There is a place in Bangor, Maine where Jack Torrance's ax can be held.
It is a bookstore with a unique type of books, and an endless collection of objects related to those same books.
Its name is Gerald Winters and Son Rare Books, that is, Gerald Winters and Son Rare Books, although it is popularly known as the
souvenir
and novel shop, in as many and as different editions as can be imagined, of its most illustrious neighbor: Stephen King (Portland, 75 years old).
Located at 48 Main Street, the shop has the look of a small, unofficial museum—it can recreate an animal graveyard, or display Georgie Denbrough's bloody raincoat and a collection of locked doors—perhaps King himself it drops from time to time.
Shiloh Temple in Durham, in the State of Maine (United States), is the inspiration for The House of Marsten, inhabited by the vampire Kurt Barlow in "Salem's Lot (The Mystery of Salem's Lot)" (1975), the second novel by Stephen King, later adapted for television.James Rajotte
Yes, King spends part of the year in Bangor.
It is there where his mansion with a door forged in iron —and bats— from the 19th century is located.
At 47 Broadway Street.
But the protagonists of It
, of
A Bag of Bones
, of
Insomnia
, of
The Dreamcatcher
, and, in part, of
11/22/63
also live in Bangor
.
Because Bangor is Derry, one of the three fictional Maine towns —Castle Rock and Salem's Lot are the other two— that King invented by crossing to the other side of his own mirror: the one that allowed him to see everything that didn't exist in the boring world. of his childhood actually existed.
No, King didn't want to live in a Maine without monsters.
So he created his own Maine of his, one where everything is the same and terrifyingly different at the same time.
Starting with Thomas Hill Standpipe.
Durham Methodist Church (now disused) stands near the house where Stephen King lived as a boy.
Durham is the hometown of the writer's mother. James Rajotte
The mammoth water tower, which King contemplated from the bench where he sometimes stopped to take notes for
It
, is the place where Pennywise supposedly lives, or, rather, where he leaves in the novel.
Yes, the evil mutant clown capable of embodying every last monster, and fear, imaginable —in a certain sense,
It
is, as Bret Easton Ellis said, "the
Ulysses
of terror"—,
floats
Down there.
The statue of Paul Bunyan, the giant, superheroic lumberjack, myth of American and Canadian folklore, to a certain extent ridiculous, inoffensive, inevitably disturbs anyone who remembers how they ended up possessed by some kind of demon —one of those fears turned into monsters —and attacks funny Richie Tozier.
The statue also has a small role in
Insomnia
.
Long Lake, the lake where a mysterious mist surrounds the town in "The Mist" (1980). James Rajotte
The lake from which the ghost emerges in
A Bag of Bones
is one of the more than likely destinations of the river that crosses Derry, and which is surely the same one that crosses Bangor.
The abandoned barns and lonely soccer fields with which Carrie White lives in Chamberlain —a tiny town in real Maine, a necessarily deformed copy of the existing one— could also be found in Castle Rock, a town supposedly 200 kilometers from Derry—, the epicenter of
The dead zone
—he was born with it, in 1979—,
Cujo, The Dark Half, The Store
, a handful of stories and even the recent Elevation.
With some Plymouth Fury —the future, and damned
Christine—
the writer must have come across in her idyllic and claustrophobic adolescence at the same time.
A statue of Paul Bunyan, a symbol of the lumber industry, brought to life in the novel "It" (published in 1986).James Rajotte
Because if there is something about the landscape of Maine, of the
other
Maine, the Maine that began to exist only in the head of a child who refused to live in a world without monsters —"Who would want to live in a world without monsters?" the writer has asked on more than one occasion— and ended up becoming a creator of monsters, is the kind of perfect mix that has turned his work into a classic of the genre.
Let's take the innocent mind of a child like the innocent mind of a place, let's turn off the light and open the door to the unknown.
It will happen that nothing, and no one, will ever be the same again.
Not the place, not the child.
King turned his city into his own reverse of him by playing anything possible.
He cursed her with the power of fiction, grim fortune for all.
The Thomas Hill Standpipe in Bangor, Maine.
In It is where the protagonist, Stan Uris, meets Pennywise the clown for the first time.James Rajotte
Houses next to Route 9, which passes through Durham.James Rajotte
A 1970s Cadillac for sale along Route 9 in Durham, Maine.James Rajotte
A football field next to Route 9, which runs through Durham.James Rajotte
Old books in Durham Methodist Church.
In September, "Fairy Tale", the latest novel (number 64) by Stephen King, who turned 75 in 2022, was published in Spanish.James Rajotte
The fictional town of Castle Rock, which appears in King's novels, is inspired by the Maine towns where the writer grew up.James Rajotte
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