Stephen King's Geography Lessons Quiz

Answer: Colorado

Jack Torrance, a failed teacher and aspiring writer, took a job as a winter caretaker at a grand hotel in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Moving there with his wife and son as the hotel closed in the autumn, Torrance worked on his writing until strange things began to happen in and around the hotel.

As winter rolled in they became snowbound and without means of communication with the nearest towns, which were miles away. Torrance started acting strangely and his son appeared to have psychic abilities.

Answer: Connecticut

For a few years King used a nom de plume, Richard Bachman, so that he could get more than one book a year published (his agent told him to do more than one per year would be considered gauche). In this 1984 story, a lawyer, Billy Halleck, while driving through town, hit and killed an old woman who was part of a band of Gypsies.

The woman's father put a curse on the lawyer, which caused him to lose weight continually and not be able to regain it. Following the Gypsies to Maine, Halleck bargained to get the curse reversed, but at a terrible price.

Answer: Nevada

U.S. Route 50 is an east-west highway in north-central Nevada. It was named the most desolate road in America by "Life" magazine and became the setting for King's 1996 novel. Travelers were abducted by a deputy sheriff and locked in jail or killed in the town of Desperation.

It turned out that a local mining operation had loosed a being from another dimension who had to keep changing human hosts to keep itself alive. In King's storyline not everybody got out alive, or whole.

Answer: Ohio

"The Regulators" is another Stephen King novel using the pen name Richard Bachman. Though the real identity of Bachman was exposed in the mid 1980s and, according to King, Bachman died "from cancer of the pseudonym", Bachman novels have occasionally been "found" since. This one was written in 1996 as a companion to "Desperation". Its setting was a parallel universe but featured some of the same characters as "Desperation".

The Ohio story concerns Seth, a boy who has been taken over by Tak, the villain in the Nevada story. Similarly, the townspeople had to find a way to put the genie back in the bottle, as it were, before Tak killed everyone in town.

Another Richard Bachman novel, "Blaze" was "found" in King's attic in 2007. Granted, he does have a rambling old Victorian house but still...

Answer: Louisiana

People with unusual abilities are standard fare for Stephen King. This novel concerned Paul Coffey, an inmate on Cold Mountain Penitentiary's death row, who may have been wrongly convicted. Interactions and chafing among prison personnel complicated the story, as did a mouse who got the nickname Mr. Jingles.

The name of the book comes from the color of the linoleum in that part of the prison.

Answer: Florida

King's 2008 novel was the first of his to be set in Florida. Edgar Freeman was a construction contractor in Minnesota who was maimed when a crane fell over and crushed the truck he was in. Having trouble dealing with people, he decided to take a year's vacation and ended up on Duma Key, an island on Florida's Gulf of Mexico coast.

He met a man who also had brain injuries and the man's employer, a woman who owned part of the Key and was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Freeman revived his interest in sketching and began painting pictures which appeared to have paranormal ability to manipulate people and events.

But it wasn't just him, the island had some abilities of its own.

Answer: Pennsylvania

It isn't quite a hearkening back to "Christine", but the novel is set in Pennsylvania and is about a car that isn't just a mechanical device. Being left at a gas station near a Pennsylvania State Police barracks in 1979, and taken into storage by the police, the car, which looked like a 1953 Buick Roadmaster, occasionally gave off wild pulses of light and produced plants and creatures that didn't look like anything in our world.

Indeed, the car seemed to be a portal into another reality. Eventually, someone decided to destroy the car, but would that cause more problems?

Answer: Iowa

"The Library Policeman" is a novella published in a collection of four of King's short works called "Four Past Midnight". In the story Sam Peebles was asked to give a speech at his local Rotary Club. Going to the library to see if there were any books that might help him, he met the old librarian who told him cryptically that if he didn't return the books on time she would send the Library Policeman after him. Later, Peebles found out that the woman had been dead for about 30 years and there really was a library policeman who came after him. That triggered a memory from his childhood which started unravelling a string of events in which we learn that the librarian was a being which fed on fear.

In the end they destroyed the being, or did they?

Answer: North Carolina

"Joyland" was Stephen King's second novel in his occasional contributions to the "Hard Case Crime" series initiated by writer Charles Ardai. The story involves Devon Jones, a university student from New Hampshire who took a summer job at the Joyland amusement park in North Carolina.

The resident fortune teller told him he would meet someone that summer with "The Sight" (a clairvoyance similar to "the shining", in the King novel of the same name). Before long a real ghost from the haunted house in the park made itself known, as did connections to a number of murders which had never been solved. Jones learned more and more until he was confronted by the murderer.

Answer: Maine

This is a Stephen King quiz so we have to have a question about a story centered in Maine, particularly the best-known town in Maine which doesn't exist: Castle Rock. Of the several Castle Rock settings in King's stories, in this one the town saw a new shop named "Needful Things" open which seemed to have just what people wanted, even if they didn't know it when they walked in.

In return for low prices on items, the proprietor, Leland Gaunt, asked them to play a small prank on someone else in town. Gaunt knew of the grudges and arguments among the townsfolk and exploited them until the residents started killing each other. Finally, the town sheriff was all that stood between Gaunt and his sinister purposes. Though 1991's "Needful Things" was supposed to be the last Castle Rock story, King can't seem to resist bringing it back from time to time.