One of my all-time favorite authors is Stephen King, a grand master of the horror genre. Ever since he published his first scary novel, Carrie, in 1974, I’ve gobbled up every one of the more than 50 books since and a significant number of his 200-plus short stories.
King has a way of making mundane things chilling in his books which are filled with horror, suspense, crime, magical realism, and realistic magic. Take Carrie for instance. At first glance, a story about a teenage girl and her angst at not being excepted by her peers seems tragic, but not scary—until you read it. He did the same with dogs in Cujo, a chilling story about a rabid dog that almost turned me off having a dog as a pet.
As a writer myself I’ve often wondered where King gets his ideas, and until just recently had assumed it was from a troubled childhood. After all, some of the traumatic events of my youth find their way into the books and stories I write. His physical environment never entered my mind—until a recent visit to his home state of Maine.
In August 2023, I traveled to Camden and Rockland on Maine’s mid-coast on a speaking engagement. My hosts put me up in a quaint hotel overlooking Camden’s harbor and the Atlantic Ocean beyond, and my speaking engagement was seven miles away at the Elk’s Lodge in Rockland, a town which also has a large harbor.
I flew into Portland and drove a rental car 80 miles up the coast to Camden. A scenic state, with over a thousand miles of jagged coastline and mountains in its interior, it just struck me as beautiful and peaceful. Camden, with its old buildings and a harbor jammed full of sailboats of all types, struck me as quaint. Then, the next morning, I woke up and looked out the window of my room at the pre-dawn sky. It hit me. I knew almost immediately where Stephen King gets his inspiration. The eastern sky was nearly blood red with dark ominous clouds and it brought to mind the old saying, ‘red sky at morning, sailor take warning.’ It looked . . . intimidating.
With a lot of free time on my hands—the speaking engagement involved a three-hour speech and lunch at the Elks Lodge in the middle of the day, leaving my morning free. So, I hopped in my rental car and explored. It hadn’t occurred to me before that Maine is an outlier of the Atlantic seaboard states. Most of them are on the small side and are rather densely populated. Maine is on the large side at 92 thousand square kilometers in area in which reside 1.4 million people. When you remember that New York City has 8.9 million people jammed into just 300 square miles, you begin to get the picture. Maine has a lot of dark, empty forests and long stretches of picturesque, but uninhabited coast. Growing up in a place like that, a person with a vivid imagination can come up with some scary stories.
Having finally had a chance to walk where King probably walked, seeing, hearing, and smelling the same things, I can see that growing up in a rural East Texas town on the edge of a massive swamp filled with snakes, spiders, and alligators isn’t the only way to have inspiration that causes nightmares. – NWI
