The Complete Stephen King Universe

by Stanley Wiater

  ACE MERRILL: After doing time in Shawshank Prison, Ace is drawn back to Castle Rock to view the burned-out remains of his uncle’s (Pop Merrill’s) store, the Emporium Galorium. Once there, he is hired by Gaunt as an errand boy. In return for a treasure map ostensibly detailing where Pop buried his considerable fortune, Ace travels to Boston to pick up the weapons that Gaunt later sells to the citizens of Castle Rock. When not running Gaunt’s errands, Ace engages in a personal treasure hunt for his uncle’s money, but uncovers nothing more valuable than trading stamps and some rolls of steel pennies buried in Crisco tins. In one, he finds a letter planted by Polly Chalmers, supposedly written by Alan Pangborn. In the letter, Pangborn mocks Ace, telling him that he’d already recovered the money in the tin. Ace, primed by anger and Gaunt’s special cocaine, vows to murder Alan, the man who put him in Shawshank for dealing cocaine. Ace is killed by Norris Ridgewick just as he is about to kill Alan.

  POP MERRILL: Ace Merrill’s uncle, Pop died when his store and living quarters, the Emporium Galorium, burned down just prior to Gaunt’s arrival.

  NORRIS RIDGEWICK: Alan Pangborn’s deputy, he is lured into Gaunt’s circle by a bazun fishing rod, which brings back pleasant memories of lazy days spent with his father. Later Norris, on the verge of suicide, suddenly sees through Gaunt’s trickery, and vows revenge. Although he does not achieve it directly, he saves Alan and Polly from Ace Merrill. Norris leaves town with Alan and Polly. Norris subsequently makes a brief appearance in Bag of Bones.

  NEEDFUL THINGS: ADAPTATIONS

  In this 1993 adaptation released by Columbia Pictures, Max Von Sydow is well cast as the demonic Gaunt. At once charming and sinister, he assays the character as well as time allows. Ed Harris and Bonnie Bedelia are also well cast as Alan Pangborn and Polly Chalmers, but neither is given the chance to fully explore their roles. Unfortunately, the movie cannot take advantage of a leisurely buildup that King exploits in his novel.

  The movie also makes subtle changes to certain events, compressing and embellishing them. Thus, all but the major subplots are eliminated. Also, several of the “needful things” are changed—Brian Rusk’s Sandy Koufax card becomes a Mickey Mantle card; Nettie Cobb’s carnival glass becomes a Hummel statuette; and Hugh Priest’s fox’s tail becomes a more convincing varsity football jacket. Ace Merrill is entirely eliminated from the story line. The producers, possibly constrained by a small special effects budget, even rewrote the ending. Instead of working his magic, Alan is reduced to delivering a Capraesque speech about evil, which Gaunt dismisses with a few pointed quips.

  NEEDFUL THINGS: TRIVIA

  • King himself does a masterful job in his full-length reading of the book for the audio version. Especially interesting is the thick Maine accent he adopts to read the prologue, “You’ve Been Here Before.”

  • Ace Merrill, of course, was one of the bullies in The Body, which became the film Stand by Me. Also, he spent some time in Shawshank Prison, the locale of the story Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.

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  RELATED TALES

  Asmentioned in the preface to this section, King has also used Castle Rock as a backdrop for several short stories. Here, in no special order, are brief summaries of those tales.

  The Body (from 1982’s Different Seasons)

  There are a great many things that Stephen King does well. Some of them he accomplishes as well as, and arguably better than, anyone else writing popular fiction today. In The Body, as in ’Salem’s Lot and It (1986), among others, King seems to send his imagination back in time to his own youth. Though only a novella, The Body is so steeped in nostalgia and Americana, and thick with real emotion and fondness and primal fear, that it is a fully realized exploration of what it meant to the author to be a boy growing up in Maine in 1960. There are those who have equated King with Mark Twain. That comparison is never more accurate than here.

  The Body relates the story of four friends who undertake a quest—without their parents’ knowledge, of course, and in peril of severe punishment—to see the corpse of a boy who has disappeared, but whom they discover has been hit by a train.

  As a coming-of-age-in-America story, it can rightly be termed a masterpiece.

  “I never had any friends later on like I had when I was twelve,” King—as narrator Gordon LaChance—tells us. “Jesus, does anyone?”

  The Body also provides a solid foundation for King’s fictional town of Castle Rock, which would appear as the background to so many subsequent works. The realism of this tale helps to build a sense of authenticity and history around Castle Rock itself.

  In the narrative, the four friends trek through rain and slug-filled ponds and run across a train bridge just ahead of the locomotive, all to find the corpse of Ray Brower. When their goal is reached, after a day and a half of hard travel, they feel a sense of proprietorship over the dead boy. However, they are challenged by a gang of local toughs that includes the older brothers of two of the youths. Though they drive the older boys off, they are eventually beaten soundly for their affront.

  There are so many elements that make this fiction much more than a mere coming-of-age story. Gordie, the main character, is the smart one. He wants to be a writer. Though his best friend, Chris, is intelligent, he is from a poor family with a reputation for making trouble. The other two, Vern and Teddy, are not very bright and seem destined for a dead-end future.

  We learn that later Chris triumphs over the expectations placed on him. He goes to law school, even, and becomes an attorney. And then he dies, senselessly, trying to break up a fight. Just as Teddy and Vern both die senselessly, later on. As the entire story seems to predict, Gordie is the only one who survives and succeeds. And yet, save for Chris, their deaths are revealed with the distance of age and the passage of time, so that it seems more sad than tragic. For we only know them as the children they were, instead of the men they became.

  For all the promise and hope we had for Chris Chambers, however, his death is the real tragedy.

  THE BODY: PRIMARY SUBJECTS

  GORDIE LaCHANCE: Gordon is twelve in 1960, when he and three of his friends go on an adventure to find the corpse of a missing local boy. Though they find the body, the experience changes them all, forcing them to grow up in a way that none of them could be prepared for. They drift apart after that, except for Gordon and Chris Chambers. Gordon LaChance becomes a successful novelist.

  CHRIS CHAMBERS: Along with his best friends, Chris embarks on a mission to find the corpse of a missing local boy. Though he is from a family with a bad reputation, he makes good and eventually becomes an attorney. Sadly, Chris is killed while trying to break up an altercation in a restaurant in Portland, Maine.

  TEDDY DUCHAMP: One of the four who set out on a trek to locate a missing local boy, Teddy has never been quite right in the head. He dies in a car accident in late 1971 or early 1972.

  VERN TESSIO: Vern overhears his brother telling a friend about the body of Ray Brower, a bit of knowledge that leads to the quest for the missing boy’s corpse. Vern dies in a house fire in Lewiston, Maine, in 1966.

  ACE MERRILL: The leader of the gang of hoods who try to claim the body of Ray Brower after Gordie and his friends found it, Ace is a sadistic bully. He will die many years later when a mysterious man named Leland Gaunt opens a store called Needful Things in Castle Rock.

  RAY BROWER: It is never clear if Ray Brower had run away from home or merely gotten lost. Either way, he finds himself on the train tracks at the wrong time, is struck by a train, and dies. Though a handful of kids in Castle Rock know where his body is, it is some time before it is finally discovered by the authorities, thanks to an anonymous tip to the police.

  THE BODY: ADAPTATIONS

  Of the four tales collected in Different Seasons, three have been made into films. The first of these, Stand by Me (based on The Body), was released by Columbia Pictures in 1986. The motion picture adaptation, apparently among King’s favorites, was directed by former television a
ctor turned director Rob Reiner (When Harry Met Sally, The Story of Us), and featured a plethora of young talent among the cast.

  Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Wil Wheaton portrayed Gordie LaChance (with Richard Dreyfuss appearing and narrating as the character as an adult). The late River Phoenix costared as tough kid Chris Chambers. Omnipresent 1980s child star Corey Feldman was Teddy Duchamp, and Jerry O’Connell, who would later go on to fame in film (Scream 2) and television (Sliders), was chubby enough back then to play Vern Tessio.

  Stand by Me also included performances by Kiefer Sutherland as Ace Merrill and John Cusack as Denny LaChance, Gordie’s older brother.

  Reiner’s direction of this coming-of-age story is flawless. Much of King’s narrative remains as voice-over by Dreyfuss, and despite moving Castle Rock from Maine to Oregon, there is a universal quality to the representation of the time period here, and a timelessness to the relationships between the kids, that makes this picture speak to the entire audience.

  It may be that Stand by Me is the closest a director has ever come to replicating the texture that King has put down on the page. Ironically, the film that is its only real competition is also based on a story in this collection.

  THE BODY: TRIVIA

  • Although the town of Derry was not prominent in King’s fictional landscape at the time, it is mentioned in The Body, as are Jerusalem’s Lot and Shawshank penitentiary.

  • The Body features many references to Constable Bannerman, who would, in such later works as The Dead Zone (1979) and Cujo (1981), become Sheriff Bannerman.

  • Gordie LaChance, the narrator of The Body, refers to the events of Cujo.

  “Nona” (from 1985’s Skeleton Crew)

  A story that recalls Charlie Starkweather’s murderous rampage in the late 1950s, and prefigured such films as Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), “Nona” tells of a murder spree that concludes in King’s fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine. Says Nona: “We’re going to Castle Rock. It’s a small town just south and west of Lewiston-Ashburn.” It turns out that the narrator has had a run-in with Castle Rock’s most famous juvenile delinquent, Ace Merrill. Ace’s presence links the story to the 1982 novella The Body, as does a mention of the GS & WM railroad trestle.

  “NONA”: PRIMARY SUBJECTS

  THE NARRATOR/THE PRISONER: Nona’s narrator is unnamed; we only know he has just been released from prison. Entering Joe’s Good Eats one evening, he meets a woman named Nona. After he gets into a fight with one of the patrons, they leave the diner together, embarking on a long, strange trip to the narrator’s hometown of Castle Rock. On the way, he kills a Good Samaritan who foolishly picks him up near an off-ramp and steals the victim’s car. The man also murders a policeman who pulls him over, and two power company employees who are out fixing a downed line. The narrator eventually ends up in the crypt of a former girlfriend, where he is found the next day. The narrator is arrested, and is presumably spending his days in safely locked away again in prison. It is up to the reader to decide whether Nona actually existed—or was merely a creation of the narrator’s twisted mind.

  “Uncle Otto’s Truck” (from 1985’s Skeleton Crew)

  Another story of Castle Rock (Billy Dodd, father of “Crazy” Frank Dodd who figures so prominently in The Dead Zone, is mentioned at one point), this one is about a haunted truck that, despite its decrepitude, drags itself across a field, moving toward the house of the man who once used it as a murder weapon in the killing of his business partner. Like 1985’s “Beachworld,” this is King in an EC Comics/Creepshow frame of mind.

  Otto enters into a partnership with George McCutcheon in order to obtain a choice piece of land from the New England Paper Company. Their association makes both men rich, but when they have their inevitable falling-out, Otto kills George by dropping an old Cresswell truck on him. Now able to live anywhere he chooses, Otto spends his days in a house he built across the road. His corpse is found one Wednesday evening by his nephew (Quentin Schenk, the narrator of the story), oil spewing from a mouth that also contains a 1920s vintage spark plug that almost certainly came from the Creswell. The coroner’s verdict, however, is that Otto committed suicide by swallowing the oil.

  “Gramma” (from 1985’s Skeleton Crew)

  A tale of a young boy left home alone with his invalid grandmother, this offering, which contains elements King later used in Dolores Claiborne (1993), had its roots in the author’s childhood. King’s grandmother lived in their home during her last illness, nearly driving daughter Ruth crazy with her constant nagging. Apparently King was home alone with his grandmother the day she died. Another tale set in Castle Rock, the story features

  cameos from Henrietta Dodd and Joe Camber, owner of the dog featured in the novel Cujo (1981).

  Like any eleven-year-old, the young protagonist of this story, George, thinks he’s a great deal more capable than he really is. Therefore he is not fazed when his mother asks him to stay alone in the house with his spooky old gram. George doesn’t know what he’s in for, however—just when it looks like his Gramma has died, he turns around and discovers she has shambled into the kitchen. It develops that Gramma is actually a witch, who covets George’s youth. It’s not clear at the end of the story whether George has been totally possessed by the spirit of the woman, or has merely absorbed his grandmother’s powers for his own use.

  “Gramma” was adapted for television by famed fantasist Harlan Ellison. This 1986 adaptation appeared as part of CBS television’s anthology series The New Twilight Zone.

  The Sun Dog (from 1990’s Four Past Midnight)

  Bracketed by 1989’s The Dark Half and 1991’s Needful Things, The Sun Dog was the second installment of what King has called the Castle Rock trilogy. The Sun Dog tells the story of Kevin Delevan, and the strange camera he receives on his fifteenth birthday. As it is set in Castle Rock, the Constant Reader hears the names of many of the locals, some of whom are destined to play significant roles in Needful Things. Ace Merrill, Norris Ridgewick, Buster Keaton, Alan Pangborn, and Polly Chalmers are all mentioned or make brief cameos.

  THE SUN DOG: PRIMARY SUBJECTS

  KEVIN DELEVAN: On his fifteenth birthday, Kevin receives a Polaroid 660 Instant Camera. Something is wrong with the camera, however—no matter what he points it at, the camera produces pictures of what appear to be a dog in front of a picket fence. Kevin is fascinated by the camera and continues to use it, despite the flaw.

  Laying the pictures out in the order in which he took them, Kevin makes a startling discovery—the dog is moving closer to the foreground in every shot. Frightened, he seeks out his dad, who suggests they take the camera to Pop Merrill, a cagey old gent for whom John Delevan has a grudging respect.

  Intrigued by the mysterious camera, and sensing a quick score, Pop rooks the pair out of their possession. After experimenting with it, Pop tries to unload the camera on one of his “Mad Hatters,” but is unsuccessful. Falling under the camera’s spell, he continues to snap shot after shot, bringing the dog closer and closer from that other dimension to this one. Kevin, realizing that Pop has tricked him, confronts the old man just as the last picture is snapped. Fortunately, Kevin has come prepared—using another Polaroid, he captures the Sun Dog just as it enters this world. The camera then implodes, seemingly ending the threat.

  Kevin emerges unscathed, but soon realizes his business with the Sun Dog is not finished. On his sixteenth birthday, he receives a WordStar personal computer. Booting up the PC, he types “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy sleeping dog” and hits the print button. He’s shaken to the core by what comes out of the printer: “The dog is loose again, and it is not sleeping. It is not lazy. It’s coming for you, Kevin. It’s very hungry. And it’s very angry.”

  JOHN DELEVAN: Kevin’s father, who, seeking to connect with his troubled son, reveals his secret shame to his offspring. Early on in his marriage, John made and lost an extravagant bet, threatening the young couple’s financial stability. Des
perate to hide this from his wife, John borrowed money from Pop Merrill to cover the wager. It took many years of hard work to pay off, given the high rate of interest Pop charged. After relating this story, John convinces Kevin to take the camera to Pop, a man who’s seen much in his long and varied life.

  REGINALD MARION Knowing that they have a unique item, John and Kevin Delevan bring the camera to the shrewdest man in town, Pop Merrill. Pop is a character right out of Charles Dickens, larger than life and twice as cunning. He runs a shop called the Emporium Galorium, becoming wealthy by making usurious loans and by “selling the worthless to the useless.” Pop takes just one look at the camera and dollar signs instantly spring up in his eyes. Unable to purchase the camera from its owner, Pop quickly conceives and implements a plan to steal it from Kevin. Pop tries to sell the camera (see next entry), but is unsuccessful.

  Unknown to Pop, the camera has been exerting its unnatural influence on him, forcing him to take pictures. Unable to control himself, Pop repeatedly uses the camera until the Sun Dog actually emerges from the last photo. As the Sun Dog draws closer to this reality, the camera grows so hot it eventually bursts into flame. Pop dies in the subsequent fire that guts his store.