While the streets and landmarks of a town establish its concrete sense of geography, there are a range of less tangible elements that contribute to a sense of place, including history, traditions, and the people who live there. One of the (in)famous families of Castle Rock that shows up throughout King’s stories set in that small town are the Merrills, including Ace and his uncle Reginald, who is better known as “Pop.” While neither of these men are civic leaders or even respected citizens, they—and their influence—are just as much a part of Castle Rock as the gazebo, the drugstore, or the local high school. 

Ace Merrill casts a long and terrifying shadow in The Body (in Different Seasons, 1982) with Gordie and his friends well aware of the threat posed by Ace and his gang of tough guys, which includes Vern and Chris’s older brothers (though Ace is their undisputed leader). When Gordie, Chris, Vern, and Teddy hold off the older boys and keep them from Ray Brower’s body, they know it’s just a matter of time before the consequences of their actions catch up with them, with beatings and broken bones. 

The Body circles back to Ace in the novella’s final pages, with now-grown Gordie recounting how he came across Ace again years later on a trip back to Castle Rock: “His hair was mowed into a crewcut and he’d gotten fat. The sharp, handsome features I remembered were buried in an avalanche of flesh … There was no sign of recognition on the face of this thirty-two-year-old man who had broken my nose in another dimension of time” (433). Gordie watches as Ace makes his way from the mill parking lot to the Mellow Tiger down the street, imagining “the welcoming shouts of the other regulars as he closed the door and placed his large ass on the same stool which had probably held him up for at least three hours every day of his life—except Sundays—since he was twenty-one” (433). In Gordie’s childhood, Ace had been terrifying, able to wield power over the younger kids and doing so through violence, cruelty, and abuse, but in this later glimpse, he has become contained, neutralized. He is an aging monster who has lost his power, still stuck in Castle Rock and the idea of who he used to be long after Gordie has grown and changed, built a life for himself beyond his small hometown. But it’s never a good idea to sleep on Ace Merrill: his power may be diminished, but it’s a pretty good bet that the propensity for cruelty and violence remains, just waiting for an opportunity. 

And this underhandedness seems to run in the family. We don’t get to meet many of the Merrills in King’s Castle Rock stories, but Ace’s uncle, Reginald Marion “Pop” Merrill takes center stage in the novella The Sun Dog (in Four Past Midnight, 1990). Pop is the shifty proprietor of Castle Rock’s Emporium Galorium, a junk shop that cashes in on rooking the tourists who come through town with often-suspect “antiques.” When Kevin Devlin gets a decidedly abnormal Polaroid Sun 660 for his fifteenth birthday, he is steered Pop’s way by one of his teachers, who tells Kevin about Pop’s “crackerbarrel-philopher act … glasses up on top of the head, wise pronouncements, all of that” (598). Nobody in Castle Rock trusts, respects, or even likes Pop, but he’s definitely the right guy for the job. Pop looks at Kevin’s camera—which spits out picture after picture of a monstrous dog-like creature slowly turning toward the photographer and preparing to attack—and when Kevin decides to destroy the camera, Pop switches Kevin’s out with a clever replacement, with the plan of leveraging the Polaroid Sun’s inexplicable ability into making a quick buck. Both Merrill men are predictable: if violence is an option, that’s the option Ace will always take and when there’s money to be made, that’s the choice Pop will make.. 

Like Ace, Pop has a dark and unsavory power, though his is significantly more subtle than Ace’s, as Pop loans money to the desperate people of Castle Rock for horrifyingly high interest rates, exploiting others’ suffering for his own gain, with a hard heart toward any pleas for sympathy. Pop has terrifying layers that he usually keeps concealed, though a glimpse of his true self emerges as the final showdown nears and a flash of “Merrill the animal with his wind up” (705) rises to the surface. As King writes, Pop’s real face was not that of “Pop the folksy crackerbarrel philosopher or even Pop the sharp trader, but something like the spirit of the man. In that moment of being totally there, Pop looked like a rogue dog himself, a stray who has gone feral and now pauses amid a midnight henhouse slaughter, raggedy ears up, head cocked, bloodstreaked teeth showing a little” (705, emphasis original). Pop is a formidable adversary and largely inflexible, committed as he is to his personal philosophy of getting all he can and keeping it, but the influence of the Polaroid Sun and its dog-like monster begin to wear him away, taking control of his mind and body to force him to keep taking pictures, even when he believes he is walking to the drugstore for pipe tobacco or fixing a busted cuckoo clock. 

Hulu’s Castle Rock (2018-2019) provides new versions of Ace and Pop Merrill. Ace Merrill (played by Paul Sparks) remains shifty and exploitative, as he attempts to blackmail Annie Wilkes (Lizzy Caplan). While there isn’t a lot of depth or subtlety to Ace’s characterization, he becomes wholly monstrous after he is killed and becomes resurrected as one of the creatures attempting to colonize both Castle Rock and Jerusalem’s Lot. The blurred liminal spaces between the human and the monstrous, as well as Ace’s fundamental transition from human to monster provide an interesting angle on this memorable character. Pop Merrill is brilliantly played by Tim Robbins, in a storyline that invests Pop with a complex backstory and a humanity that is not evident in The Sun Dog. Pop doesn’t become a “good” guy in Castle Rock, exactly, and his reputation in Castle Rock is still suspect, but there’s a lot more going on with him than wanting to make a quick buck. He’s fighting cancer and is a man who is haunted by the mistakes of his past. He is a surrogate father to his adopted nephews Ace and Chris (Matthew Allan), as well as two adopted Somalian refugee children, Nadia (Yusra Warsama) and Abdi (Barkhad Abdi) (all now grown) and in the end, he is willing to sacrifice himself for those he loves and a chance to atone for his sins. This expanded characterization for Pop runs counter to King’s descriptions in The Sun Dog, but almost suggests who Pop could have been in an adjacent timeline, an alternate path his life might have taken and the man he could have become.

The Merrills are familiar faces in Castle Rock and while they are far from one the town’s “first families,” they are a known entity and wield significant power, a generational influence that stretches from Ace’s adolescent violence to Pop’s exploitation. They are part and parcel of Castle Rock, a personified reminder of the bad things that happen here and the dark possibilities that lurk beneath the surface. 

[Page numbers from Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight are both from the Signet paperback editions of these books.]