LISBON FALLS, Maine — Sharon Kitchens got her big idea a few years ago while traversing an eerie stretch of country road somewhere in the Pine Tree State.
“I thought, this is so Stephen King,” Kitchens said, “the old churches, the abandoned gas stations, the cemeteries and granite mausoleums.”
It turned out, she was spot on.
Kitchens later learned that she’d been driving through the actual towns where King grew up, south and east of Lewiston. She also realized many of them appear in his terrifying novels and short stories.
With this discovery, Kitchens started re-reading all her favorite King books, matching up real towns and locations with the author’s fictionalized versions, and plotting them on hand-drawn maps. This pandemic exercise in homebound time-killing later morphed into a popular website.
Now, it’s a full-blown book called “Stephen King’s Maine.”
Kitchens is celebrating its release on Thursday, May 23 at SPACE Gallery in Portland, along with a screening of “Pennywise: The Story of ‘It,’” a documentary directed by John Campopiano. Following the film, both Kitchens and Campopiano will take questions and discuss their work.
The new book features maps and suggested itineraries for tourists wanting to take King-centric driving tours around Maine. It also explores the real-life towns where King grew up and eventually set his stories, and the people — alive and undead — who populate them.
“It’s about the small towns and big characters which shaped his work,” Kitchens said. “King nails small towns and the intense personalities you find in them — kind of like Mayberry meets Twin Peaks.”
Kitchens spoke while sipping java this week in a Lisbon Falls coffee house which appears in her book. It’s in a building that formerly housed the Enterprise newspaper, where King worked as a teenager. He recalls the experience in detail in his memoir “On Writing.” Viewable out the back window of the coffee shop is a faded Western Auto sign marking a shop that shows up in King’s first published novel, “Carrie,” which came out 50 years ago.
Around the corner from the coffee shop once stood the giant Worumbo textile mill where King labored one college summer and which looms large in his story “Graveyard Shift.” The whole town plays a big part in King’s time-traveling tome “11/22/63.”
One of the real-life King-related characters Kitchens found while researching her book is Doug Hall, a local who grew up with the horror master. Kitchens met Hall by chance at the Lisbon Historical Society one day.
At first, Hall was wary of Kitchens. She’s not the first writer to come to town, asking about King. Most are looking for salacious dirt.
“People always want to know about his childhood,” Hall said, “and what awful thing happened to make him the way he is.”
To this notion, Hall just shakes his head.
Once Kitchens and Hall got to know each other, he eventually led her on long drives around Lisbon Falls, Durham and Pownal, helping her construct detailed maps of how the towns looked back in the 1950s and 60s, when he and King were growing up there.
In those days, Hall said, there was no school bus to bring himself, King and their brothers to school. Instead, the boys’ parents pooled their money and hired a taxi to do it every day.
“And back then, Route 9 was still all dirt,” Hall said of their daily commute from Durham to Lisbon.
Hall said, in those days, expectant mothers living on the unpaved road would leave and stay with relatives in bigger towns when their babies were due, afraid they’d be stuck at home during mud season for the delivery.
Hall also told Kitchens a story about how his brother, Brian Hall, scared King one night when they were still kids.
“One night Brian and Steve were up late at our house watching horror movies,” Doug Hall recalls in the book. “At midnight or so, Steve trudged slowly down the hill and across the street toward his home (which was next to the church). Brian ran across the field and into the church. It wasn’t locked in those days. As Stephen walked by, he came out the door screaming. Steve was terrified.”
Doug Hall said he’s not so much of a horror fan, but he appreciates the way King writes about small towns. In the sprawling novel “It,” King describes a scene where the main character, Mike, is “harvesting” rocks from a farm field one spring with his father. It’s a scene Hall recognizes.
“Not many authors would take the time to describe rock-picking,” Doug Hall said. “In my mind, those hands looked just like my father’s hands. He never wore gloves.”
Kitchens loves the same novel, but for different reasons.
“I wanted to be one of those kids in ‘It’ — or in the ‘The Body,’” she said, referencing a King novella on which the film “Stand by Me” was based.
Again, for Kitchens, it’s all about the big personalities and small towns.
“King was one of the first authors I read as a kid who talked about how hard it was to be a kid,” she said, “and how bad things sometimes happen.”
Kitchen stresses that her new book is about King’s Maine locations and environments, not about the author, himself, whom she has never met.
“I’m not so arrogant to think I could write a full-blown biography,” she said. “I just hope the book draws people into these small, rich towns — rich as in full of great places and great characters.”
