25. The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands
Roland and company are reunited with Jake Chambers, a young boy who can’t remember if he is alive or dead. Together they face desolation, pockmarked diseased pirates around every corner, and extremely inconvenient public transportation. This book is Maine to the bone.
24. Bag of Bones
One of only 30-something Stephen King books where the main character is a writer, this book sees a widowed novelist return to the summer retreat he shared with his wife in Maine in an attempt to cure his writer’s block. Turns out the place is haunted. No shit dude. It’s in Maine.
23. Faithful
Technically this book should not be on this list — it’s a memoir only co-written by King and it’s not horror. It makes the cut because it’s worth noting that Maine’s devotion to the Red Sox (or “Red Sauuuwwqes” as they say in their delightful dialect) is truly frightening. Their cult-like fixation on this team makes them somehow more obnoxious than Boston sports fans, and the Red Sox don’t even play in Maine. Nobody plays in Maine. They don’t let you play there…
22. Dreamcatcher
Four men on a hunting trip wind up having to thwart an alien invasion. Since aliens only seem to appear in places where nothing happens and everyone is bored, they are a reasonable concern in Maine.
21. Insomnia
You wouldn’t think that insomnia would be a problem in a place like Maine where there is nothing to do but sleep, but sonofabitch if you don’t find yourself wide awake in bed every night thinking “What the hell am I doing here?!”
20. Thinner
After accidentally killing an elderly woman with his car, an overweight lawyer is cursed by a Gypsy (King’s words) with “thinner,” causing him to waste away. It is a haunting, impactful metaphor for how awful pizza is in the state of Maine.
19. The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
Not everyone loved the conclusion to King’s Dark Tower series, but I say if you decide to read a 4250-page epic by a guy notorious for not writing satisfying endings, you know you’re rolling the dice. The book ends with Roland restarting his adventure from the very beginning, with the revelation that he has done this countless times. It is an essay on the futility of existence that only someone who grew up in Maine could channel.
18. Cujo
Wild dogs are so prevalent in Maine that they are actually allowed to vote.
17. The Dark Tower IV-1/2: The Wind Through the Keyhole
A sort of late supplemental to The Dark Tower series, this book features three interwoven stories bound together by the presence of a freezing, howling wind, which is why it ranks high. One does not know the true indifference God is capable of until they have felt the wind in Maine during winter.
16. The Long Walk
Another dystopian future games story. In this one, 100 random boys are selected to compete in “The walk.” What they do is, they go for a walk. They must maintain a pace of 4 miles per hour, a standard walking speed. If they stop, they die. Last one alive wins, but by that point has been driven insane. Its trudging pace in the face of bleak hopelessness makes it an essential Maine novel.
15. The Dead Zone
After years in a coma, a schoolteacher awakens to find that he has psychic powers. You don’t need psychic powers to predict the future in Maine, every day is basically the same.
14. Firestarter
Stephen King sure loves his kids with weird telekinetic powers. This one is about a young girl struggling to control her ability to start fires with her mind. Replace the mind powers with psychological disorders and zippo lighters and you’ve got your typical Maine child. In their defense, burning random buildings is sort of the only thing to do there.
13. The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
Many fans consider Wizard and Glass to be the height of the Dark Tower series. Three young gunslingers, somewhere between boys and men, set out on their first assignment biting at the chomp for adventure. What they find is a cruel and twisted place full of secrets, old crones and murderous failures. Any out-of-stater who went to the University of Maine can relate.
12. Carrie
Everything in this novel except for the girl having power and getting revenge is a completely accurate picture of life in Maine.
11. The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
In the penultimate Dark Tower novel, Susannah births a demon engineered to kill Roland through a ritualistic ceremony of spiritual incest. Its higher ranking on this list is not meant to imply the people of Maine practice incest. It’s just when a population is isolated enough, the gene pool gets sort of, uhm, well, go there you’ll see what we mean.
10. Salem’s Lot
Stephen King has been quoted multiple times as saying that of all the novels he’s written this is his favorite, going so far as to say “I have a special cold spot in my heart for it!” It’s easy to see why it resonates with him. It tells the story of a semi-famous horror writer who returns to his hometown in Maine to discover that everyone is an evil vampire. This is the feeling anyone has when they leave Maine and come back.
9. The Stand
I almost never catch colds, but in the two years I lived outside of Portland I was sick 80% of the time. I don’t know if it’s the extreme temperature changes, something in the water, or something more sinister and ethereal but something about the place makes it a breeding ground for illnesses of both the mind and body. If “Captain Trips” ever becomes real, it will start in Maine.
8. Under the Dome
An entire town is suddenly and inexplicably placed under a giant, impenetrable dome-shaped barrier. It is a terrifying premise for a science fiction novel and a feeling inherent in the heart of anyone with the misfortune of being born in a small Maine town.
7. Christine
A car possessed by the spirit of a murderous sadist enthralls and corrupts a nerdy high school student. Together they go on a rampage, slaughtering high school bullies and anyone else who stands in their way. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of driving through Maine, hopefully on your way to somewhere much better, you know that its roads are full of Christines.
6. Cycle of the Werewolf
A young wheelchair-bound boy discovers that his preacher is a werewolf but no one believes him. We don’t want to unpack why a disenfranchised child knowing horrible truths about a religious leader is on the nose for the horrors lurking in small town New England. We’re just gonna go ahead and leave this here in the top 10.
5. Pet Sematary
Sometimes, deads better. One of those times is if you find yourself trapped in America’s coldest, grayest, bitterest continental state.
4. Misery
Besides the fact that it’s right there in the title, Misery, this book encapsulates the horror of Maine in its main antagonist, Annie Wilks. Every single woman of a certain age in Maine just has that vibe. That vibe that says “I’ve murdered children and I have a big-wig writer from the city imprisoned in my home, steer clear of me.”
3. The Tommyknockers
This is sort of like Stephen King’s “Station to Station” in that he was so coked up he has no memory of writing it. A mysterious alien relic is uncovered in a small Maine town, turning the inhabitants into genius but morally corrupt creatures. But that’s not the scariest part. The scariest part is that the transformation somehow prevents anyone from leaving the town. I would rather live anywhere else as any sort of creature than be confined to one town in Maine.
2. It
As children, a group of friends called “The Losers Club” contend with a sinister entity in the form of a clown who prays on children’s fears and devours them. They defeat the monster and leave Maine for greener pastures, but 30 years later the evil re-emerges, forcing them to do the hardest thing anyone who grew up in Maine can possibly do, go back for a week! Childhood trauma, dark secrets, ethereal bleakness, and a wildly inappropriate child sex scene. Stephen King’s “It” is as Maine as calling a car a “caaaaaa.”
1. The Shining
Keep in mind we’re talking about the book, not the movie where Jack Nicholson is ready to slaughter his family from the get-go. In the novel, Jack Torrence is a decent guy who loves his wife and son. He has the misfortune of moving his family to The Overlook Hotel, an evil place with a supernatural corrupting influence. By the end he is so twisted by the evil that resides there that his only options are to murder everyone around him or destroy himself. There is no greater metaphor for the Maine experience than this book.