King's Highway pt. 36: It

"This book is gratefully dedicated to my children. My mother and my wife taught me how to be a man. My children taught me how to be free.

NAOMI RACHEL KING, at fourteen;
JOSEPH HILLSTROM KING, at twelve;
OWEN PHILLIP KING, at seven.
Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists."

Not only is that a nice dedication, but it's a useful sentiment / mission statement to keep in mind as you make your way through these 1138 pages.

Wraparound cover to the 25th anniversary edition

From the FearNet review: "It marks a deliberate shift in King's career, a stated conscious decision to sum up everything he had to say about children and monsters and functioning as a statement of intent as to what he hoped to accomplish with his later novels: explorations of adults and the dual natures of creativity and creation.  It is a massive undertaking, not only addressing and expanding upon the themes in his earlier fiction, but also transcending those themes, uncovering and creating something new."

And how! Here's another good review.

WHAT YOU'LL SEE

Chances are, if you're reading this, you know what It is all about, so I won't devote too much space to the plot. For those who don't know, though, here is Library Journal's summary: "Moving back and forth between 1958 and 1985, the story tells of seven children in a small Maine town who discover the source of a series of horrifying murders. Having conquered the evil force once, they are summoned together 27 years later when the cycle begins again."

That's all you really need to know, though one of the top-rated comments on Its Amazon page goes a bit further:

"It is two stories being told at once. One is the story of their childhood, of their first encounter with Pennywise the Clown, their troubles with the local bullies, the impact of It upon their lives, their own personal struggles, and (Its) eventual defeat. This is told from the beginning of the book to the near end of it. At the same time, the story of the return to Derry, of the research done to see what It was, the memories that were now urging to return, and subsequent events that followed which I won't spoil here. Both timelines alternate in their tellings to fit one another perfectly, even if not in perfect chronological order, and they're even further juiced with quick points of time long before their own, dipping into what else It has been up to. This construction is utterly beautiful in how it's placed, and completely builds the story up for all its plot points and climax."

I have to mostly-agree with that last sentence. Whatever else one might say of it, It is beautifully structured. (These pronouns are going to screw me up; apologies in advance) The events of 1957-1958 flow seamlessly with the events of 1985-1986, and the intermittent sections (narrated by Mike Hanlon) about Derry's past complement them perfectly, adding depth and nuance. Their collective amnesia about their interactions with It works to the story's advantage, as well; the reader discovers as they re-discover. (I also quite like how the adults all more or less ignore what goes on in their town every twenty-seven years; it adds to the children's feeling of loneliness and solidarity) Although it's one long-ass novel, it never feels bloated.

"Its true form as perceived by the human eye is that of a female spider that houses Its essence: namely writhing orange lights (termed "Deadlights"), looking directly into which can either kill a person or drive them insane."

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And the only way to defeat an evil spider/clown that feeds on fear ("fear salts the meat") is to give yourself 100% to your inner child/ utilize that magical imagination that only truly exists when you're a kid. As one other Amazon reviewer notes, "What is scarier: Pennywise or the reality of what happens to us once we leave childhood behind?"

But in some ways, of course, the reality is we want to leave childhood behind. It can just as easily be viewed as the terrifying deep from which we're relieved to escape, a Maurice Sendak pit of horrors, colonization, and sublimated panic.

And speaking of Sendak, It melds the sensibilities of  The Goonies with Where the Wild Things Are. At the same time that childhood/ innocence/ imagination is a comfort and that the solidarity formed during that time endures in a way like no other, it's also the source of all our terror. You are never more vulnerable than when you are a child, but, It argues, perhaps you're never better-equipped to deal with what life can throw at you, either.

As The Turtle tells Bill in the last act, "What can be done when you're eleven can often never be done again."

This site never fails to crack me up. Worth enlarging for a better view. All clowns are the minotaur.

WHOM YOU'LL MEET

I originally planned for It to be the last stop on the King's Highway. (All roads lead to IT, or some such thing.) But as it introduces a rather important character/ concept to the Dark Tower series, it was bumped up the queue on account of...

At the time of publication, Maturin (aka "The Turtle") had not been introduced in the Dark Tower.

I was 13 when I read It. It was the first new King book I'd read. (I remember a radio campaign on 92PRO-FM and WHJY, but I can find no internet evidence of this. I can't be making that up, can I? Perhaps it's the search terms I'm using.) I recall my friends being amused at how quickly and steadily my bookmark moved centimeter-by-centimeter from front to back over a succession of study halls. (Maybe they weren't even amused, actually. Speed-reading is a useful skill to have, but it's a bit like being the guy on the X-Men whose mutant power is... well, speed-reading.) The Turtle is introduced during the Ritual of Chud.

No, not this 80s "classic." But bonus points if you knew what the letters stood for without being told.

From StrangeHorizons: "This Himalayan tradition, the Ritual of Chud, requires the shaman to meet the taelus, the shape-changer, face to face. After the holy man and the monster each stick their tongues out and overlap them, "you both bit in all the way so you were sort of stapled together, eye to eye" (675), Bill explains. The two then engage in a riddle contest."

(More riddling! Blaine the Mono would be happy.)

Anyway, so there I am in 8th grade, reading this, and suddenly the main hero mentally "bites tongues" with the main villain. Like something out of Marvel's Secret Wars, they then rocket through spacetime towards something called "the Deadlights" beyond all conception of reality. Before they get there, Bill speaks with a giant, cosmic turtle who, it is revealed, created the universe once by vomiting it up. He tells Bill, basically, Nice to meet you and all, but you better get your head in the game, and I take no part in these affairs...

And, then he's done. When Bill, Ritchie and Pennywise Chud-it-out for a second time, Pennywise tells them the turtle is dead. (But, he isn't, don't worry.) And that's that. Wait, what? Yep. I remember thinking 'What the hell is this cosmic turtle stuff?' when I read it in the 80s. And probably would have this time, as well, had I not been reading the Dark Towers. Still, this is kind of... stoney stuff.

Speaking of being stoned, I got this image for Turtle Island (aka North America according to Gary Snyder and others) from a site for "Uniting the Indigenous Peoples to Create the Indigo Bridge." More power to them and all (sincerely) but damn! BLAAOW! I think Rusted Root's CD sales just shot up from my typing those words.

So, we don't really learn much about the Turtle here except that he exists, floats in the space beyond all rational meaning, maybe created the universe while he was hungover, and, you know, maybe he just sort of died. If I sound critical or mocking of this, let me also say I look forward to finding out more about the Turtle in the last few Dark Tower books, but it's clear it's a benevolent force that, despite what it tells Bill, does help King protagonists from time to time. I kind of love the cosmic randomness of the Turtle's introduction and would have it no other way.

Next, one of King's most popular creations, Pennywise the Clown aka IT. There is a good summation of what exactly it is at the SK wiki. But "evil shape-shifting clown" works as a placeholder.

Part of Pennywise's popularity is due to Tim Curry's performance in the TV adaptation.

Funny, disturbing, memorable. (And that clip above is rather shockingly suggestive, isn't it? Creepy.)

A performance equal to Dennis Hopper's "Frank" from Blue Velvet.

Not that I'm comparing it to Blue Velvet.

Overall, the TV adaptation is a failure, I think, but we'll get to that momentarily. It has its moments, to be sure, but it is only a dim echo of the novel. Tim Curry's Pennywise, though, seems to have settled comfortably into the collective unconscious, another constellation next to Cujo, Christine, Children of the Corn, and Red Rum.

Why, h-h-h-hi, B-b-b-b-b-b-ill!

As I mentioned when I covered "The Library Policeman," Pennywise may or may not be related to some other King villains. (Mr. Linoge from Storm of the Century? I'd like to see a Deadlights family tree.)

And The Loser's Club, our heroes.

Top row: Ben, Stan, Ritchie, Pennywise (photobomb!) and Eddie. Bottom row: Mike, Beverly, and Stuttering Bill.

As kids.

All richly-drawn and detailed, and each serves the plot/ brings a unique weapon to the fight against It.

Guest cameo: Richard "Dick" Halloran: A chef in Derry Army E Company. He's only in it for a hot minute, saving Mike Hanlon's father at the fire at the Black Spot. I'd forgotten all about this (and if I ever learned it to begin with, I forgot that, too) so this was a pleasant surprise. And if you're asking yourself Who the hell is Dick Halloran? you're going to kick yourself once you find out. You almost wish you could reach in the novel and tell him to never under any circumstances accept a job in Colorado.

TRAIL NOTES

- Okay, this came out in 1986.

Here's the cover of the copy I had back then.

Here's the copy I got this year for $3.50 at Myopic.(The Shakespeare and Co. of Chicago! The That's Entertainment of Used Bookstores Everywhere!)

Open to the publication page of this last copy and what do you see?

First Signet Printing 1981?

I have it on good authority that "there must have been some misprints; the novel was unquestionably NOT published in 1981... an excerpt from it -- called "The Bird and the Album" -- WAS published (in the program for that year's World Fantasy Convention, which was called A Fantasy Reader) in 1981.  So maybe that's where the confusion comes from. I've got three copies of the book, and they all say 1986.  So if yours says 1981, odds are you are the owner of a potentially valuable misprint."

Or, I have one that was published on a different level of the Dark Tower, which is the theory I prefer. I'm tempted to write 'PROPERTY OF JAKE CHAMBERS' on the inside cover.

To complicate matters, go to Amazon and they list the book as being published in 1987! Get it together, internet.

- The band Shark Puppy from Duma Key is not a real band, but King quotes one of their "songs" a few times in the text. If you look at the copyright page at the beginning of the book, you see: Permission to use lyrics from "Dig" by Shark Puppy (R. Tozier, W. Denbrough), granted by Bad Nineteen Music, copyright 1986. R. Tozier and W. Denbrough are, of course, Ritchie and Stuttering Bill. Nice touch.

- Who wouldn't watch a 'Tales from Derry' ongoing show? I sure would.

TRAIL DIFFICULTY

Fans of short reads (or short blogs) will not be pleased... but, for what it's worth, the book reads pretty quickly. It is definitely the proverbial "page-turner." I was on page 800-something before I realized Crikey, I'm on page 800-something! 

"Beep Beep, Ritchie!" appears in this novel around 100,000 times. I'd like to think whomever made this clip below is commenting on that.

Along those lines, although it didn't bother me, Bill's stuttering might be a stumbling block for some readers. It's an essential part of his character, so I wouldn't change a thing, but the stutters plus the 'Beep Beep's really add to the page count.

Henry Bowzer, the bully/psycho of the book, is one of those flush-the-psychic-toilet-type villains. Everything negative is loaded up and dumped on him. An Alpha Male of racism, anti-semitism, etc. He does come off as truly menacing, though, which is no small feat when you're sharing bad-guy-center-stage with Pennywise. But for my personal taste, Henry was a bit overdone.

And, well, let's just look it straight in the face. At the end of the book, after the final confrontation/ egg-stomping with It, the Losers Club loses its way in the sewers. Beverly steps up to the plate to save them. And by that, I mean, she has sex with everyone, one at a time. Everyone settles in for a nice old-fashioned romantic sewer gangbang.

King's explanation: "I wasn't really thinking of the sexual aspect of it. The book dealt with childhood and adulthood --1958 and Grown Ups. The grown ups don't remember their childhood. None of us remember what we did as children--we think we do, but we don't remember it as it really happened. Intuitively, the Losers knew they had to be together again. The sexual act connected childhood and adulthood. It's another version of the glass tunnel that connects the children's library and the adult library. Times have changed since I wrote that scene and there is now more sensitivity to those issues."

Strange Horizons' take: "Beverly, the only girl in the circle, presents a special case; she employs no material talisman, but the power of her awakening sexuality. When the circle threatens to fall apart after the first defeat of It, causing the children to lose their way in the tunnels beneath the Barrens, Bev, like a priestess, recreates the bond by coupling with each of the boys. King here seems to allude to the familiar magical motif of a virgin sacrifice, but again he sets the image in a context of personal spiritual power, not the rituals of an organized cult. "There was power in this act, all right," Bev reflects, "a chain-breaking power that was blood-deep" (1082). When she experiences her first orgasm (with Ben), "she feels her power suddenly shift to him; she gives it gladly and goes with it" (1084), forging the necessary connection."

Samuel L. Jackson's take:

I really don't know what to say about this one. I guess there are aspects of both explanations that make sense to me, but at the end of the day, this still strikes me as wrong. Not in the won't someone please think of the children sense, but in the not-sure-if-this-actually-works sense. This sequence is the only thing (not counting the random wtf-ness of The Turtle) that keeps It from being an unreserved masterpiece. (Though really, how could you put it up against anything that doesn't have a cosmic turtle/ pre-teen sewer gangbang? It's a category of one.) But flippancy aside, it truly is both a remarkably well-constructed novel and a wholly absorbing read.

I wonder, actually, why it's never been targeted by angry groups, of any variety (it's easy to imagine both hardcore feminists and hardcore offended-about-un-Christian-values/communism uniting on this front, something as rare as the transit of the Venus). Not even so much why but how. (shrugs)

(I'd love it if Chris Columbus revealed this was his original idea for the ending for The Goonies. If I were him, I'd have been telling that joke since the late 80's.)

SCENIC VIEW 

Like The Stand, but even more-so, this suffers from an attempt to PG-ify definitely-R-rated material. (Hell, X-rated: unsurprisingly, the filmmakers chose not to portray the tweener sewer get-down in their adaptation.) Whereas Pennywise, as aforementioned, comes across in all his lunatic glory, Henry Bowzer does not. This was a time on American TV where you could still use "the n-word" if you put it in the mouth of a racist, but even so, Henry's effectiveness is nullified somewhat.

That's perhaps the problem. Excising the material of anything not-ready-for-prime-time fatally injures the story. (Although this:

is very funny to me.)

The casting is good (I remember being truly surprised by John Ritter in this back in 1990; I'd only ever seen him in Three's Company and Real Men); the direction is fine. Excepting the above, everything hums along fine for the first hour or so. So what ruins it? Basically, this:

Not only does it look cheesy as hell, but it ret-cons the whole damn story. All it takes is a couple of rocks to kill It? What the hell you so worried about, then, Losers? And without any of the Ritual of Chud stuff, what are we to make of the scary clown suddenly being this spider-creature? Just a terrible filmmaking choice. I don't know if they ran out of time/ money or what, but damn. I sympathize. I'm curious as hell as to how Cary Fukanada plans to pull it off.

Finally, I should mention that Jonathan Brandis, the actor who played Stuttering Bill, committed suicide at the age of 27. From his wiki: "Paul Petersen, president of A Minor Consideration—an organization that deals with issues affecting child actors—stated, 'Speculations as to the underlying cause of this tragedy are exactly that: speculations. It serves no purpose to leap to conclusions for none of us will really know what led Jonathan to his decision to take his life.'" True enough, so I won't offer any. Just my condolences.

RIP, buddy; you were a good Stuttering Bill.

He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

NEXT!

INSOMNIA