Stephen King’s Maine is a fascinating example of literary geography, where fiction and place come together to create rich and immersive worlds. Imaginative places and literary geography can be grounded in the real world, entirely fictional, or somewhere in the middle, and that liminal space in the middle is where King’s Maine resides. His fictional towns of Castle Rock, Derry, Haven, and others are clearly situated in relationship to and share space in the same world as real places like Bangor and Bridgton.  

This combination of reality and fiction simultaneously ground readers within the real world, making the horrors King’s characters face feel intimate and immediate, while also drawing us out of that established frame of reference, which can be either somewhat comforting (we can tell ourselves “it’s not real”) or disorient us even further, knocking us off balance because we don’t know what to expect in this uncanny world that feels both familiar and unknown. In The Role of Place in Literature, Leonard Lutwack provides another perspective on the liminality of real and imaginary places, arguing that “a good part of the attraction of realistic writing consists in the pleasure of recognizing in their verbal form places already familiar to the reader through personal experience and discovering new places whose descriptions carry the authenticity of actual geographical sites” (29). This is where the lines blur, whether we’re reading about places that feel very close to—but not entirely confined by—our reality, or when we take our reading experiences into the real world, visiting places that have inspired King himself, like the famous Paul Bunyan Statue in Bangor. 

As Umberto Eco reflects in The Book of Legendary Lands, “there is an infinity of places that never existed in reality but where many fictional adventures take place. Many of these places are now a part of the collective imagination” (431). For King’s Constant Readers, there’s not just recognition of place in his work, but recognition of one another, as we share our personal reader visions of Castle Rock and reminisce about the horrors of Derry. King’s literary geography doesn’t just serve as a backdrop against which his characters live—and fight for—their lives. With these places, King creates fictional universes that we can pick up a book and return to, immersed in both their familiarity and horror, again and again, returning to towns that can somehow feel like home.