The Complete Stephen King Universe

by Stanley Wiater

  “THE MAD HATTERS”: Pop Merrill’s name for a unique group of customers fascinated by the occult. One mad hatter buys a “spirit trumpet” from Pop for $90; another claims to engage in twice-weekly conversations with Adolf Hitler. Pop offers the Polaroid Sun 660 to four mad hatters—Cedric McCarty, the “Pus” Sisters (identical twins Miss Eleusippus Deere and Mrs. Meleusippus Verrill), and Emory Chafe—but is unable to close a sale with any of them.

  “It Grows on You” (from 1993’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes)

  This tale is an epilogue of sorts to Needful Things (1991), featuring a handful of elderly survivors of the debacle caused by Leland Gaunt, a demonic evil force who had destroyed most of the town. Focusing on a strange house that is modified and enlarged whenever someone in town dies, it recalls H. P. Lovecraft’s 1929 classic “The Dunwich Horror.”

  “IT GROWS ON YOU”: PRIMARY SUBJECTS

  THE NEWALL HOUSE: An old house situated out on Town Road #3, overlooking the section of Castle Rock known as the Bend. The unpainted house has a look of evil to it that one could sense immediately upon entering.

  JOE NEWALL: The owner of the Newall House, Joe is constantly adding rooms, then entire wings, to the edifice, arousing curiosity among the surviving residents of Castle Rock. His life is marred by tragedy—his daughter, born misshapen and malformed, died shortly after birth; his wife, Cora, died after falling down a flight of stairs.

  GARY PAULSON: An eighty-four-year-old resident of the Bend, he’s an ailing widower who has, over the years, lost all three of his sons (two in wars and one in a car accident). He suspects there’s some kind of unholy connection between the way local people die and the continued construction of the Newell House. When Paulson passes away in his sleep, his friends are not surprised to see a new cupola being added onto a new wing of the Newell House.

  Bridge between Lisbon Falls and Durham VINTAGE POSTCARD

  “The Man in the Black Suit” (from 1997’s Six Stories)

  This story of the devil won both the 1994 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction and the 1994 O. Henry Award for Best American Short Story. It’s a neat little tale of innocence confronted by evil, perhaps best described as King à la Ray Bradbury. King has written that the entry comes out of “a long New England tradition of stories which dealt with meeting the devil in the woods … he always comes out of the woods—the uncharted regions—to test the human soul.”

  “THE MAN IN THE BLACK SUIT”: PRIMARY SUBJECTS

  GARY: In 1914, fishing off the banks of Castle Stream, Gary falls asleep and wakes to discover that he is not alone—a sinister man wearing a black suit has entered the glen, a man the boy quickly realizes is not human. The stranger taunts the boy, telling him that his mother is dead, the victim of a bee sting. Terrified because his younger brother Dan died the same way a year before, the youngster stands there paralyzed. The man approaches, telling Gary he is going to kill him, tear him open, and eat his guts. The threat galvanizes the boy, who takes a fish from his basket and stuffs it in the man’s mouth, then runs home. There he finds his mother alive and well.

  Gary is old now, and currently resides in a nursing home. He has, however, lived his entire life in fear that the man in the black suit will one day reappear.

  SECTION FOUR

  The Prime Reality, Part III: Jerusalem’s Lot and King’s Maine

  Maine is the setting of so many of King’s stories. We have already discussed several key sites in the state, most importantly the fictional towns of Castle Rock and Derry, and in the section on The Shop we will discuss Haven. But those towns represent only a small part of Stephen King’s Maine—one must also consider such locales as ’Salem’s Lot, Little Tall Island, Dark Score Lake, and other rural Maine communities that have figured so prominently in King’s fiction over the years.

  The people who inhabit this reality are tough, down-to-earth, stoic types who, given a choice, keep themselves to themselves. They are an intriguing mix of good and evil—for every Jud Crandall (Pet Sematary), Mark Petrie (’Salem’s Lot), Johnny Smith (The Dead Zone), Dolores Claiborne, or Mike Anderson (The Storm of the Century), there are flawed, troubled, sometimes inhuman types such as Louis Creed, Father Donald Callahan, Frank Dodd, Joe St. George, and Robbie Beals (from the same stories, respectively).

  How do these tales of a more rural Maine connect to the rest of the Prime Reality, and to the other realities in the Stephen King Universe? It is obvious from one look at the maps contained in both Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game that the reality that includes Little Tall Island (Dolores Claiborne, Storm of the Century), Dark Score Lake (Gerald’s Game and Bag of Bones) and Lake Kashwakamak (Gerald’s Game) is the Prime Reality, the one that includes Derry, Haven, and Bangor. But these locales represent only a small part of Stephen King’s Maine. Obviously, there are other locales that figure in his stories.

  Consider Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, set at everyone’s favorite penal institution, the oft-mentioned Shawshank Prison (in Needful Things and Bag of Bones, for example). The GS & WM train line, which runs through Castle Rock, also winds through Tarker’s Mills, Maine, the setting of Cycle of the Werewolf. Louis Creed, the chief protagonist of Pet Sematary, lives in Ludlow, near the University of Maine at Orono, where he works as the head of health services. Goat Island (from “The Reach”) could very well be a sister island to Little Tall Island. Finally, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is set in Maine, as its heroine wanders the woods in the southern part of the state, and hallucinates the presence of her hero, Boston Red Sox pitching sensation Tom Gordon.

  Are the characters in these stories aware of the rest of the Stephen King Universe? It certainly seems so. For instance, Pet Sematary’s Jud Crandall makes reference to the events that occurred in Cujo, and Rachel Creed reads the name of the town Jerusalem’s Lot off an ancient road sign. As mentioned above, Louis Creed works at the University of Maine at Orono, which is prominently featured in Hearts in Atlantis and “Riding the Bullet” (it is also King’s alma mater). Finally, Trisha McFarland of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon picks up a Castle Rock radio station while listening to her Walkman in the Maine Woods. Serial killer Andrew Ray Joubert, who figures in the events described in Gerald’s Game, is mentioned in passing in Insomnia. Perhaps the best example of the cross-pollination within the Maine locales in the Prime Reality is offered by King’s novella The Body—besides a reference to Derry, Castle Rock sheriff Bannerman, and a dog named Cujo, it also mentions ’Salem’s Lot and Shawshank Prison.

  There is one locale we haven’t mentioned yet, but with ample reason. One of the more important towns in the Stephen King Universe, it was effectively reduced to a ghost town over a quarter of a century ago, when it succumbed to a great evil.

  You see, long before the words “Castle Rock, Maine” first graced the printed page in The Dead Zone (1979), Stephen King had created and destroyed another fully realized fictional community. Jerusalem’s Lot—or “’Salem’s Lot” to the locals—became Maine’s answer to Roanoke, Virginia.

  England attempted to colonize that now-notorious island several times, only to find—first in 1587 with one group, and again with a second in 1590—that the respective Roanoke colonies had disappeared without a trace.

  King has shown an interest in Roanoke, most recently in 1999’s TV miniseries The Storm of the Century, but in the Stephen King Universe, nothing is so reminiscent of the seemingly cursed Roanoke Island as Jerusalem’s Lot. It has been occupied and abandoned several times, and now, after a vampire plague fell upon the town, is a veritable Flying Dutchman of burned-out homes and stores and offices.

  While Stephen King has created many parallel universes in his work, perhaps the three that are primary are the world of the ongoing Dark Tower series, that of The Stand (1978), and, finally, what we’ll call the Prime Universe—that being the one that includes all of the stories that have taken place in his carefully crafted fictional towns: Castle Rock, Derry, Haven, and Jerusalem’s Lot.

 
But of the several fictional towns King has created, restructuring the map of Maine to suit his own needs, Jerusalem’s Lot was the first. In the novel ’Salem’s Lot (1975) and the short stories “One for the Road” and “Jerusalem’s Lot”—both of which appear in the 1978 short story collection Night Shift—King meticulously crafts the birth, life, and awful death of a small American town, a town imbued with evil from its very inception.

  In the creation of this town in “Jerusalem’s Lot,” King has taken a classic horror conceit and made it his own, echoing works by some of horror’s earliest masters, in which a house or even an entire town have been forever tainted by evil. As early as the 1765 publication in England of the first gothic novel—The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1717–1797), which concerned haunting events in a medieval castle—the lingering of evil has been a major theme in horror literature. The story “Jerusalem’s Lot” seems a descendant of Walpole’s novel, as well as the work of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) in such tales as “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), in its use of the mysterious old house that holds dark and unspeakable secrets.

  However, in many ways ’Salem’s Lot and its atmosphere of lurking evil, terror, and the erosion of the natural world are most reminiscent of the work of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), who is also known to have had quite an influence on King. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1936) is just one example of a Lovecraft tale about a cursed small town or village that holds within its confines a dark, deadly secret. The same author’s “The Dunwich Horror” (1929) also features townspeople coming to grips with an evil that lurks among them. Thus Lovecraft had taken the gothic old, dark house tale and moved it out into the larger setting of an entire town.

  In the 1960s, television series such as Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and the classic horror films from England’s Hammer Studios contributed to the expansion of the “old dark house” mythos to include, as in Lovecraft’s work, an entire town. The work of Richard Matheson (1926–), who wrote for The Twilight Zone in addition to his many novels and short stories, also heavily influenced King. Matheson often demonstrated evil as being present in the most contemporary and mundane surroundings. In other words, a vampire could just as well be found lurking in a meat locker in a local supermarket as it could be in an old European castle crypt.

  What King has done in the creation of Jerusalem’s Lot, and in particular the novel ’Salem’s Lot, is to bring that kind of paranoia-inducing fear into a very familiar, contemporary setting, draped in pop culture. The more familiar elements King introduces into the story, the more we identify with the characters, the more terrifying the story becomes.

  The classic structure of such a story—as shown in many period horror films from Hammer (Horror of Dracula, Curse of Frankenstein) and other studios, as well as in various episodes of The Twilight Zone, and even the 1981 horror-comedy classic An American Werewolf in London—usually went something like this: our protagonists are innocent outsiders who pass through the spooky town in the night and are put off by the odd behavior of its secretive residents, who cower in fear of the evil that lives all too nearby.

  While in many ways the story “Jerusalem’s Lot” follows that standard structure ’Salem’s Lot and “One for the Road” most certainly do not. The protagonists of these tales are the people who actually live in the town, who then discover that lurking evil, and who must somehow work as a team to combat and finally destroy it. These people know that there are monsters among us, and that they must do something to stop the evil from spreading.

  In this deceptively simple manner, with an ancient evil arriving in the average Joe’s proverbial own backyard, King lays the bedrock for the essential horror tale of the final quarter of the twentieth century. It would have been merely a new take on an age-old conceit, yet before long, virtually dozens of writers—including such bestsellers as Dean R. Koontz and Robert R. McCammon—would build entire careers around it during the horror boom of the 1980s.

  It is important to note, then, that ’Salem’s Lot was not merely the continuation of a growing trend toward “mainstream horror” stories, but truly its vital beginning in contemporary literature.

  Incorporated in 1765, Jerusalem’s Lot was named almost by accident. Jerusalem was the name of a particularly large and nasty pig owned by Charles Belknap Tanner, a local farmer. When Jerusalem broke out of her pen, she entered the nearby woods and stormed about angrily, prompting Tanner to warn children in the vicinity to stay out of “Jerusalem’s Lot.”

  But long before that, sinister forces had already drawn together in ’Salem’s Lot, establishing a pattern that would leave the town empty and tainted by evil not once, but twice in its history, and eventually lead to its destruction.

  Upon examining the texts of the short story “Jerusalem’s Lot” and the novel ’Salem’s Lot, it is possible to put together a more specific timeline, one that is haunting in the way in which evil is drawn to the town time after time.

  • In 1710, a splinter group from the original Puritan settlers of that region of southern Maine—led by a man named James Boon—founded the town of Jerusalem’s Lot. A preacher, Boon worships a horrid, demonic creature known only as “the worm,” and leads his followers to do the same. He is a fanatical leader, and breeds with many of the cult’s women.

  • An adjoining hamlet, once called Preacher’s Rest and later Preacher’s Corners, is founded in 1741.

  • In 1765, Jerusalem’s Lot is officially incorporated as a township.

  • Boon’s descendants (Robert and Philip Boone, their surname inexplicably altered) build a house called Chapelwaite in the Lot in 1782, not far from Preacher’s Corners. They are unaware at the time that James Boon was their ancestor.

  • On October 27, 1789, after Philip Boone has become involved with the cult that still exists in ’Salem’s Lot, Robert Boone follows his brother to the church where James Boon and his cult first worshipped the worm. Whatever happens that night between the Boone brothers, the cult, and the worm, Jerusalem’s Lot is completely deserted the next day, with no sign of life at all.

  • In 1850, Robert’s grandson Charles moves into Chapelwaite, his family estate, and happens upon documents that reveal part of his family’s history. Also, the attitudes of the people of Preacher’s Corners make him realize some of the horror related to his ancestors. On October 27 of that year, Charles faces the worm and the rotted zombielike form of James Boon, both of which still live beneath the abandoned church in ’Salem’s Lot.

  • By 1896, the evil that has suffused the Lot’s history has been all but forgotten, or only whispered about, and the ghost town is settled anew. In that year, the main street, formerly the Portland Post Road, is renamed Jointner Avenue after a local politician.

  • In 1928, Hubert Marsten, president of a sizable New England trucking company (and secretly a Mafia assassin), retires to ’Salem’s Lot with his wife, Birdie. Of course, Hubie is still in touch with the “family.”

  • In summer 1939, Marsten inexplicably shoots his wife to death and then hangs himself. It later becomes clear that he had been in touch with a mysterious stranger who was residing in Hitler’s Third Reich Germany, a stranger who turns out to be the vampire Kurt Barlow.

  • On a childhood dare in 1951, a young boy named Ben Mears enters the reputedly haunted Marsten House and, in the attic, sees what he believes to be the ghost of Hubie Marsten. It haunts him for the rest of his life.

  • In October 1971, James Robert Boone, the final descendant of that family, takes up residence in Chapelwaite. Though indications seem to point toward the ancestral home being haunted, there are no subsequent references to the worm or the living corpse of James Boon, or the evil lurking beneath ’Salem’s Lot. However, it is also logical to presume that should a Boone ever venture near the spot where that old church had once stood, with the right frame of mind and the right book, that evil would rise again.

  • On September 5, 1975, Ben Mears, who had lived in the Lot as a boy,
returns to town only to discover that the Marsten House has been purchased by two mysterious European gentlemen.

  • By mid-fall 1975, the vampire Barlow has killed or transformed or driven out nearly all of the townspeople before finally being killed by Ben Mears and Mark Petrie. Ben and Mark destroy as many vampires as they can, and then flee the empty township.

  • In late 1976 or early 1977, Ben Mears and Mark Petrie return to ’Salem’s Lot—prompted by newspaper reports of suspicious disappearances that they link to Barlow’s remaining vampiric offspring—and burn the town to the ground.

  • On January 10, 1978, the Lumley family of New Jersey are taken by the vampires who still hunt the area around the burned-out town. Two men from a neighboring town, Herb Tooklander and his friend Booth, barely escape the same fate.

  Though more than two decades have passed as of this writing, the pattern of dark events indicates that something evil still lurks in the remains of ’Salem’s Lot.

  Located east of Cumberland, some twenty miles north of Portland, Maine, the fictional ’Salem’s Lot boasted a population of 1,300 prior to the vampire holocaust that decimated its populace. For the most part, the town was made up of “a lot of old folks, quite a few poor folks, and a lot of young folks who leave the area with their diplomas under their arms, never to return again.”

  In order to reach ’Salem’s Lot, it would be simplest to take Interstate 95 (a.k.a. the Maine Turnpike) to the exit sign that reads ROUTE 12, JERUSALEM’S LOT, CUMBERLAND, CUMBERLAND CENTER. The off-ramp from the highway leads down onto Route 12, which, if one were to follow it, would turn into Jointner Avenue before too long. Jointner runs straight through the heart of ’Salem’s Lot.