores buys Joe’s last bottle of Scotch, and the Methodist Church mentioned in “Home Delivery,” which is home to one of Little Tall’s two graveyards. I have put the suggestions of cross-streets on Main, where the homes of the other Little Tall Islanders are located, though we don’t get much information on these aside from glimpses of individual homes in Storm of the Century (i.e. Martha Clarendon’s, the Andersons’). In Storm of the Century, many of the islanders gather together at the community center, where they step outside to watch the docks and the lighthouse claimed by the wind and waves, so I have situated those close together. 

One element that I struggled with representing was elevation: Dolores mentions hills and rises at her end of the island, like when people drive by her house in the middle of the night in an attempt to frighten her following Vera’s death, and “I thought they’d use the wide spot at the bottom of our hill to turn around, and they did” (340). As an outer island, Little Tall is likely to be rocky and craggy, with some variation in the elevation throughout the island, though I did not attempt to mark this on the map itself, focusing instead on key locations and geographic layout. 

Overall, mapping Little Tall Island was much more challenging than mapping Cujo, with many more pieces to consider and multiple texts to synthesize and overlap, and in some cases, I found myself simply giving it my best guess based on Dolores’s descriptions and the visual representation of Storm of the Century. At best, it’s a first attempt, the foundational layer of palimpsest that will be added to and refined through further reading and another rewatch of Storm of the Century, but the broad strokes provide us with some sense of how the island might be laid out, the streets and paths that Little Tall Islanders’ lives traverse. 

[Page numbers are from Signet paperback edition of Dolores Claiborne]