How Stephen King Made Maine America’s Haunted Mirror

Since the publication of Stephen King’s first novel Carrie in 1974, the master of horror has used the small state of Maine as a breeding ground for his stories. What is it about Maine that makes it the perfect setting for King’s characters? For King, it’s a landscape and history he knows well—and he draws on this familiarity to often confront weighty themes.

King described his childhood in Maine as ordinary in a 2018 NPR interview, with one caveat: “From a very early age, I wanted to be scared.” He found himself drawn to horror and mystery books like Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew series, Robert Bloch’s Psycho and Richard Matheson’s Incredible Shrinking Man.

“King writes about the world in which he is inhabiting in a very direct way, in a way that even though it's horror, even though it's fantastical, it's very specifically about the place that he's in,” says Daniel T. Kasper, English professor for the University of Texas at Arlington.

King often reimagines real places as fictional settings—from IT's Derry (inspired by Bangor) to The Dark Half's Castle Rock (inspired by Durham). "I wanted [IT] to be in Maine, because that’s the place I knew. Also, unlike Boulder, Maine towns and cities have histories going back hundreds of years,” King told Bangor Daily News in 2017.

Maine started out as one of the nation’s largest lumber ports, resulting in a boom-or-bust economy tied to closely to the industry. As logging shifted westward in the late 1800s, many of the state’s once-thriving boom towns declined. By the 20th century, logging had become heavily mechanized and Maine was competing with operations in Canada and the Pacific Northwest. The shadow of the logging industry is epitomized by a menacing Paul Bunyan statue that comes to life in IT (1986), based on the real 31-foot figure installed in Bangor.

King was well aware of that history, the house he bought off the success of Carrie once belonged to a lumber magnate. “They're living in this nice house built on lumber money from the early 1900s,” says Kasper. By the 1970s and ’80s, the region’s economy had sharply declined. King’s rise in popularity coincided with a period of national economic hardship: times when horror and gothic stories often thrive, explains Kasper.

"In an abstract fashion, King is erupting alongside a bunch of national [and] political problems.”

That sense of hardship—poverty, disaffected youth, addiction and simmering violence—flourishes in King’s fiction, populated by characters trying to make ends meet in towns on the brink of collapse. Those stories have resonated around the world, selling more than 350 million books across dozens of languages and spawning countless adaptations.

“I wanted Bangor because it was a tougher, harder place, with its history of loggers, the thing about the Brady Gang shootout, and all those fightin’ bars like the Silver Dollar that used to be down at the waterfront,” said King. The Brady Gang shootout appears in IT as the Bradley Gang shootout, inspired by a 1937 event in which two outlaws were slain by FBI agents on Bangor's Main Street.

The history of America's colonization also finds its reflection in King’s pages. Four Indigenous nations (collectively known as the Wabanaki Confederacy) reside in Maine. King’s work has drawn criticism for its portrayals of Indigenous land, notes Kasper, citing Pet Sematary’s “ancient Indian burial ground,” attributed in the 1983 novel to the Mi’kmaq nation. King explains in Danse Macabre (1981) that he drew inspiration from The Amityville Horror, but others have interpreted this trope as a means of the land fighting back against its own exploitation.

One of the whitest states in America, Maine saw the Klan establish a presence in the state.

“Maine’s relationship with the Klan was short-lived, but surprisingly intense. Starting from virtually nothing in 1920, Klan membership grew from 23,000 in 1923 to its peak of 150,141 members by 1925… At its height, membership in the Klan represented 23 percent of the population of Maine, with the largest groups belonging to the communities of Portland, Lewiston and Brewer," writes historian Raney Bench in "History of Maine: The Rising of the Klan" (2019).

The state’s ties to the Ku Klux Klan remain a lasting stain on the community—one that King confronts in IT (1986), where Pennywise the clown becomes a vessel for the town’s buried bigotry and violent past. Mike Hanlon, the lone Black member of the “Loser’s Club," the group of children up against this evil, experiences racism firsthand and routinely brings up Derry’s racist history.

Culture critics have also discussed King’s reliance on the magical Negro trope, a term coined by Kwame Anthony Appiah in 1993. Characters like The Green Mile’s John Coffey and The Shining’s Dick Hallorann may be heroes in their respective stories, but this often manifests through folkloric magic. However, this isn't the only way King has explored marginalized groups in his work.

One of King's most heartwrenching and terrifying chapters is directly lifted from a piece of Maine history. On July 7, 1984, 23-year-old Charlie Howard was attacked by three teenage boys, beaten and thrown off Kenduskeag Stream Bridge in Bangor where he drowned. The three boys targeted him for being gay. Howard’s death didn’t receive the same national attention as the murder of Matthew Shephard would 14 years later, but it affected King who recreated it in IT as the story of Adrian Mellon. “It's almost identical to the actual incident," says Kasper.

Across five decades, King has fundamentally reshaped modern horror—blending the supernatural with ordinary American life—and his influence can be seen across film, television, video games and the language of pop culture.

At the heart of King's work is an appreciation for Maine’s history and how it’s changed around him. The state has also embraced King back. His birthday (September 21) is celebrated in Bangor, and smaller cities like Hallowell have declared May 17 “Stephen King Day.” There’s even a Stephen King tour industry, guiding fans through real locations from his novels, and his former home is now a writer’s retreat for aspiring authors.