Hey all! This post is longer than the usual. This past week, I had the opportunity to share some of my work on King and literary geography at a conference on the coastal Gothic, hosted by the Haunted Shores Research Group and Edinburgh Napier University. This is the full text of that conference presentation, which looks at King’s island horrors, with a key focus on the short stories “The Reach” and “Home Delivery.”

While Stephen King is best known for his fictional small Maine towns like Derry and Castle Rock, the islands off the coast of Maine have also served as a geographical source of literary inspiration, in the setting for the short stories “The Reach” (collected in Skeleton Crew, 1985) and “Home Delivery,” (collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes, 1993) the novel Dolores Claiborne (1992), and his ABC miniseries screenplay Storm of the Century (1999). 

Geocriticism is central to exploration of King’s places, including his Maine islands and the ocean that surrounds them. Robert Tally Jr. highlights the significance of sensory description in creating a strong sense of place, explaining that “Geocriticism explores, seeks, surveys, digs into, reads, and writes a place; it looks at, listens to, touches, smells, and tastes spaces” (2). Sten Pultz Moslund concurs, focusing on what he terms “the corporeal experience of place, or geographies as sensuous geographies … the production— or the poiesis or presencing—of place in literature through the enduring interconnections between place, language, and bodily sensation” (30, emphasis original). He goes on to argue that:  

Most significantly, the bodily side to the topopoetics in question involves a mode of reading that moves away from the representation of place in literature to a direct presencing of place or sensation of place. The physicality of place in this mode of reading is not something absent to the reader, some passive “out there” that is only textually represented. Place is experienced as present within language and made present by language … It involves an approach to literature and language not as meaning and discourse but as phenomena that are capable of triggering a disorganized intensity of sensory experiences or sensory memories of taste, color, smell, touch, warmth, cold, and so on. (31, emphasis original) 

The significance of the sensory in geocriticism—and particularly the importance of sound—is central to my consideration of King’s stories of his fictional Maine islands, particularly in the short stories “The Reach” and “Home Delivery.” 

King’s “The Reach” (originally published with the title “Do The Dead Sing?”) is set on Goat Island and “Home Delivery” is set on Gennesault Island, with their isolation, residents, and close-knit communities contributing to the strong sense of place evoked by each. These Maine islands are special places: separated from the mainland, they retain a culture and strong sense of community all their own. Stanley Wiater, Christopher Golden, and Hank Wagner address the insularity of King’s island communities in The Complete Stephen King Universe, highlighting “the self-sufficiency and isolation of small-town people in general and island people in particular” (231). While the islanders’ lives may occasionally be difficult, lonely, or disconnected from the rest of the world by the water that separates them from the mainland, that is a trade-off that they are happy to make. As Mike Anderson notes early in Storm of the Century, “Folks from Little Tall send their taxes to Augusta, same as other folks, and we got either a lobster or a loon on our license plates, same as other folks, and we root for the University of Maine’s teams, especially the women’s basketball team, same as other folks […] But we ain’t the same. Life out on the islands is different. We pull together when we have to” (3-4). There is an almost timeless quality to these places and King’s description of them and in many ways, the beauty and singular nature of these islands echo Anne Fuller’s mid-twentieth century description of Maine’s Monhegan Island, whose cliffs serve as “towering ramparts against the ceaseless onslaught of the sea. There on calm, blue days you can know true serenity. And there in a storm you will see the full fury of wind and ocean as mountains of green water range in from the open sea to shatter against the headlands. To witness the almost irresistible power of the seas crashing against these giant barriers is a most humbling experience” (25). 

Echoing Fuller’s description, while King’s islands serve as central settings, the ocean that surrounds them is a complementary yet separate setting, a liminal space that denotes not just geographical difference, but the blurry, watery boundary between the living and the dead. In “The Reach” and “Home Delivery” the ocean carries the voices and echoes of the dead, an acoustic experience that shapes the lives (and deaths) of some of the islands’ residents. While both stories feature the acoustic intrusion of the dead, however, “The Reach” and “Home Delivery” make it clear that while they have been claimed by—and now speak from—the ocean, some deaths are better than others. 

“Home Delivery” is a story of the zombie apocalypse and as everything on the mainland and in the wider world goes to hell, an island seems like the safest possible place to be. Shortly before the beginning of the end of the world, Maddie Pace finds out she is pregnant not long before her husband Jack is swept over the side of the lobster boat on which he is working. Jack is a strong swimmer and while he made it back to the surface, “another heavy swell came, slewing the boat directly into him, and although [Jack’s friend] Dave would say no more, Maddie had been born and brought up an island girl, and she knew: could, in fact, hear the hollow thud as the boat […] smashed its way into her husband’s head” (388, emphasis original). Jack’s body is never recovered and while they bury an empty casket in the Gennesault Island cemetery, the ocean is his true grave. When the dead begin to rise, the descriptions of of what happens at the cemetery blur the lines between earth, air, and water, with “a sound like the wind wailing in the chimney on a gusty night” and the ground shifting like “a big wave rolling into a close cove” (401). But for Maddie, the most significant return comes from the ocean itself, when her husband Jack returns to her, acoustically signaled when “Something had thumped against the window” (405). While Maddie and Jack’s final confrontation takes place on land, in the living room of the house they used to share, Jack has become one with the sea as “he came toward her, leaving black kelpy tracks on the carpet, fingers reaching. He stank of salt and fathoms” (406). 

In “Home Delivery,” the influence of the ocean and the dead is corrupted, a perversion of the human being Jack had been and the love he and Maddie had shared. The voices of the dead that carry across the water are more reassuring in “The Reach,” as lifelong Goat Island resident Stella Flanders sets out on her one and only trip to the mainland. At Stella’s ninety-fifth birthday party, she hears the wind blowing over the ocean and “She thought the wind was calling her name” (547). She begins to see the spirit of her dead husband Bill, first on the island and later, on the frozen expanse of what islanders call “the reach,” the expanse of water between Goat Island and the mainland. On a cold March night, Stella walks away from the shore and into a whiteout, and in that liminal space between Goat Island and the mainland, between life and death, she is reunited with all of the people she has loved and lost. Bill is there, of course, offering her both his arm and his hat when her own blows away, snatched by the driving wind, and when she turns around she sees “the others coming out of the snow that the wind drove across the Reach in the gathering darkness. A cry, half joy, half fear, came from her mouth” (564). She sees old friends, including a fisherman who had gone down with his boat years ago and whose body was never recovered, now “not a mouldering skeleton somewhere on the bottom […] but whole and young” (564). Time and the Reach may have taken their lives, but in the expanse between the island and the mainland, all is reclaimed and restored. Stella smiles at her friends, takes Bill’s hand, and finally crosses the Reach. While the sounds of the water itself are silenced by the ice that has frozen it, the voices of the ocean and of the dead are captured through wind and song. In Stella’s final moments, surrounded by her dead friends and loved ones, “the wind screamed around them, driving its packet of snow, and some kind of song burst from her. It went up into the wind and the wind carried it away. They all sang then, as children will sing in their high, sweet voices as a summer evening draws down to summer night. They sang, and Stella felt herself going to them and with them, finally across the Reach” (565). 

In both of these stories, the ocean that surrounds these islands is a source of aural spectrality and horror. Spectrality is by definition distinctly liminal, with Julian Wolfreys noting that “that which is spectral is neither living nor dead; it is, moreover, neither simply a presence nor an absence; it crosses and recrosses such binary loci, as it does perceptions and conceptions of ‘here’ and ‘there,’ ‘past’ and ‘present,’ ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’” (638). This liminality takes different forms in “Home Delivery” and “The Reach,” which highlight the different ways the ocean influences the lives of the islanders, particularly through death and its afterlives. In “Home Delivery,” loved ones who are lost in the water are corrupted: when Jack comes back to Gennesault Island, it is to kill and feed on Maddie (and by extension, their unborn child). Just as Jack’s soul is absent, he has been robbed of his voice and he pursues Maddie implacably and silently, reduced to grasping hands and gnashing teeth. He is severed from the sounds of the ocean that haunt Maddie, the spectral terror of that “hollow thud” (388) of the boat hull against her husband’s skull, which is carried and echoed in the thud against the window, as the thing that used to be Jack comes home hungry. The aural spectrality of “Home Delivery” is brutal and dehumanized, offering no comfort. 

In contrast, the ghostly voices of “The Reach” are inviting, reassuring. Like Maddie’s Jack, Stella’s dead husband Bill returns to her, but he does so in a ghostly, human form, rather than one grown monstrous through death, decay, and return. He speaks to her with affection and offers an invitation, asking her “Stella […] when you comin cross to the mainland?” (548). Bill’s voice blurs together with that of the wind over the water, which Stella can hear “calling her name” (547). The synthesis of the voices of the dead and the water that separates Goat Island from the mainland culminates in the words and songs of her dead loved ones, who greet and comfort her with reassurances like “It’s all right” (563), “Only a little further” (564), and “it don’t hurt. At least, I never heard so. All that’s before” (565). Stella’s encounters with the dead are reassuring and peaceful, with their voices there to guide her as she makes her final journey. 

In “Home Delivery,” the ocean and its aural spectralities are sources of horror, dehumanizing forces that offer only death and decay. However, in “The Reach,” the water and the spectral phenomena are comforting, an expression of the heart, soul, and love of the dead, rather than the corrupted corporeal body. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren argue that “the twists and turns of haunting manifest as a layering, a palimpsestic thinking together, simultaneously, rather than a thinking against or after” (32). As a result, rather than confining or concluding the process of meaning making, spectrality offers more expansive ways of seeing, reading, and knowing, occupying dynamic liminal spaces. Jack Pace and the dead of Goat Island who greet Stella Flanders (and even Stella herself in the story’s final pages) straddle the line between the world of the living and that of the dead, as a zombie, a cadre of spirits (whether literal or resurrected by Stella’s memory), and an old woman crossing that final threshold. The geographic boundaries between the island and the water are similarly liminal, from the earth of the Gennesault Island cemetery heaving “like a big wave” (401) to the frozen expanse of the Reach between Goat Island and the mainland, as its watery depths become a temporarily solid route. The sound of the water itself also blurs with other acoustic sources, becoming one with the howling of the wind and the voices of the dead. 

Through his descriptions of both land and sea, in his island stories, King draws upon the sensory description privileged by geocriticism as a way of inviting readers into these stories, places, and characters, including the things they hear and the horrors they endure. These islands, their inhabitants, and breakdown of the barriers between the living and dead in “Home Delivery” and “The Reach” cannot be separated from the water which surrounds them and the sounds it carries, whether that is the crash of waves, the thud of a fatal encounter with a boat hull, or the reassuring voices of the dead. The water separates Gennesault and Goat Islands from the mainland, isolating the islanders and leaving them with no choice but to fend for themselves, but that distance also offers (at least temporary) safety, whether from legions of zombies or the fast-paced hustle and bustle of city life that Stella Flanders never feels the need to experience. The water and the sounds which echo across it are a source of both horror and hope and the encounters that Maddie Pace and Stella Flanders have plumb the depths of what it means to be human and what awaits when this life is done. “Home Delivery” and “The Reach” offer two very answers to these questions: when the ocean physically returns that which it has taken, the human body is compromised and destroyed, a site of horror and potentially fatal danger, but when that return is ephemeral and disembodied, it offers peace. Some deaths and returns are definitely better than others: when faced with her zombie husband, Maddie fights violently to protect herself and their unborn child from a fate worse than death, while death is a comforting release for Stella, surrounded and welcomed by those she loves.

[King page numbers from “The Reach” are from the Signet paperback edition of Skeleton Crew; “Home Delivery” from the hardcover Signet edition of Nightmares & Dreamscapes; and Storm of the Century from the screenplay published by Scribner. Other sources include Robert T. Tally Jr.’s Spatiality (Routledge, 2013); Stanley Wiater, Charles Golden, and Hank Wagner’s The Complete Stephen King Universe (Macmillan, 2006); Julian Wolfrey’s entry on “Spectrality” in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (Blackwell, 2013); and Maria del Pilar and Esther Pereen’s “The Spectral Turn” in The Spectralities Reader (Bloomsbury, 2013)].