As I mentioned in last week’s post, this summer is all about writing my book and what I’ll be sharing here in the coming weeks will be brief selections from that work in progress. Last week, my writing focused on literary cartography and maps of King’s Maine, including the map of the eclipse that accompanies Dolores Claiborne (1992) and Gerald’s Game (1993), maps of Derry in Andy Muschietti’s IT, Chapter 1 (2017), reader-created maps, and more. One of the maps I especially enjoyed diving back into was Glenn Chadbourne’s map of Jersualem’s Lot that is included in the 2016 Cemetery Dance deluxe special edition of ‘Salem’s Lot, which you can check out in some of the preview images for the book here.

Here’s some of the work I did with that beautiful map:

Chadbourne’s map of Jerusalem’s Lot builds on King’s description early in the novel: Brock Street runs from left to right across the map, clearly bisecting the top and bottom halves, while a number of geographic features are clearly identifiable and aligned with King’s description, including the Royal River on the righthand side of the map. While King’s map of Maine included in Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game is similar in design to that of a standard atlas, Chadbourne’s map is artistically rendered, privileging artistic representations of key features and locations rather than textual identification. The peaks and windows of the Marsten House are darkly shadowed and loom ominously over the town from the northwest area of the map, sketched against a backdrop of skeletal trees. A cluster of buildings in the map’s center denotes the downtown area of Jerusalem’s Lot, which includes a gazebo and flagpole. The spires of a church rise in the northeast section of the map and Griffen Farms appears in the southeast, featuring the barn, farmhouse, and fields. While manmade details, like the houses, school, and a baseball field feature significantly in the map, Chadbourne renders the natural features of the land in similar detail, with dark trees encroaching upon the northeast and southwest corners, while fields, grass, and forests are textually detailed. Chadbourne’s thoughtful rendering of the land itself echoes King’s description later in the novel that “The land is granite-bodied and covered with a thin, easily ruptured skin of topsoil” (224), simultaneously nourishing and unforgiving, an uneasy synthesis that is mirrored in the realization that “at that moment of hating the land and the soft suck of gravity that holds you to it, you also love it and understand how it knows darkness, and has always known it. The land has got you” (225). Chadbourne’s also illustrations blur the lines between manmade and nature, with the deteriorating road that passes out through the Bends towards Dell’s Tavern more darkly shadowed, echoing the neglect of this place and its people. Chadbourne includes directional compasses in the upper-right and lower-left corners of the map, incorporating objective cartographic features, aligning with the overview that King provides, but it is his artistic details that effectively capture D.H. Lawrence’s “spirit of place” (qtd. in Tally 81). King ends his introductory description of Jerusalem’s Lot on an optimistic note, but Chadbourne’s map of the town captures the darkness that lies beneath the surface, including deep shadows that can hide a wealth of secrets.

As Chadbourne’s map and King’s descriptions highlight, there is more in Jerusalem’s Lot than meets the eye. As King writes, “The town is an accumulation of three parts which, in sum, are greater than its sections. The town is the people who live there, the buildings which they have erected to den or do business in, and it is the land” (224). All of these elements coalesce to make Jerusalem’s Lot the place it is and invite in the human and supernatural horrors that descend. “The Lot” sections of ’Salem’s Lot detail the private lives and secrets of its residents, including the terror and violence that happens beyond closed doors. Much like the line of darkness that signals the path of the eclipse in the maps from Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game, Chadbourne’s map of Jerusalem’s Lot is simultaneously cartographic and symbolic, depicting a clear and defined sense of place while their significance remains opaque. Reflecting on his inspiration for the novel, King says ’Salem’s Lot is “a book about vampires; it’s also a book about all of those silent houses, all those drawn shades, all those people who are no longer what they seem” (qtd. in Winter 41). The truth beneath the façade is symbolically presented in Chadbourne’s map: readers can see the Marsten House, getting a clear look at its location, its spatial alignment with the rest of the town, and even details of the edifice itself, like its front door, windows, and chimneys. But that representation does not reveal the dark story of Hubie Marsten, young Ben Mears’ terrifying experience within the house, or the ominous feeling Mears and others have of the house watching over them all. We can see these places, but not the horrors that play out within them or the history that has been absorbed into the soil itself. Both King’s descriptions and Chadbourne’s map balance the seen and the unseen, revealing and concealing as readers consider the geography, streets, houses, and people of Jerusalem’s Lot.

It has been a lot of fun to return to and dig into these maps of King’s Maine! This week, I’m presenting on King’s island settings in a conference on the coastal Gothic, and I’ll share some of that work with you all next week. Next up on the writing agenda: literary tourism!

[‘Salem’s Lot page numbers are from the Doubleday hardcover edition. Other quoted material from Douglas Winter’s Stephen King: The Art of Darkness (1986) and Robert J. Tally Jr.’s Spatiality (2013)].