Rupert Lally - Where the Dark Speaks - for the Halloween season, illbient instrumentals inspired by Stephen King
The Dark Landscape Of The Mind Despite often seeming an overly formal language, one benefit German has over English is its use of a single word to evoke an abstract feeling that we would need an entire sentence to describe. One of these is ‘Fernweh’. The opposite of ‘Heimweh’ (homesickness), it is the longing for or the familiarity with somewhere that you have never been. Long before I knew of this or any other German word, Stephen King’s books took me to places so vivid it seemed like I’d actually been there. My knowledge of the state of Maine, where the majority of King’s books are based, was even sketchier than it is now. I’ve still never been there and in fact my knowledge of the US in general was, I now realise, largely a fabrication; drawn from TV shows shot on a studio back lot. Despite this, I developed a deep familiarity with the towns of Castle Rock, Derry, Salem’s Lot and all the others. In my mind’s eye I felt enough of a native to be able to navigate the streets with ease and have some sense of how far the various locations were from each other. More than that, I felt I could describe the clothes and haircuts of the characters, along with the decor of their homes and would sometimes feel short changed when subsequent film adaptations of King’s work seemed unable to maintain this level of detail. In short, a sense of place and the nature of a location is just as essential to King’s work as the creepy storylines or the graphic descriptions of horrific events. Not only because a sense of familiarity allows him to underpin the fantastic nature of the storylines with a level of detail, but also because of the reoccurring theme that a location is of vital importance to, and even partly responsible for, the events that transpire there. Again and again in his work we are treated to examples of places where either the occupants are evil, or where great evil has taken place, acting as a beacon or magnet for other bad events and people. With that in mind, allow me to act as your sonic tour guide to some of the most malevolent spots in Stephen King’s fictional A-Z. Rupert Lally
