Stephen King's Bangor House

 The house I’ve chosen is the Bangor house owned by Stephen King while he lived in Maine.​​ This Victorian house was built in 1858, and King lived there for 40 years, starting in 1980. The house itself is a striking red color with white trim. King customized parts of the house such as a fence with spider webs and bats to add to the spooky aura. 

This house inspired many of King’s books that he wrote while living there, such as “It”, “Insomnia”, “11/22/63” and “Dreamcatcher”. All of these novels take place in the fictional town of Derry which is based on the town of Bangor. 

I will be focusing on one of King’s most popular works, the 1986 novel, “IT”. The book centers around seven kids that call themselves the “Losers” that all experienced the wrath of Pennywise the clown in their hometown of Derry in summer 1957. Pennywise uses the sewers of the town to lure children into their deaths. It switches perspectives between the children, now adults, and their childhood memories of the trauma. The seven are brought back together by the reemergence of their evil foe from childhood in 1984. All of the men have moved from Derry, except one who calls them back to kill Pennywise for good. Pennywise lives in an old house where the children and then adults must fight him to keep him from taking more children into the sewers.

The red and white house alludes directly to the villain in the novel, Pennywise the clown whose signature colors are the same, and his red balloon used as a calling card. The sewer that inspired King to make sewers where Pennywise dwells is also located close to the house in Bangor. In this novel, King uses the signature haunted house as the heart of the curse of Pennywise. The children must enter the house to defeat Pennywise and his many other shapeshifting forms. It serves more as a nightmare than the interior of a house. The children are presented with their greatest fears personified by Pennywise as they try to fight him. The house also becomes a cave where the souls of lost children go after Pennywise kills them. At that moment in the novel, the house actually seems to disappear completely into a hell-ish underground world. The house becomes a front for something much darker lurking underneath. 

The town of Bangor provided King with a landscape to imagine the worst possible circumstances. A sleepy town without much going on holds so much potential for terror. The town was not known for much before King, but it was known as the supposed birthplace of the legend of the lumberjack, Paul Bunyan. His massive statue stands in the town and King even uses it in the novel to terrorize one of the children by animating it. An arcade also serves as an important meeting place that the children can usually be found in. In a town with not much else to do, the arcade is the beating pulse for the kids in real life as well. A final thing about Bangor is that it experiences very high rainfall, similar to Derry which floods often and provides Pennywise with power in his circuit of sewers. The iconic opening scene of the novel features Georgie, one of the main children’s little brother, in a yellow raincoat during the flood trying to float a paper boat which falls in a sewer. Pennywise appears and tells the boy he will give the boat back if he reaches down for it. When he does, Pennywise rips his arm off and kills him. 

King writes to make his house the one that children run past for fear of a monster within. But, in reality, fans flocked to King’s house and stood outside the tacky fence looking for signs of the writer. To this day, the house is still a tourist location. People can gawk at the house and the town of Bangor with its menacing sewers. King was avid about not having his house become a tourist trap, so he made it a writer’s retreat and museum of his writing. This definitely reflects King’s own stubborn personality. He did not want any of his books to become movies at first, but then eventually gave in. He also did not dedicate time to fans and spent most of his time writing in isolation. The novel has been adapted into a 1990 miniseries as well as a movie in 2017 followed by “It: Chapter Two” in 2019. Before the 2017 adaptation, a red balloon was placed in the window of the Bangor home to excite fans. 

Works Cited

Mullinger, James. “The It Factor: Exploring Stephen King’s Maine.” The Guardian, 20 Sept. 2017, www.theguardian.com/travel/2017/sep/20/it-movie-film-exploring-stephen-king-maine-bangor-mount-hope-cemetery.

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