I think a lot of my friends and neighbors think I am being a little dramatic when I say that while Maine—particularly Western Maine—is really beautiful and loaded with great community, there is always this underlying sense of darkness that makes Stephen King’s depiction of the state feel like non-fiction. A lot of that has to do with the desolation related to extreme economic depression, and a lot of it has to do with increasingly rampant and devastating rates of addiction. The rest has to do with the fact that a man-charged-with-decapitating-neighbor-with-machette-then-disposing-of-body-in-heap-of-rotting-deer-carcasses story comes almost as no surprise. This is at once so gruesome a crime that my heart very obviously goes to those affected and, while jarring, surprising by no means at all.