King’s Castle Rock is a distinctively Gothic locale: layers of secrets, a dark history that resonates throughout the present, and always in a dual process of death and return. So many of the Castle Rock stories note the town’s decline, like the previously-discussed “It Grows on You” (originally published in 1973, but revised for the 1993 collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes). But while Castle Rock may perennially be down, it never actually seems to be out. 

Needful Things (1991) serves as an interesting pivot-point between what could be distinguished as “old” Castle Rock and “new” Castle Rock. Announcing itself as “the last Castle Rock story,” in Needful Things, the literal devil comes to town, as Leland Gaunt strikes deals with the townspeople. Needful Things highlights the interconnection of place and the people who make that place what it is, as King tells their intimate stories and the dark deeds they commit against one another to secure their deepest desires. These vignettes and their ability to establish a strong sense of place resonates through much of King’s fiction, with this ‘Salem’s Lot (1975), IT (1986), The Tommyknockers (1987), and Under the Dome (2009) similarly showing readers the dark hearts of Jerusalem’s Lot, Derry, Haven, and Chester’s Mill, respectively. 

Castle Rock is singular, but so familiar. As the opening pages of Needful Things tell readers, “You’ve been here before” (1). We have—and we’ll be here again. Castle Rock is a ruin in the final pages of Needful Things, with Alan Pangborn saying “Whatever went on in Castle Rock is over” (684), as he leaves the cursed town in the rearview and heads toward a new future. But Castle Rock can’t be kept down. 

There are a couple of different ways to read the town’s persistence: it could be a testament to the hearty stubbornness of its people, a resilient refusal to be beaten even when the odds are stacked against them (like when the devil comes to town). Or from a darker perspective, we can read Castle Rock as a horror that just won’t die, like an unbeatable monster or a slasher that keeps rising from the dead to come back for sequel after sequel. 

A few decades after Needful Things, King took readers back to Castle Rock, in what we could think of as the “new” Castle Rock cycle, which includes stories in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015), Elevation (2018), and the Gwendy trilogy, where King collaborated with Richard Chizmar on the first and third books, Gwendy’s Button Box (2017) and Gwendy’s Final Task (2022) (Chizmar is the sole author of the second book,  2019’s Gwendy’s Magic Feather). Hulu’s Castle Rock (2018-2019) series also draws on King’s expanded canon to explore contemporary Castle Rock. These new variations of King’s iconic town give readers the opportunity to not just return and walk those familiar streets, but contend with the history, echoes, and afterlives of old Castle Rock.