Stephen King’s novel IT, published in 1986, is set in the fictional town of Derry. Although no other work published before IT is set in Derry, the town is mentioned in no less than five stories that appeared prior to 1986. So did King create Derry for IT, or was it already part of his fictional universe before he began that book?
I believe Derry was first conceived as the setting of IT and that it premiered in King’s work in the first draft of IT, which he began in August 1980. Once the draft was finished, in June 1981, the novel became part of King’s oeuvre, you could say, and the fictional town of Derry “appeared” on his map of Maine. He knew IT would be published at some point down the line, but that it would be a while. During that five-year wait, King amused himself by putting references to Derry in several stories that were published between 1981 and 1986: The Running Man (May 1982), The Body (August 1982), “Uncle Otto’s Truck” (October 1983), Pet Semetary (November 1983), and “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” (May 1984) and “The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson” (July/August 1984).
In May 1982 The Running Man by “Richard Bachman” hit bookstores in the US and in Canada. The novel’s thrilling finale takes place largely in “Voight Airfield” in Derry, Maine. At this point very few people knew or suspected that King was Bachman. What a jedi-mind-trick to “premiere” your newest fictional town in another author’s work.
Three months after Bachman published The Running Man, Different Seasons came out in August 1982. With this book King pulled off the almost un-pull-offable: a successful collection of novellas. One of those novellas is the fantastic The Body. The story itself was written around May/June of 1973, after King finished a draft of ‘Salem’s Lot. But when he prepared it for submission to Viking in the second half of 1981, he put in a reference to Derry. I’d bet my left pinky toe “Derry” wasn’t in the first draft of the story.
The town of Derry next appeared in print in the October 1983 issue of Yankee magazine, containing King’s short story “Uncle Otto’s Truck”. It was written after he had completed IT. One month later, another novel hit the shelves with a quick reference to Derry: Pet Sematary. The book was in stores in November 1983. The first draft, written in 1979, did not contain the reference; Derry was a second-draft addition.
“Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” first appeared in Redbook magazine, in May 1984. In the afterword to Skeleton Crew King said Mrs. Todd is actually his wife, who always seemed to be on the lookout for shortcuts. When King wrote the short story he had finished IT and already done a lot of work on The Tommyknockers, so, like Derry, the town of Haven was now a part of his fictional universe. Haven is mentioned along with Derry and Bangor.
The final pre-IT occurrence of the fictional town of Derry was in the story “The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson”, which appeared in the July/August 1984 issue of Rolling Stone magazine. There’s just a very cursory mention of Derry in this one. King later incorporated the story into The Tommyknockers, changing a few things to make it fit.
Most SK fans would not have gotten to read The Running Man, “Uncle Otto’s Truck” and “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” until 1985, when these two books came out: The Bachman Books and Skeleton Crew. For ‘Becka Paulson’s conversation with Jezus they needed to wait even longer, until 1987, when The Tommyknockers came out. This somewhat odd situation sometimes creates some confusion among King readers, but a look behind the scenes at the order these stories were originally written in, and when they were rewritten, can conform that King created Derry for IT in 1980-81, and then retro-fitted Derry into new drafts of earlier stories (The Running Man, The Body and Pet Sematary) and dropped casual references in short stories he wrote between 1981 and 1985 (“Uncle Otto’s Truck”, “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” and “The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson”).