Stephen King's Bangor

The wrought-iron gates at the King house on West Broadway in Bangor are cast in the shapes of bats and spiderwebs, and they were not installed ironically. Stephen King has lived in Bangor by choice for most of his adult life, in a Victorian house in a city that was once one of the wealthiest lumber ports in the world and is now one of the most economically depressed cities in New England. He has set or referenced Bangor, thinly disguised as Derry, in more than two dozen of his novels. The choice is not accidental.

The Bangor that appears in King's fiction, with its decaying Victorian architecture, its institutional isolation, its communal silence about what happened to it, is not a horror-genre convention. It is a documented sociological condition. The Penobscot River lumber economy that made Bangor wealthy in the mid-nineteenth century collapsed when the accessible timber was gone. The city never found a replacement. The postwar prosperity that transformed much of industrial America largely bypassed it. The neighborhoods of Victorian mansions that mill owners built now coexist with the economic conditions of a city that peaked a hundred and fifty years ago.

King has described the Maine of his imagination as a place where people know things are wrong but have developed elaborate cultural mechanisms for not talking about them, where the silence itself becomes a form of pressure. That psychological condition is not universal to post-industrial cities, but it is recognizable in the particular kind of northern New England town that was once something and is now managing the memory of having been something.

The house is private. You can see the gates from the sidewalk. They are exactly what they look like.