The Persecutors

The Persecutors is Danforth Keeton’s name for the imagined force he believes is conspiring against him. The phrase gives a single, menacing identity to disparate pressures—including an impending audit of Castle Rock’s accounts—and reveals how a word repeated in fear can turn suspicion into a private reality. Leland Gaunt recognizes that reality and uses it to draw Keeton into his plans.

Naming the threat

During a tense conversation with Alan Pangborn, Keeton says he is tired of the persecution. It is the second time he has used the word, and Alan finds it unsettling: the conversation has shifted beyond an ordinary disagreement into language that suggests Keeton experiences himself as the target of a continuing campaign. Keeton abruptly rises, still angry, and leaves. The exchange establishes the vocabulary of persecution before the narrative gives it a more definite shape.

That shape emerges in Keeton’s office, where an official letter announces a comprehensive audit of the town’s books, scheduled for October 17, five days away. The state authorities seek access to tax records, revenue-sharing accounts, expenses, road maintenance, municipal law-enforcement budgets, Parks Department accounts, and records concerning the state-funded experimental tree farm. The letter bears personal signatures from the State Treasurer, State Auditor, and Attorney General. Its breadth and short deadline make the audit an unmistakable institutional pressure, but Keeton reads it not as a defined inquiry into public finances but as the work of a collective enemy: They.

The distinction between the letter’s actual contents and Keeton’s interpretation is central to the expression. The audit is real; the unified persecutors he imagines behind it are not established as a hidden organization. Yet the word compresses many people and institutions into one hostile presence. Keeton whispers the pronoun at the letter, shakes it until it rattles, and bares his teeth. He then defaces the file labeled for correspondence from the Maine Bureau of Taxation, replacing its orderly designation with insults, before locking it away. His response makes the paperwork feel to him like a personal attack and turns an administrative document into a token of an enemy’s reach.

From pronoun to persecution

Keeton’s fixation does not begin with the audit letter. He has already been thinking increasingly often about a revolver kept in a carved wooden box made by his father, whose Alzheimer’s disease had taken his skills and memories. At first, Keeton tells himself the gun would not be for him, but for Them. The shift from an unnamed plural to the capitalized phrase The Persecutors gives his fear a label, while the weapon makes clear that this is not only a figure of speech: his imagined conflict is beginning to suggest physical violence.

Alone at the office window, looking out over the sleeping town, Keeton tries to calm himself and wonders who first set Them against him. He imagines that, if he could identify the supposed chief persecutor, he would use the revolver to torture and kill him. His suspicion then attaches itself to people close at hand. He considers Norris Ridgewick, remembering that Ridgewick had called him Buster and appeared contemptuous, and plans to examine the deputy’s employment record. He also considers Alan, whom he believes hates him and who knows people in Augusta. The phrase therefore does more than describe a vague unease: it supplies a ready-made explanation that can absorb each new grievance and redirect it toward a suspected culprit.

When Keeton meets Gaunt, that suspicion briefly finds a possible face. Gaunt’s sympathetic manner makes Keeton feel that he is in the presence of a fellow sufferer, yet shaking Gaunt’s hand produces such sudden revulsion that Keeton is momentarily convinced he has found his chief persecutor. He warns himself not to go too far in that suspicion. The scene holds two opposed responses together: Keeton senses danger in Gaunt, but his hunger for someone who understands his plight makes him receptive to him.

Gaunt’s intervention

Gaunt turns that receptiveness into an alliance. He tells Keeton that the town is full of Them, claims that his own new shop is already surrounded by them, and says he may need Keeton’s help. Keeton answers with emphatic willingness. The exchange is a pivotal enlargement of the delusion: what had been Keeton’s private interpretation of civic trouble is now echoed by another person as a shared diagnosis. Gaunt’s apparent confession makes Keeton feel recognized while giving the imagined enemy a wider scope.

The irony is that Gaunt does not simply validate a fear he shares. He exploits Keeton’s persecutory fixation for his own purposes. By speaking as though both men are besieged, he recasts Keeton’s suspicion as loyalty to a fellow victim and invites him to act against a common enemy. The rhetoric of persecution thus becomes a means of recruitment: a man increasingly inclined to see conspirators in officials, colleagues, and neighbors is offered a relationship that confirms his worldview and channels it into cooperation with Gaunt.

The phrase in action

The term acquires immediate force when Nettle Cobb breaks into the Keeton home and leaves pink warning slips. She leaves without Keeton seeing her. On entering his kitchen, he notices the slips and freezes; the narration renders the words flashing through his mind as THE PERSECUTORS, repeated like a screaming sign. His interpretation is instantaneous, and the physical evidence that someone has entered the house becomes, for him, confirmation of the larger campaign.

The scene’s structure makes the gap between event and belief especially stark. Nettle is already running from the house, terrified that Keeton may chase or punish her, while he remains indoors, fixed on the slips and unable to see her escape across the lawn. The reader can perceive the actual human act behind the supposed conspiracy, but Keeton’s phrase blocks that recognition. The missed sight of Nettle preserves his false explanation and allows the two frightened characters to move through the same moment with incompatible understandings of what has happened.

Across these scenes, The Persecutors is both a symptom and an instrument. It condenses Keeton’s financial and civic anxieties into a single hostile force, then gives each new grievance a place in that imagined pattern. Gaunt’s willingness to speak the language back to him turns isolation into a dangerous sense of common cause. The phrase’s menace lies not in the existence of a secret group, but in the way Keeton’s certainty erases distinctions between an official audit, personal slights, and real acts of intimidation—until suspicion itself becomes a motive for violence.