Like many Mainers I grew up in the shadow of Stephen King. I wanted to be a writer, for one thing, and that meant I had basically a single role model. But man, was this role model something else. For a Maine kid you couldn't ask for better. Here was Stephen King with his incredible life story - a geeky, blue collar dude from Durham who might have otherwise ended up doing oil changes in a Jiffy Lube, but instead found a way to mine his feverish imagination and turn ghost stories into freaking gold. By the time I hit high school, he'd already achieved bestsellerdom with books like Carrie, Salem's Lot, and The Shining. And of course, the movies were coming fast and furious, too. So of course, I wanted to be a writer like Stephen King. Who wouldn't?

But when I say I grew up in the shadow of Stephen King, I mean something more. During my lifetime Stephen King redefined the state of Maine. It went from being one sort of place before he started writing his bestsellers, and then slowly - novel by novel - it became something altogether different. Because of books written by Stephen King, Maine became world-famous for being scary. We forget about it now, but before Carrie, not a lot of people in Munich or Hong Kong or Rio had even heard of Maine. These days, you travel in Europe and someone asks you where you're from, and you say, "Maine," you're apt to get this for a response: "I know Maine! It's where Cujo's from, yes?" In fact, I heard these very words once in Brussels.

So in a manner of speaking you can say that the Maine tourists come to see wouldn't exist without Stephen King. In the August issue of Down East we decided to pay homage to his enduring impact. We can only hope he forgives us.