Castle Rock and Stephen King

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.


The episode in question is called "Henry Deaver." And what we discover is that we had been misinterpreting the Kid from the start. When asked his name, he answered. He is Henry Deaver. But he's a different Henry Deaver.

The episode is set in the current day, but is actually a sort of prequel to the events that occurred back in the early 90s. We meet this Henry as a successful neurologist working for some Boston-based biotech firm. He's miles away from the thousand-yard-stare creepozoid that we've seen over the course of the series. He's pitching a neural implant that his company has created that is meant to help patients with Alzheimer's, which is apparently inspired by his mother Ruth's struggle with the disease.

Yet in this universe, it's not just Henry who is different. In an earlier episode, when Matthew Deaver has been browbeating the young Henry into listening for the "voice of God," Ruth considers, but ultimately does not run away with Henry into the loving arms of Alan Pangborn (a King recurring character and Ruth's star-crossed lover.) Later in life, the two would get together, though due to Ruth's own bizarre unstuck-in-time problems, she would fatally shoot him accidentally (two episodes ago.)

But in this universe, she did leave Matthew, and this Henry hasn't seen his father since then, which he seems to think is probably for the best. So just as he is prodding his wife (or possibly girlfriend) about the chance that she might be pregnant, he gets a call and finds out that his father has shot himself in the head. Henry, just like "our" Henry, thus goes up to Castle Rock to deal with this fallout, though it's a very different Castle Rock. While "ours" is run down and economically depressed, his is holding a fun summer festival filled with smiling people.

Yet despite the differences, we soon find out that there is one massive parallel. While descending into the dark basement of his late father's house (which in "our" universe is his mother's house now,) Henry finds a metal cage that holds within it... the twelve-year-old black Henry Deaver.

Yes, both mysteries are solved. The Kid is Henry, and in a sense, Henry is the Kid (at one point he is even referred to as such.) When the police take the person I'll call Henry 1 (even though technically we saw this episode's protagonist first,) into protective custody, Henry 2 realizes that Henry 1 knows things about his life and his dad that no one should.

He later finds a set of tapes making a comprehensive audio journal his dad recorded, and we hear the story. Henry 1 arrived in the middle of the night at Matthew 2's house and, thinking that this was his father, told him about how he had heard the voice of God in the forest finally. But Matthew 2, religious madman that he was, became convinced that this strange, unfamiliar Henry was actually the Devil granting Matthew's wish, not God answering his prayers. And so Matthew drugged this black Henry and imprisoned him in a cage. And nearly thirty years passed, without this Matthew aging a day.

Convinced that he needs to help his doppelganger-in-all-but-age-and-appearance get away, Henry 2, with the help of his old neighbor Molly (who appears to have the Shining - which is an element that shows up in a lot more King books than just that one,) bring him to the woods. After the police officer who had been assigned to escort them to Molly's home after she secured his release from a jail appears to fatally strike Molly with the warning shot he had fired several seconds earlier (which... hm,) Henry 2 follows Henry 1 farther into the woods until they pop into a bizarre location - one that appears to be a Thinny - a place where the walls between realities have grown thin and permeable.

And it is through this Thinny that Henry 1 makes his reappearance, to be rescued by a much younger Alan Pangborn. But also into this reality has come Henry 2, who we know will be found by Warden Lacey and imprisoned himself.

There's a not-quite time loop element to this - it's not Henry 2's actions that got Henry 1 taken in the first place, but while Henry 1's near thirty-year trauma is something he has apparently repressed, Henry 2 has a vague sense of it before he is subjected to the same treatment - except that he is an adult preserved in his late 20s instead of a child preserved as a pre-teen, and at least it's not his apparent father who is doing this.

But there are definitely some remaining questions. Both "aliens" seem to cause others around them to act brutal and violent, even if neither seems to desire this. There's also a really big question surrounding Molly. Molly 1, while Henry 1 is missing, receives a telepathic communication that she believes is from him. Before he dies, Matthew 1 falls off a cliff - this is before Henry 1 returns - but he does not die. Molly walks into the house and disconnects his breathing tube, believing Henry wants her to do this. But presumably, during this gap, neither Henry is in that universe. Can this connection cross the barrier, or is there something else encouraging this action?

I do feel like this invites a rewatch, knowing who The Kid is. Does it all hold up? His actions during The Queen seemed to push Ruth into the behavior that killed Alan, but was this intentional? And what about Lacey? What made him so convinced that Henry 2 was evil? In Henry 1's case, it was a strange boy showing up claiming to be Matthew 2's son and knowing a great deal about the mystical forces that had been his obsession. But did Henry 2 even introduce himself to Lacey? It's a shame we didn't get that scene (in part because we could have gotten more Terry O'Quinn, although this was a far younger Lacey and likely would have been a different actor now that I think about it.)

Anyway, the presence of alternate universes and zealots convinced that they know God's will doing horrific things to people certainly fit with King's oeuvre. I guess what I wonder is how willing they are to talk about alien presences and Lovecraftian monsters influencing events.

I'm actually not sure if this is meant to be an ongoing narrative in future seasons or a limited anthology. On one hand, they did answer both of the biggest mysteries the show had, but I'm also not sure they'll be able to address the questions that this raised.