No consideration of King’s Castle Rock would be complete without the Hulu series Castle Rock (2018-2019), which uses King’s fictional town and its dark history as a foundation, while creating new characters and telling new stories. 

Unlike Chapelwaite (Epix, 2021), which I dug into here as a first-time viewer, I know Hulu’s Castle Rock well. I’ve seen the series a few times and have presented a couple of conference papers on it. I have written about it elsewhere, with my book chapter “Coming Home to Horror: Stephen King’s Derry and Castle Rock” in the edited collection Dark Forces at Work: Essays on Social Dynamics and Cinematic Horrors (2019) and I have further plans in the works for collaborative scholarship on the series in the not-so-distant future. I love Castle Rock and full disclosure: I LOVE the Kid (played by Bill Skarsgård). 

As I return to the series now, I’m excited to get back to those familiar places and faces, but in keeping with the theme of “Exploring King’s Maine,” I will also be paying particularly close attention to the literary geography and spatial experience of the series. 

One element of engaging with literary and fictional geographies can include tourism and last fall, when I traveled to Maine, one of my stops along the way was in Orange, Massachusetts, where Castle Rock was filmed. I met up with my dear friend, colleague, and Castle Rock enthusiast Jenny and we walked those Castle Rock streets together, an experience that I’m sure will provide me with a different perspective in rewatching the series now.  

In some ways, there wasn’t much to see in Orange: it’s a pretty standard small-ish town, with a river (Millers River), a park, and an old-school downtown area with looming brick buildings. The population of Orange in the 2020 census was just over 7,500 people. There are some vestiges of Castle Rock remaining, like the “Entering Castle Rock” sign in one downtown window, the local pizza factory sign that still reads “Castle Rock Pizza,” and the faded Schlitz mural on the side of the building that represented the series’ Mellow Tiger bar, as well as recognizable landmarks like the bridge, the white-spired church, the local cemetery, and Ruth and Molly’s houses, but residents of Orange certainly haven’t made a cottage industry of their town’s appearance in the series. There was one local store that had previously mentioned series-related merchandise on their social media pages but on the day we visited, they were closed. 

But while Orange is arguably just another small town that you could drive through without noticing anything out of the ordinary, it was a thrill to be there, to share some of the same places the characters of the series occupied and follow in their footsteps. There’s a way in which these experiences blur the lines between fiction and reality, allowing us to breathe the air of a place that previously existed in imagination alone. On the dedication page of IT (1986), King writes that “fiction is the truth inside the lie” and being in Orange was like inhabiting that liminal space where the truth and the lie become one, where fiction bleeds into reality. 
This will be my first time returning to Castle Rock since visiting Orange. I wonder how the familiarity of those places will layer now and how my own viewing experience will take on new dimensions, bringing the well-known horror home to my heart in new ways.