Bangor Daily News

The Bangor Daily News is the regional newspaper that turns Haven’s growing crisis into a public record, even as its reports initially make the town’s strange events seem like separate emergencies. Its reporters connect the missing children, the vanished state police officers, and the unfolding danger around Bobbi Anderson’s farm; David Bright’s decision to trust John Leandro’s account finally carries the story beyond the newsroom and toward state authorities.

Coverage of the disappearances

The paper’s July 25, 1988, lead story announces that two state police officers have disappeared in Derry and that an area-wide manhunt has begun. The report identifies the officers as Benton Rhodes and Peter Gabbons and notes the unsettling connection to their last assignment: they were returning from Haven after investigating a furnace fire that had taken one life. The article places their disappearance alongside the summer’s earlier major search, the hunt for four-year-old David Brown, who remains missing. A deer found near the abandoned cruiser—shot, gutted, and cleaned—adds a further disturbing detail to the newspaper’s account, though the excerpt presents it as the basis for speculation rather than a settled explanation.

The News therefore acts as a record of separate investigations that are, in fact, converging on Haven. Its coverage makes the disappearances legible to readers outside the town, but the reports do not yet explain the connection among the missing boy, the fire, and the absent officers.

Ev Hillman seeks a public hearing

In Derry, Ev Hillman turns to the newspaper after struggling to make others understand his fears about Haven. A bartender recommends David Bright, noting that the reporter had written about John Smith, a man whose alleged psychic gift Bright had believed. After three beers, Ev calls the paper’s office and tells Bright that he has a story he cannot make sense of, but that people need to hear it quickly. Bright sounds interested and sympathetic, and asks Ev to come to Bangor that night. Ev takes this response as an opening, though the invitation to travel to the newsroom rather than an offer for Bright to come to Derry leaves the depth of the reporter’s commitment uncertain.

Ev later recognizes how little his account has accomplished. After seeing headlines about the missing officers, he wants to persuade the investigator, Dugan, that Haven is changing and that its residents are connected by telepathy. Yet he fears he cannot make the case: he can barely recall how he knew what was happening, did not witness everything himself, and sees the newspaper’s readers as overlooking what is plainly in front of them. The difficulty is not merely getting a strange story printed; it is converting an experience that depends on knowledge without ordinary evidence into something outsiders can accept.

David Bright and John Leandro

The newspaper’s reporting thread continues through David Bright’s relationship with John Leandro, who investigates the disappearance of the officers. Leandro enters Maine Med Supplies looking for an air mask, wearing a T-shirt that asks, “WHERE THE HELL is TROY, MAINE?” His purchase is part of his effort to return toward Haven, and he phones Bright while tension and excitement have made him unwilling to keep his discovery to himself. He tells himself that someone must know what he is pursuing in case something happens to him, and chooses Bright because, despite their differences, he believes the reporter will not betray him.

Bright’s response marks a change from the uncertainty surrounding Ev’s approach. He tells Leandro to slow down, but Leandro hears excitement in his voice and concludes that Bright finally believes him. Bright has promised to give Leandro until four, honoring both his word and his sense of what a reporter should do, while remaining wary of entering what might prove more dangerous than a news story. Still, Bright does not dismiss Leandro as a liar: he regards him as prone to extravagant conclusions, but not as someone capable of fabricating the account he has brought forward.

From newsroom intuition to official action

As the promised deadline approaches, Bright begins to suspect that Leandro is dead. Remembering John Smith, whose psychic perceptions he had once accepted despite their apparent impossibility, Bright experiences an increasingly certain premonition while looking toward Leandro’s covered word processor. By three o’clock, he is convinced that the reporter is dead. The paper’s pursuit of the story has thus acquired a personal cost: the man who carried the investigation back toward Haven does not return, but his account remains with Bright.

Bright acts on that belief by calling the Cleaves Mills state police barracks. The call becomes a turning point in the newspaper’s role: fifty-five days after Bobbi Anderson first stumbled in the woods, someone finally contacts the authorities described in the narrative as the Dallas Police. Bright speaks with Andy Torgeson, an acquaintance from college, and begins telling him what has happened, starting with Leandro’s assignment to the story of the missing officers. Soon afterward, Torgeson delays contacting the Attorney General’s office because Jim Tierney is away, but calls Bright instead. Bright already has reports of a fire in Haven and asks whether Torgeson has heard about it. The newspaper is no longer simply publishing accounts after the fact; its reporter is helping connect incoming reports and pass information into official channels.

The newspaper as record and conduit

The Bangor Daily News occupies two related positions in the novel: it is a public archive of events that appear disconnected, and a working link between witnesses, reporters, and authorities. Its headlines give Ev a way to understand how Haven’s crisis is being seen from outside, but the paper’s ordinary news categories cannot by themselves convey what he knows about the town’s collective transformation. The same limitation makes Bright’s eventual judgment consequential: he does not accept Leandro because the story is easy to verify, but because he trusts the reporter and recalls having believed another witness whose account also sounded impossible.

That movement—from headline, to private warning, to an endangered reporter’s investigation, and finally to a call to state police—makes the newspaper part of the plot’s information network. The paper cannot prevent the disappearances or explain every cause, but Bright’s decision to take Leandro seriously allows the story of Haven to reach beyond those already caught within it.