Castle Rock.

I had to write to say that I won't be home anymore

'Cause something happened to me while I was driving home

And I'm not the same anymore

As part of this newest wave of filming Steven King adaptations, Hulu has released the ten-episode series "Castle Rock" (all episodes streaming now). It is written by Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason and based in the King multiverse, set in his oft-used fictional, foreboding town of Castle Rock, Maine and making frequent nods to past literary horrors. The story is new, and as mentioned not penned by King, but tries mightily to carry the spirit and underlying philosophy of his work.

The series is made to appeal to both the rabid and the casual King fan; you do not need an intimate knowledge of his canon to understand and enjoy it. I personally have only read two of his short story collections and seen a handful of his films, but his writing is so iconic, so permanently etched into the fabric of modern American society, that the odd reference to Cujo or The Shining is immediately recognized. (The series also features at least three actors who have been in previous King films: Sissy Spacek of Carrie, and Bill Skarsgard and Chosen Jacobs from the recent It)

The premise is this: on a bright late summer morning, Shawshank Penitentiary's very recently retired warden Dale Lacey (Terry O'Quinn) commits suicide. Upon hearing that he had kept an entire cell block empty for decades, his successor Theresa Porter (Ann Cusack) sends two prison guards to investigate the area; there they find, in an underground cell, a young man in a cage. When asked to identify himself, he says the name Henry Matthew Deaver. The problem is, he is most decidedly not Henry Deaver, and the guards who grew up in Castle Rock know this instantly.

One of those guards, Dennis Zalewski (Noel Fisher), calls the real Henry (Andre Holland) anonymously and tells him he is being asked for in his hometown. Henry is currently a lawyer for death row inmates in Texas; we see him eloquently (but ultimately fruitlessly) arguing to a jury for the commutation of the death sentence of a woman who killed her husband. He reluctantly makes the trip up to Maine to discover the purpose of the anonymous call, and on a more personal note, to visit his mother Ruth (Sissy Spacek), currently suffering from dementia.

(thar be spoilers ahead)


Who is the Kid?

The character known only as "the Kid" is played by Bill Skarsgard, who famously portrayed Pennywise the Clown in last year's truly excellent remake of It. (He knocked the sewer scene out of the park - so intensely, authentically creepy). Here he is an almost mute, gaunt, but imposingly tall figure, left shoulder sagging, staring at everyone blankly yet intently, ostensibly heavily traumatized by years of the worst solitary confinement. Why was he down there? What was Lacey doing to him? We don't know because he won't tell. He only stares.

Who is Henry Deaver?

Henry is African-American, adopted by white parents at six years old in the 1980s (their only child had died at birth). The father, Matthew Deaver, was a devout preacher and strict with discipline; his mother Ruth had a "friend" in Sheriff Alan Pangborn (he of two other King novels). In 1991 when he was eleven, Henry went missing for eleven days, during which time his father died under mysterious circumstances. It was the dead of winter in the Northeast and no one expected to find Henry alive. But then one morning, there he was, standing in the middle of frozen Castle Lake, where Pangborn found him. No frostbite, no malnutrition. No memory of any events before being found, and by that I mean his memory of his life was wiped clean. Despite any trauma he must have endured, the town believed he had faked his kidnapping in order to kill his adoptive father.

Upon his return to Castle Rock in present day, he finds that Ruth's condition has worsened and that Alan Pangborn, now craggy and surly, has moved in to take care of her.

A philosophy of horror

Steven King doesn't just write scary stories; he writes horror, which has (when done correctly) a foundation of the dread of the unknown, the incomprehensible, the uncontrollable. My favorite short story of his is "1408" from the collection Everything's Eventual. I made the mistake of taking it with me on a trip and reading it before bedtime, and even with my mom sleeping next to me, I was scared shitless.

Many of his stories present evil as a wrongness, as an essential quality of some thing or someone that is inseparable from any other part of their nature; as something that cannot be rehabilitated or exorcised because it simply is, it always has been, and it exists for its own sake. You deal with it, maybe even contain it, but you never defeat it. That is what both his protagonists and antagonists alike are up against; that is true horror, and that is what Castle Rock's writers had to capture.

The Kid exhibits an aura of wrongness. It isn't just that he's creepy; bad things actually seem to happen when he's around. Since the administration at Shawshank doesn't know what to do with him (of course, it's first and foremost a public relations nightmare), they put him on a cell block in a tiny cell with the obligatory white-power roommate. As the obligatory white-power roommate tries to intimidate and insinuate, the Kid - eyes averted, posture wary and meek - very, very softly says, "You don't want to touch me." The next morning White-Power Roommate is found dead in the cell, the cause of which is discovered to be impossible: multiple stage-four cancers throughout his entire body.

We learn that before committing suicide, Warden Lacey touched the Kid's face in a gesture of goodbye and perhaps regret as he left the underground cell for the last time, instructing him that whenever he was found, he was to ask for Henry Matthew Deaver. Dennis Zalewski, trying to do the right thing in an institution riddled with the most shocking abuses throughout its 100-year history, fatefully bumps fists with the Kid through the cell bars in a gesture of good will - he's trying to help. Within twenty-four hours he's riddled with bullets.

There are other instances where simply his mere presence nearby induces people to commit horrific acts. The Kid never lifts a finger against anyone, and yet violence and death surround him, as though his very essence manipulates the nature of reality as an imperative; blind, ambivalent, chaotic, unknowable, uncontrollable. The question is, why?

Remembrance

In my opinion it's impossible to tell a story "through-composed," without any flashbacks. "Castle Rock" features plenty of shifts through time to slowly piece together the various mysteries we are faced with. The most striking use is with Ruth Deaver, as she deals with the loosening of her cognitive grip on reality and finds herself reliving the past in vignettes again and again.

Her marriage to Matthew had deteriorated by the time of young Henry's disappearance, caused largely by the minister's insistence on proof of God's existence. On a jaunt to the nearby woods to blow his brains out, he was stopped by a sound permeating the air that, to him, could only be the voice of God. Quickly obsessed, Matthew spent his days roaming the woods listening to the schisma, soon forcing Henry to accompany him and admit that he could hear it, too. Encouraged by Pangborn, Ruth very nearly escaped Maine with Henry to start over elsewhere - but ultimately could not go through with it. Soon after, Henry disappeared.

In a stellar hour of television dedicated to Ruth, we are with her as she moves not only through her house but through time, anchored only by the baroque chess pieces given as a gift by Alan. When she sees one, she knows that her intense reveries are not real. She admits to Henry's son Wendell, visiting from Boston, that they had played their game of chess and had this conversation several times - that time stopped moving linearly for her.

It's a fascinating way to portray and try to clarify the conditions of dementia and Alzheimer's, especially now that we know resisting the person's "movement through time" only hurts them, and that we should instead go along in order to reduce their stress. Therefore, in this episode the Kid (whom Henry has brought home not knowing what else to do with his client) seems to play along with Ruth's confusion that he may be her deceased husband. It expands Skarsgard's portrayal of his character but also only muddles what we thought we knew: how can he know so much about Ruth, let alone her past? Why does he know the combination to the safe, how she likes her eggs, the game she and Henry used to play at bath time? Is he Matthew come back from beyond? Is he, as Warden Lacey believed, the devil and therefore the supreme trickster?

What is the schisma?

Fuck if I know. Essentially it's a sort of twisting of the fabric that separates alternate realities, allowing someone at the right place in the right moment to get caught up in it, and spit back out far from home. It also casts a figurative shadow over someone who passes through it, a veil of wickedness seeking whom it may devour as it clings to its host. The precise details of it are left to the viewer to speculate, but it is the entire reason for the series, and hints at playing a part in many other gruesome events in the history of Castle Rock, Maine.

Prison

With the essentials of the show now laid out, I move to one of the most shattering episodes of television I've ever seen. I don't expect that others would feel the exact same way, but it cut so deep I will never forget the experience.

In the penultimate episode of the season, we finally learn who the Kid is - he is an alternate reality version of Henry Deaver, the son of Ruth and Matthew, surviving instead of dying at birth. In his timeline, he and his mother did escape with Pangborn, and Henry became a successful adult and a husband. When he receives the news that his father passed away, he flies home to Castle Rock and takes stock of the house. In the basement, he finds a young black boy in a cage.

The mystery of Black Henry Deaver's disappearance is solved in one cataclysmic moment - coming into contact with the schisma sent him to this alternate timeline, where his parallel self had just escaped with Ruth; when he made his way back to the house, it was the home he knew, the father he knew, but everything else was different. Matthew, believing this boy who called him "Dad" to be both heaven-sent and evil, naturally locked him up in a cage.

And there he stayed. For over twenty years. Whatever laws of physics bend when someone moves through the schisma keeps them from aging, or even being susceptible to death by things like hunger. This miraculous agelessness only cemented Matthew's conviction regarding this strange black child's supernatural origin, and there was never any reason for him to release young Henry. Only in his death was Henry freed.

After a series of events, young Henry is able to escape back to the schisma, back home, but unintentionally bringing the other Henry with him. And thus, White Henry's stay at Shawshank is just days away and his own twenty-plus year imprisonment on the dark horizon.

The idea not just of imprisonment but wrongful imprisonment, and in the darkest, smallest, loneliest cage possible, for days that turn into weeks and then into months and then into years and then into decades...well, it blew my mind, and not in a good way. I believe this was the moment that the writers out-Steven-Kinged Steve King.

I will credit the reviewer over at A.V. Club for noticing the deeper metaphor implied by the use of Shawshank as one of the series' primary settings. Obviously the suffering both Henrys endured is an easy frame in which to fit almost anyone who does hard time, and the fact that they were both locked away for crimes that only seemed to exist in their captors' minds - some notion of evil decided by one person in authority - is telling.

There's also the issue of forgetting who you were, seen most strikingly in Black Henry as he returned to the early 90s with absolutely no memory of his life before the schisma, none. It stands to reason that if White Henry ever gets back home, he will face the same irreversible amnesia, as a husband with possibly a child on the way. Being in prison for epic periods of time does change people, and many forget the past in order to survive the present.

Then there's the recidivism, which hit me almost as hard as young Henry's imprisonment. In the final episode of Castle Rock, we seemingly get an answer about "the Kid" - though he came to this timeline a normal, well adjusted person, he in some way became evil via the schisma, and was responsible for the terrible things that spontaneously happened around him. Black Henry made the choice to try and save Castle Rock by putting White Henry back in Shawshank...back in the abandoned wing...back in the tiny little cell.

My heart actually sank at this. Prison is a metaphor for many, many things in this life, and to escape or be set free is no small thing. Ending the season right back where he started, having gained nothing, having erased all progress toward home, back in the futility and indefinite darkness, is just a brutal thing. Many prisoners, unable to adjust to life on the outside, find themselves back in, where they now somehow "belong." Is the Kid really evil? The shows ending gives us some chance at relief by hinting that he is and therefore he deserves to serve more time. But what about the person he used to be? What if he could just get back home, losing all memory but regaining his humanity?

***

A very nice touch by the writers was to further embed the shared traumas of the Henrys into their lives. Black Henry chooses a career as a lawyer specifically for death row inmates, to try to release them from a prison they will otherwise never leave. Ostensibly he has no memory of his ordeal beyond the schisma, but his occupation is truly bittersweet. White Henry is a doctor searching for the cure to dementia and Alzheimer's - working to help recover memories and restore lives. He is spurred on by Ruth's worsening condition, but psychically linked, perhaps, to his brother by another reality.

There is plenty more to this show that I can't cover for the sake of length, so I highly recommend watching it. Even though I just spoiled everything. I think the task the writers set before themselves was accomplished marvelously and I hope they come back for future seasons.

One more interesting thing to note is how writers have found a solution to the inevitable expiration date on major plot twists. It all started with The Sixth Sense, but twenty years on I think we're all tired of the asshats who claim to see a ridiculous twist coming in like the first ten minutes. So now, we are given movies and TV shows that are constructed like puzzles, so instead of one shocking twist at the end, the viewer is left putting the pieces together in a string of "aha!" moments. I think it's pretty clever, myself.

Ok. Go watch.