Stephen King’s Maine is a rich and complex landscape, ranging from towns like Jerusalem’s Lot, Haven, and Castle Rock to the wider cityscape of Derry, and the off the beaten path spots like TR-90 and islands like Little Tall. In the stories and novels that call these places home, King provides readers with specific details, like the layout of the streets, historical details both public and clandestine, and the lives and secrets of individual characters. Readers get to know King’s world, its places, and its people intimately, with an almost granular level of familiarity and recognition. 

But (as we’ve previously discussed) King’s literary geography transcends these specific, invented locales, situated in relationship with the highways, byways, and landmarks of Maine in real life, with distances from and trips to places like Bangor, Portland, and Lewiston peppered throughout his descriptions and characters’ journeys. 

Finally, another layer of place is added to the framework of King’s literary geography through each place’s position within what Stanley Wiater, Christopher Golden, and Hank Wagner refer to as the “Stephen King Universe (SKU)” (xv), the intersections and overlappings of King’s stories and worlds with one another. 

In their book The Complete Stephen King Universe: A Guide to the Worlds of Stephen King (published in 2001; updated in 2006), Wiater, Golden, and Wagner open their exploration with a brief example from ’Salem’s Lot (1975), asking “Why would you need to know the current whereabouts of Ben Mears from ’Salem’s Lot? That novel is more than two decades old” (xvi). And it’s even older now at the time of this writing, when ’Salem’s Lot is fifty years old, published a full half a century ago. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t still under constant negotiation, a malleable touchstone in the King universe. As Wiater, Golden, and Wagner explain, “Simply put, ’Salem’s Lot isn’t truly over yet. It exists within the Stephen King Universe, an ever-changing fictional landscape that is constantly being altered because it is all of a piece, for as noted, King has created … an entire multiverse, a fully realized cosmology wherein every story and book is somehow connected to every other story and book by the author” (xvi, emphasis original). 

These layers make King’s literary geography a complex and satisfying territory through which to ramble, charting both the minutiae of individual places and interconnections between them, which span time, place, and even “other worlds than these” (as the young Jake Chambers reminds Roland Deschain in King’s The Gunslinger, the first book of his epic Dark Tower series, a phrase which becomes a recurring mantra throughout the series). And while literary cartography gives us the opportunity to pinpoint these locations, plotting towns on a map and charting the layout of streets and landmarks, King’s universe is always constantly in flux, with new details, connections, and secrets emerging all the time. 

With King’s literary geography, we must balance the specific and the cosmic, charting our course while always resisting the temptation to believe we can ever know all there is to know, and keeping well aware of the fact that there are countless unexplored corners of this universe, all of which are connected by invisible strings that could be pulled taut with King’s next story or novel. We may be intrepid and conscientious travelers, making notes and tracing paths, but our explorations can never be complete. 

(Wiater, Golden, and Wagner’s The Complete Stephen King Universe is an excellent resource for exploring these places and connections, featuring sections on the Dark Tower series, Derry, Castle Rock, Jerusalem’s Lot (group together with other miscellaneous Maine locations), King’s Bachman books, and parallel realities, with close readings of the stories and novels that build and are set in those places. You can check the book out here.)