The actual Harmony Hill Cemetery is called Harmony Grove Cemetery. This makes sense, given King’s fascination for Southern Maine in those early novels as he had grown up in that general area and was still living around there at the time. More than that, it hails from Stephen King’s actual hometown of Durham. This cemetery, as it turns out, is very real. The scene in the Tobe Hooper miniseries terrified me for completely different reasons at a young age, as it was the image of Danny Glick popping up with his eyes shining silver that scared the living hell out of me and nothing was implied.
The same is true of Mike’s death, later, when we’re simply hearing the child vampire suck Mike’s last remaining drops of blood out from Matt Burke’s perspective. Mike is hypnotically lured into the grave because he feels like it’s looking at him and it’s one of the most uncomfortable moments in the book without actually showing anything. In the novel, this is where Danny Glick is buried after becoming a vampire and where he in turn bites Mike Ryerson, who has been charged with burying him. One of the first that comes to mind, which was seen on screen as recently as last year’s Castle Rock, is Harmony Hill cemetery. Just by the fact of being a significantly smaller book, Salem’s Lot doesn’t have quite as many seminal locations as IT, but there are still some that stand out that any fan of the material might instantly think of when thinking about the book or either adaptation. It’s easy to buy this as the “real” Salem’s Lot just at a first glance. Yarmouth might not exactly be a ghost town, but it’s still pretty small and secluded. There’s even a strong visual similarity with the way the town is described. If you were to match that up with the actual state, then the town of Jerusalem’s Lot pretty well matches up with the actual town of Yarmouth. Surprisingly, the geographical location of Salem’s Lot in the novel-particularly its relative distance to Cumberland-is made pretty clear. Naturally, to start a spotlight on the locations of Salem’s Lot, you have to start with the location of the town itself and the inspirations behind it. To make the town feel as real as possible, King must have taken a lot of influence from the world around him, some of which has been well documented from the author himself, the rest of which can be inferred from the descriptions in the novel and a general knowledge of the state. That got him thinking about what would happen if the vampire returned not in the city, but in one of any number of small Maine towns where no one would really even notice if people started to disappear. King famously said to his wife, Tabitha, while teaching Dracula in high school, “What would happen if the Count came back now?” And she joked that he’d take a step to cross the street in Times Square and be flattened by a bus. This book hinges on those real world influences because they were the entire reason for writing it in the first place. I’m talking, of course, about Salem’s Lot.
One of my all-time favorite King books, though, never seems to get that level of interest or recognition (outside of this fantastic blog post I’m very grateful for) even though it has just as many real world influences. A lot of people have taken a look at the locations that inspired IT and Pet Sematary in particular. But there are some that are far, far more talked about than others. With the exceptions of things like Dark Tower, The Stand and The Eyes of the Dragon, most of King’s stories are set in a world that feels incredibly real, with characters you feel like you could bump into on the street. People have a fascination for the locations behind King’s books and movies and I get why.
With major landmarks and restaurants being places you can instantly recall from memory. I also can’t describe the extra impact that those books have when King’s describing a clown lurking in a drain in a town you know the ins and outs of, a place that is completely concrete and real to you. People come from all over to take the Stephen King tour in Bangor and visit all of the real-life locations behind Derry, especially with the success of the new film. It’s never not amazing to me the passion fans have around the world for the places King has described on the page and the real-life inspirations behind them. It didn’t really sink in until I was around 10, when they began filming Storm of the Century in my home town, how truly lucky I was as a fan to live where I lived. After all, I was a huge Stephen King fan from a very early age and I was not only growing up in Maine, but growing up right in the heart of the locations of some of his most well known stories. As a kid, I sometimes took for granted how amazing it was to grow up where I grew up.
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