Castle Rock, Maine is one of King’s most iconic fictional towns, the setting for novels like The Dead Zone (1979) and Cujo (1981) (which we have discussed in previous posts) and stories like “Uncle Otto’s Truck” (collected in Skeleton Crew, 1985), “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” (also in Skeleton Crew), and “It Grows on You” (collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes, 1993). The town was destroyed in Needful Things (1991), but made a comeback with King and Richard Chizmar’s Gwendy trilogy (2017-2022) and Elevation (2018), as well as the Hulu original series Castle Rock (2018-2019). There are familiar faces and local legends associated with Castle Rock that reappear not just in these Castle Rock-set stories, but across King’s fiction. 

Castle Rock is a fascinating microcosm, because while there is a rich shared history, individuals’ experiences of the town vary significantly, with each story or novel offering readers a new perspective or piece of the puzzle as they attempt to understand this town where a greater-than-average number of bad things happen. In King’s novella The Body (in Different Seasons, 1982), we see Castle Rock—and the larger surrounding landscape—through the eyes of four twelve-year-old boys. 

When narrator Gordie Lachance and his friends Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp, and Vern Tessio set out to find the body of Ray Brower, they’re looking for adventure and maybe a little bit of fame, but the heart of their journey lies in their friendship and growing awareness of their own mortality. Much like the children in IT (1986), these boys are part of Castle Rock, though they often move under the radar of the adults, whether in the private refuge of their treehouse or in the larger community’s blindness to the injustice and violence that punctuate their lives.

The Castle Rock that Gordie, Chris, Teddy, and Vern make their way through is the same Castle Rock that everyone else sees, but in a fundamental way, it also is not: it’s a private, kid-view version of Castle Rock, with secret messages, hidden pathways, and established rules. When Gordie and Chris meet up before being joined by Teddy and Vern, they cut through an alley, “the narrow space between the Blue Point Diner and the Castle Rock drugstore” (324), where Chris shows Gordie his father’s gun, which he has tucked in his pack and brought along. When the boys run, they head “behind the drugstore and the hardware store and the Emporium Galorium, which sold antiques and junk and dime books. We climbed a fence, spiking our palms with splinters, and finally came out on Curran Street … Once around the corner of Curran and Carbine Street, we slowed to a walk so we wouldn’t look suspicious, running in the heat” (326). They are seen and unseen, part of Castle Rock and also skating around its edges. They are mostly able to remain peripheral to the awareness of adults, which is essential because when they are seen by adults, it rarely goes well: Francine Tupper yells at them behind the diner, Milo Pressman yells at them and sics his dog Chopper on them at the town dump, and when Gordie goes to the market to get some food for their trip, he is cheated by George Dussett, who owns the market, and then yelled at by him too when Gordie calls him out for it. 

Castle Rock isn’t a particularly kind or nurturing place for the boys. The town has made up its mind about who they are and what they’re capable of and they are nearly powerless to change this narrative or the course of their lives moving forward. So it is unsurprising that the wilderness offers a sense of freedom for them, even with its range of fears and dangers, like leeches and cats screaming in the night. 

Even as they find themselves far from civilization, as the boys make their way toward Ray Brower’s body, they are navigating by those markers of the outside world. They know that Brower is near the Back Harlow Road and guide themselves by the train tracks, which blur the lines between wilderness and the outside world, as Chris reflects that “Maybe he thought they’d take him out, or maybe he thought he could flag down a train if he had to. But that’s just a freight run now—GS&WM up to Derry and Brownsville—and not many of those anymore. He’d have to’ve walked all the way to Castle Rock to get out” (300). The boys’ experience of that connection between the wilderness and civilization is similarly pronounced, as their subjective mental map as they walk through the woods doesn’t really match up with the objective reality, with Gordie noting in hindsight that “if we had looked on a map” the boys would have seen that by following the tracks “instead of ten miles, we had about sixteen to walk” between the Castle River and the Royal River (397). While they are immersed in the authenticity of their own experiences and perspectives, their understanding of the larger world beyond remains incomplete and flawed. 

The boys’ trip out to Brower’s body is richly detailed, though after they find Brower—and in doing so, endure confrontations with both the older boys and with one another—their return trip is abbreviated, somber, and largely silent. When they leave Brower’s body, Gordie recalls that “We started to almost-trot back the way we had come. We didn’t talk. I don’t know about the others, but I was too busy thinking to talk” (417). Gordie works to process this experience, both as a kid and through the story’s narration years later, from his adult perspective as well, with this internal reflection eliding the return journey. A couple of pages later King writes “We got back to Castle Rock a little past five o’clock on Sunday morning, the day before Labor Day. We had walked all night. Nobody complained, although we all had blisters and were all ravenously hungry” (420). 

While the four of them have been transformed by their experience, Castle Rock remains exactly the same: Gordie is still largely invisible to his parents, Chris’s future still seems fatalistically predetermined, and while they may have been able to stand and hold their own against the bigger boys in the woods, the status quo is violently reasserted when Gordie and his friends are tracked down and beaten in Castle Rock. 

Telling his story as an adult, Gordie sees Castle Rock through a dual lens, with his childhood memories colored by his adult perspective and the passage of time, as well as the loss of his friends. Looking around at the once-familiar landscape, Gordie can still see both, noting for example that a familiar vacant lot from his childhood is “where the offices of the Castle Rock Call stand today” (324) and remarking upon the once empty land that is now a motorcycle track (328). The past and the present mix uneasily together, as Gordie considers this geography, his own place within it, and the man he has become. 

[Page numbers from Signet paperback edition of Different Seasons]