Stephen King is just continuing the fine New England tradition of horror which can trace itself back to such greats as HP Lovecraft and Nathaniel Hawthorne of being unable to picture the world outside New England as anything other than a screaming void of horror.
To be fair from what I’ve heard from Florida my aunts’ work in healthcare (one as an administrator and the other as a doctor) and my cousins time in school there, they’re not wrong.
(Also, note that even though Howard Philips Lovecraft is a well-known writer and any statues of him would be even more entertaining than the statue of Edgar Allan Poe being attacked by a raven just off the Boston Common, Boston does not have a tradition of putting up statues of people whose main contribution to history was their racism.)
