Derry: A Town of Unspeakable Evil, Part 2

Derry, Maine: A Town of Unspeakable Evil

Part 2 – 1958 to 1998

In the first installment of this profile of Derry, I discussed the town, its history, and a few of its famous residents. Now I will discuss events that have been documented in King’s stories. Derry plays a significant role in the world that King has built. Due to the number of stories that take place in Derry, this will be a three-part series.

 

One event that must be discussed covers a time span from 1958 to 1985.  In 1958, children in Derry were disappearing or being killed at an alarming rate.  One of these victims was Georgie Denbrough who was killed while playing with a paper boat that his brother Bill made for him. Bill Denbrough and six of his friends created a club called “the Losers Club” while playing in the Barrens where they spent their childhood afternoons building a dam in the creek that flows through it.  The boys become convinced, due to things that they saw and experienced, that an evil murderer was stalking their hometown.  In 1958, they track the “murderer” into the sewers to exact revenge and stop the murders.  They believed that they were the only ones who could stop the murderer.



The Losers Club



In 1985, children started to disappear and be murdered again; This was also the same year of the Great Flood in Derry, which did damaged the city extensively and cost millions to repair. Mike Hanlon, the city librarian and a member of the Losers Club, contacted all of his childhood friends about the recent activity. They had made a promise as children to return if the murders started again.  Six of the seven members returned to Derry and faced the child-killing monster again.  In the course of their stay in Derry, Mike Hanlon was stabbed and one of their friends was killed. (For more about these events, see IT, 1986)

IT was inspired by the classic Norwegian fairy tale “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” according to The Complete Stephen King Universe.

In 1994, Derry resident Ralph Roberts begins a descent into a type of madness created by insomnia and the loss of his first wife, Carolyn.  Ralph, who is a senior citizen, begins to see strange people-like beings that he calls “the little bald doctors.”  Ralph develops a sixth sense that allows him to see the auras of people around him.  One of the hardest things about Ralph’s newly developed abilities is the way that he can see death hanging over someone’s head.  Ralph described it as being able to see a “black balloon” over their heads.  This is not a pleasant gift to have in the town of Derry because death is a daily occurrence.

Ralph Roberts also develops the ability to know evil when he sees it.  Ralph decides that he must take action when he learns that his neighbor, Ed Deepneau, is planning an assault on the Derry Civic Center where Susan Day, a pro-choice activist, is speaking.  A mysterious force known as the Crimson King is manipulating Deepneau’s thoughts and wants the man to kill a child named Patrick Danville, who has an important place in history.  (To read about Ralph Robert’s life, see Insomnia, 1994).

To promote the release of Insomnia, Stephen King made a ten-stop tour of independent bookstores across the United States on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. This trip helped inspire two novels, Desperation and The Regulators, which were released in 1996.

In 1998, Mike Noonan, a best-selling novelist who calls Derry home, finds his life changed in a significant way.  Noonan’s wife, Jo, dies from an aneurysm that occurs when she is expecting their first child.  Noonan becomes emotionally distraught and finds it difficult to pen another story.  He decides to leave Derry for a while and stay at their summer home at Dark Score Lake.  The home is called “Sara Laughs.”  The author believes that the writer’s block may be broken by staying at his summer home.




Mike Noonan (portrayed by Pierce Brosnan)



While staying near Dark Score Lake, Noonan becomes involved in a couple of different events.  He rescues a child from the street and then finds himself in the middle of a custody battle between the child’s mother, Mattie Devore, and her father-in-law, millionaire Max Devore. Noonan also begins receiving messages in various ways from spirits, one of which he believes to be his deceased wife. He also starts to investigate the possibility that his wife had an affair prior to her death.  The truth was much darker.  His wife had been investigating the rape and murder of a Jazz singer named Sara Tidwell that occurred nearly a century earlier. (Mike Noonan’s story can be found in Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, 1998)

Bag of Bones was adapted for television in 2011 and aired on A&E.  Stephen King read the audio version of this novel.

To Be Continued...

 

Derry, Maine: A Town of Unspeakable Evil (Part 1)

Derry, Maine: A Town of Unspeakable Evil

Part 1 – Intro and History

In Stephen King’s world, evil lurks in the darkness, balanced with a sliver of good that prevents it from engulfing everything in its path.  However, Derry is a different kind of town, a place where evil is so entrenched that most of the residents are not even aware of its presence.  Derry looks like every typical American town with average citizens and a Norman Rockwell picturesque setting.  It could be Anywhere, USA; but it is not! 

Derry has a town square where the courthouse and surrounding shops compose the community’s center of activity and life.  Popular local stores provide all the necessary commodities of life and the gossip that small American towns seem to use as fuel for life.  Mr. Norbert Keene’s drugstore located near the square is the place where most residents of Derry fill their prescriptions and doctor their ailments.  The Derry Public Library is close to the center of town and is an important setting in the events that occur in the little town.

Outside of the square, Derry has several famous landmarks that everyone in town knows, and some that they go out of their way to avoid.  Kitchener Iron Works is part of the town’s history and an important business for Derry residents as well as Stephen King’s stories.  On the outskirts of town is the infamous place known as “The Barrens,” which is where the runoff water from the town streets eventually flows.  “The Standpipe” is located in Derry Memorial Park, which is “within a shout” of the Barrens, as described by Mike Hanlon in his unpublished book, Derry: An Unauthorized Town History (IT, page 149).  Derry also has a tall statue of Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Big Blue Ox, which are fictional characters from American folklore. One of the most recent landmarks in Derry is a statue dedicated to the memory of the “lost children” of the town (Dreamcatcher).  

Derry has a tragic and dark history that is reflective upon the evil that lives in the small New England town.  This history is the focus of Mike Hanlon’s book that is mentioned in the previous paragraph.  Here are some of the events that Hanlon retells in his book:

          1741 – The entire population of Derry township vanishes. Hanlon
          compares it to the Roanoke Island, Virginia colony, where all of
          the colonists disappeared in the early settlement of North America.

1851 – John Markson kills his entire family with poison, then consumes a deadly “white nightshade” mushroom.

1879 – A crew of lumberjacks find the remains of another crew that spent the winter snowed in at a camp in the upper Kenduskeag, at the tip of the modern-day barrens. All nine had been hacked to pieces.

1906 – On Easter Sunday, the Kitchener Ironworks explodes during an Easter egg hunt, resulting in 102 deaths.

1930 – The Black Spot, a Negro social club, is burned to the ground by the Maine Legion of Decency. Dozens perish.

1958 – One hundred and twenty-seven children, ranging in age from three to nineteen, were reported missing in Derry.

1985 – Nine children are murdered; their killer is never apprehended. Also the year of the “Great Flood,” which results in millions of dollars of damage to the town.

1994 – Feminist Susan Day is killed when Derry resident Ed Deepneay – driven insane by an otherworldly being named Atropos – launches a kamikaze attack on the Derry Civic Center as Day addresses a capacity crowd. 

(Source for above history – The Complete Stephen King Universe: A Guide to the Worlds of Stephen King, 101-102.)

Although one has to live in Derry to understand the darkness of the town, even visitors have a feeling that something is odd about it.  Mike Hanlon states, “Those who have visited Derry refer to it as being ‘not right’” (IT, 151). Jake Epping aka George Amberson says that there is something “wrong” about the town. (11/22/63, 121).  Even residents of nearby Haven report seeing and hearing strange things in the town as they travel through it (The Tommyknockers).   

Derry has had a few famous residents that call the town “home.” Mort Rainey, author of two novels and a short story collection, resided in Derry with his wife until he went insane after his divorce (“Secret Window, Secret Garden”).  William Denbrough, a best-selling author and screenwriter, is one of Derry’s most famous native sons (IT).  Mike Noonan, another best-selling author, hailed from Derry and had a summer cabin near Dark Score Lake, which is near the town (Bag of Bones).  Richie Tozier, a childhood friend of William Denbrough, left Derry and became an excellent deejay that was known as “the Man of a Thousand Voices” (IT, 63).

Interesting statistics about Derry (The Complete Stephen King Universe, 101):

·   The murder rate in Derry is six times the murder rate of any other town of comparable size in New England.

·   In Derry, children disappear unexplained and unfound at the rate of forty-to-sixty per a year.

Due to the importance of Derry in King’s work and the vast amount of information that is available about the town, the article about Derry will be divided into two parts; this entry being the first of those parts.