Fanspot
House of Mr. Klerke
“It looks like number 775 is about a mile in, right after the Montauk Farm Store. (…) I turned onto a piece-of-shit dirt track marked with a sign reading PRIVATE WAY. It became clear almost at once that the dirt track was camouflage to deke curious tourists.”
Stephen King
Always playing with reality, mixing fictional and real places, as he has always done, Stephen King has, in Billy Summers, inserted a dirt road near a store located on the Montauk Highway. And if the store does exist, the path is a figment of the author’s imagination, as is the house where the confrontation between Billy, Alice and Mr. Klerke takes place in the last pages of the book.
Back to the Overlook
While Billy Summers does not contain any truly fantastic elements, it does mention the Overlook, the macabre hotel from The Shining, on several occasions. Indeed, the location makes a dramatic comeback when Billy and Alice travel to the mountains of Colorado to visit Billy’s friend Bucky. The latter living above the ruins of the Overlook, destroyed long ago after the explosion of the boiler, when Jack Torrance was in charge of its maintenance. A way of reminding us that even within the more down-to-earth stories of Stephen King, ghosts are everywhere. Including when the author mentions a painting hanging on the wall that features the Overlook’s molehills. A painting that seems to have a will of its own that the hero ends up destroying, frightened by the fact that the animals carved in the bushes seem to move.
King and his work
Stephen King explained about the presence of the Overlook in Billy Summers, in an interview for Esquire magazine : “I knew they were going to go to Sidewinder, the fictional town that exists in The Shining.. There’s actually a scene when they stop at Hemingford Home which is in The Stand and in a couple of other books, as well. I like to use my fictional places, because they’re there, and they’re handy, and readers understand that they’ve come up before. But with the Overlook Hotel, it was a conscious nod to longtime readers— a way of saying, “This is not a supernatural book, but I still remember how I got to the dance.” It’s like a tip-of-the-hat to the genre.”
Billy Summers has 528 pages. This makes it one of Stephen King’s longest single-volume novels.
775 Montauk Hwy
Located on the beautiful Montauk Highway, the Becker Home Center Inc. sells all kinds of home goods.
Part of the commercial section of the Montauk Highway, this store is located not far from Fort Pond, a very touristy pond during the summer months. Also a few miles away is the Montauk Downs State Park Golf Course and must-see Lake Montauk, one of the largest and most popular bodies of water in the region.
The Fantrippers Buying Board
The Paris guide to the 1000 cult places of films, series, music, comics and novels
The coolest guide in Paris!
The café of Amélie, the mansion of Untouchables, the jazz club of the finale of La La Land, the Hôtel du Nord of the mythical replica of Arletty “Atmosphere”, the cinema of A bout de souffle, the restaurant of Ratatouille, the quays of the Seine of Midnight in Paris, the secret places of the Da Vinci Code, the grocery store of January in La Traversée de Paris , the Bridge of Inception and Peur sur la ville, the addresses of the spectacular scenes of Mission Impossible 6, but also series Call my agent, Gears, Le Bureau des légendes, Sense8, Sex and The City, Gossip Girl…
Etienne Daho’s Café de Flore, Jay-Z and Kanye West’s hotel in Nas in Paris, Serge Gainsbourg’s Poinçonneur des Lilas metro station, Serge Reggiani and Marc Lavoine’s Mirabeau Bridge, Mc Solaar’s Lyon station…
The places evoked in the comics Adèle Blanc-Sec, Largo Winch, Blake and Mortimer, Michel Vaillant…
But also in the novels of Ernest Hemingway, Victor Hugo, Leo Malet, Daniel Pennac, Marc Levy, Guillaume Musso… you’ll find all the must-see places of Parisian Pop Culture in this new guide.
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Discover all the places Billy Summers on our map
By Gilles Rolland
Passionné de cinéma, de rock and roll, de séries TV et de littérature. Rédacteur de presse et auteur des livres Le Heavy Metal au cinéma, Paroles de fans Guns N' Roses, Paroles de fans Rammstein et Welcome to my Jungle : 100 albums rock et autres anecdotes dépareillées. Adore également voyager à la recherche des lieux les plus emblématiques de la pop culture.