Hulu's new series, Castle Rock, which is nearly done with its first season, is set in the eponymous town - a location that finds itself the location of many of Stephen King's books. Much as Lovecraft imagined various placed in Massachusetts like Arkham and Innsmouth, King has a few places in Maine that similarly embody the state's essence while leaving any real locations safely unmentioned.
Castle Rock is where Cujo and the Dead Zone and Needful Things and a number of other King works are set. King's is a shared literary universe, and while not all plots intersect, the implication if you've ever read his work is that they are all happening within the same universe - or rather multiverse, given that they all revolve around his Dark Fantasy opus, the Dark Tower, named for the cosmic lynchpin that holds all universes together (and maybe is God?) that is under threat from the forces of chaos and evil.
Castle Rock the show plays with a lot of King elements. The plot begins after the suicide of the Warden at Shawshank Prison (yes, the same Shawshank from the not-at-all fantasy/horror/scifi Shawshank Redemption.) As a new private prison company takes over Shawshank, they investigate an abandoned wing of the prison only to discover a man in his late twenties (seemingly) who has been locked in a cage hidden deep within in a water tank in this most isolated part of the prison.
When they ask him his name, the only one he can produce is "Henry Deaver," the name of a man who grew up in Castle Rock but left to become an attorney. Henry is called back to Castle Rock and decides to champion the man while he reconnects with his family and his strange home town.
But there's a reason Henry is hesitant to do so. When he was a preteen in the early 90s, he went missing for several days, during which his father Matthew, the preacher at the local church, died. Upon his return, suspicion fell upon him, and his absence was never explained.
The season up to this point has been unpacking the mystery of what happened to Henry and who/what "The Kid," namely the guy who had been locked up in Shawshank, is.
The location is certainly familiar, though sometimes I wonder if the show is pulling its punches in ways King would not. Half of King's monsters tend to be humans, and one could argue that the Warden who kept The Kid locked up is one of them, and that Henry's father - who we learn more and more has convinced himself he is hearing the voice of god and doing very strange things because of it - are pretty classic King villains. King has a tendency to take mundane evils like childhood bullying and parental abuse and following through with them, often having supernatural monsters empower this all-too-real cruelty, where defeating the monster and defeating a human evil are one and the same.
Henry's "othering" by the town is very interesting due to the fact that he's a black adoptee who grew up in a very white town in rural Maine, though I don't know that they explore this theme all that much. I think, for example, we'd see a lot more explicit racism in a King book, perhaps spurred on in people who had been unconsciously or dog-whistlingly racist by some supernatural threat.
The Kid is a curious figure, and there is a constant guessing game of whether he is, as the Warden once said "the Devil" or if he's just someone who has suffered horrific abuse and whose flat and alien-like demeanor are simply a response to the stress.
When we learn that this guy has looked the same for almost three decades, and that acts of barbarous violence seem to erupt around him, the whole "he's the devil" theory starts to look more likely.
In the latest episode, we actually get a rather definitive answer to both of the core mysteries of the series, though of course they raise new questions.
Spoilers ahead.
