Castle Rock is at the heart of Stephen King’s short story “Nona” (in the 1985 Skeleton Crew collection), even though the nameless narrator physically spends very little time there within the scope of the story. Castle Rock is the end-goal of his and Nona’s bloody trek through the cold Maine night and as they make their way there, Castle Rock looms large in his (mostly bad) memories. 

The narrator left Castle Rock behind when he went to college on a full-ride scholarship, though in some ways, the Rock has never left him. His ties to Castle Rock are traumatic, including the death of his parents and older brother (in Harlow, the next town over), his transactional relationship with his foster family, and his beating by Ace Merrill when Ace found out the narrator was flirting with Ace’s girlfriend. There’s no nostalgia or longing in the narrator’s recollections and while Castle Rock is unquestionably “home” for him, it’s not one that promises warmth, comfort, or safety. 

The story is written as a confession, the imprisoned narrator’s recollections—and possibly defense—in the aftermath of his and Nona’s violent spree, which includes his violent beating of a trucker at a roadside diner and the murder of two motorists they encounter while hitchhiking, a cop who pulls them over, and an electric company employee who stands between them and their final destination. 

While the narrator begins and ends his confession with the question “Do you love?” (371, 404, emphasis original), that’s a complicated question. The narrator similarly bookends the story with his response to this question: “Yes, I love … And true love will never die” (404). He is certainly driven on (and home to Castle Rock) by overwhelming emotion and desire, though he reflects that “I think—no, I’m sure—that violence was the real motive force” (386). His desire for Nona is pragmatic and alien, and he likens her to a carnivorous plant, inexorably attaching herself to, influencing, and then consuming him. But love is still a powerful part of it, with the narrator reflecting on “Why the fascination remains in spite of the remorse and the revulsion. Why I hate her. Why I fear here. And why even now I still love her” (386-7). 

The narrator has had little love in his life: he was three when his family died, his foster family saw him as a source of income and free labor, and his relationships with women (both in his desire for Ace’s girlfriend Betsy Malenfant and at college) are incomplete, leaving him isolated and ineffectual, without any substantive connections with others. He has friends who try to help him, but none of them try all that hard. When he returns to Castle Rock, he comes back to the scene of some of his most painful memories and his final destination is the cemetery where his parents are buried. 

In the end, the narrator’s reliability is far from certain. While his journey and the trail of brutalized bodies he left in his wake are undeniably real, we can’t be so sure about Nona. In the final paragraphs of the narrator’s confession, he tells us “They said I was alone. I was alone when they found me, almost frozen to death in that graveyard … But that only means she left, you can see that. Any fool could. But I’m glad she got away. Truly I am. But you must realize she was with me all the time, every step of the way” (404). The narrator’s reliability is called even further into question through his accounts of the rats: the rats that his fellow classmates transformed into during a college dance, the rat that lurks beneath Nona’s seductive facade, the rats that haunt his dreams and scurry behind the walls of his prison cell (evoking H.P. Lovecraft’s iconic 1924 story “The Rats in the Walls”). 

“Nona” is a nightmare, though what kind of nightmare remains up for some debate: a nightmare of violence, delusion, and mental illness? A nightmare of cosmic and monstrous proportions, in which rats lurk behind the thin veil of reality? Some uneasy combination of the two? The unnamed narrator is in no state to tell us, so we sit with the nightmare on our own. And just like “true love will never die” (404), the darkness that lurks in the heart of Castle Rock remains. 

[Page numbers are from the Signet paperback edition of Skeleton Crew]. 

(* I’m taking a brief break over the next couple of weeks before the new academic year gets underway, but we’ll resume our adventures through Stephen King’s Maine on Tuesday, August 20th. And we’re not quite done with those rats yet!)