The Frozen Shoreline Horror of Stephen King’s “The Reach”
by Alissa Burger
Stephen King’s horror ranges far and wide over the landscape of Maine, from real life locales such as Bangor and Portland to his fictional towns of Castle Rock, Derry, and Jerusalem’s Lot. The islands off the coast of Maine offer their own terrifying tales in King’s work as well, from Little Tall Island in Dolores Claiborne (1992) and Storm of the Century (1999) to Goat Island of “The Reach” (1981 as “Do The Dead Sing?”; included in the 1985 collection Skeleton Crew).
These Maine islands are special places: separated from the mainland, they retain a culture and strong sense of community all their own. These islanders are independent and self-sufficient, and while their lives may occasionally be isolated or cut off from the rest of the world, that is a trade-off that they are happy to make. As Mike Anderson notes early in Storm of the Century, “Folks from Little Tall send their taxes to Augusta, same as other folks, and we got either a lobster or a loon on our license plates, same as other folks, and we root for the University of Maine’s teams, especially the women’s basketball team, same as other folks … But we ain’t the same. Life out on the islands is different. We pull together when we have to” (3-4). Often that otherness comes from the isolation of the islands, the distance between the islands and the mainland. But sometimes, the danger comes from the water that separates the two.
In “The Reach,” Stella Flanders finds herself contemplating this stretch of water between Goat Island and the mainland, with the past and present increasingly blurring together. Stella imagines the stories she could tell and the questions she could answer, though no one ever asks her. She imagines her great-granddaughter asking “‘Gram what’s the Reach?’ … although she never had. And she would have given them the answer any fisherman knew by rote: a Reach is a body of water between two bodies of land, a body of water which is open at either end” (549, emphasis original). Stella often looks across the Reach, at the trees and town on the other side of the water, though she has spent her whole life on Goat Island, never having crossed the Reach or seen any reason to do so. The Reach is a barrier between Goat Island and the mainland, as well as a buffer that helps ensure the safety and secrecy of the island and its residents when they need it. While the Reach gives, it also takes, including fishermen who die at sea and an adventurous man named Russell Bowie, who falls through the too-thin ice of the Reach and drowns. And in the final year of Stella Flanders’ life, it also becomes a temptation, calling to her with the ghostly voices of those who have died.
In Stella’s last winter “the Reach froze for the first time since 1938” (549). This freeze simultaneously brings the mainland closer and separates the islanders even further from the rest of the world. On the one hand, if they choose to do so, the islanders can now walk across to the mainland rather than taking a boat. Stella’s late husband Bill and his friend Bull Symes did just that in 1938: “Strapped on snowshoes, walked across to Dorrit’s Tavern on the Head, had them each a shot of whisky, and walked back” (550). But there’s something unreal and uncanny about crossing this barrier and, as Russell Bowie’s death demonstrates, not everyone survives the adventure when they set out on the frozen Reach. In addition to the dangers of thin ice, when the snow begins falling and blowing, it is all too easy to lose your bearings and wander off in the wrong direction, away from the mainland, away from the island, and into the impenetrable darkness. However, as winter wears on, Stella begins seeing Bill with increasing frequency, smiling kindly and asking her “when you comin cross to the mainland?” (548).
In the end, Stella decides that the time has come for her to make her own journey, to set off across the ice of the Reach and see what she can see. She bundles up and finally gives in to the inviting voices of the dead who have been calling to her. She has lived her entire life on the island and has been happy to do so, but that long life has reached its end and as her body fails her, it is the water and the Reach that offer salvation and the promise of something beyond Goat Island, more tempting than the mainland itself. When she gets to the shoreline of Goat Island, “Bill was out there, beckoning” (560) and for the first time in her life, Stella leaves the island.
Stella walks away from the shore and into a whiteout, and in that liminal space between Goat Island and the mainland, between life and death, she is reunited with all of those who she has loved and lost. Bill is there, of course, offering her both his arm and his hat when her own blows away, snatched by the driving wind, and when she turns around she sees “the others coming out of the snow that the wind drove across the Reach in the gathering darkness. A cry, half joy, half fear, came from her mouth” (564). She sees old friends, including a reclaimed fisherman who had gone down with his boat years ago, now “not a mouldering skeleton somewhere on the bottom … but whole and young” (564). Time and the Reach may have taken their lives, but in the expanse between the island and the mainland, all is reclaimed and restored. Stella smiles at her friends, takes Bill’s hand, and finally crosses the Reach.
Once Stella is gone, the mantle of hypothetical storytelling passes on to her bachelor son Alden, who tells some stories and keeps some secrets, and begins to sense some ghosts of his own. Looking back on how his mother crossed the Reach, Alden reflects that “There are things that can never be told, and there are things, not exactly secret, that are not discussed” (566, emphasis original). The mystery and otherworldly promise of Stella’s passing becomes another one of those secrets that the islanders keep and hold close to their hearts, because when Stella’s frozen body is found on the mainland, she is not wearing that hat she set out with from her own kitchen, but Bill’s. Alden notes that “Larry McKeen had recognized that cap. So had John Bensohn. He had seen it in their eyes, and he supposed they had seen it in his. He had not lived long enough to forget his dead father’s cap, the look of its bill or the places where the visor had been broken” (566, emphasis original). The Reach encompasses life and death, but it also speaks of something beyond, a ghostly comfort and camaraderie that waits for each of them when it is their turn to step out from the shore.
Alissa Burger is an Associate Professor of English at Culver-Stockton College in Canton, Missouri (USA). Her research interests include horror, the Gothic, graphic narratives, and the work of Stephen King. She is the author of the Devil’s Advocates series monograph IT Chapters 1 & 2 (2023) and The Quest for the Dark Tower: Genre and Interconnection in the Stephen King Series (2021). Her previous work on the ocean and popular culture includes “‘Beneath the Surface Lies the Future’: Narrative, Characterization, and the Natural World with seaQuest DSV’s Darwin” in the edited collection Animals in Narrative Film and Television: Strange and Familiar Creatures (2022) and “Exploration, Education, and Humanity: James Cameron’s Deep Sea Documentaries” in A Critical Companion to James Cameron (2019).