It

2007 Review

At this point, it would be impossible for me to view Stephen King’s It with any sort of objectivity. I’m not sure I’d even want to, if I could. Between the ages of thirteen and thirty-two, I’ve read It twelve times – that works out to a little over 13,000 pages, all told, spent with just one book alone. That’s not counting the snippets, either. Whenever I fly anywhere, I bundle along It, my travel-time talisman. During takeoff, I pull the novel out and open to a random page, letting myself get lost in the words. Takeoffs terrify me, but It makes things seem all right.

Which is odd to say, I suppose, when discussing a book that can quite rightly be called King’s horror magnum opus. It’s a monster book, at least on the surface, calling up old terrors like Dracula, the werewolf, the mummy, zombies, even giants and witches. Dig just a little bit deeper and there are the other, more mundane (but maybe even scarier) horrors: disease, child abuse, spousal abuse, racism, homophobia, loneliness, childhood bullies, insanity, and the sudden, shocking death of a loved one. These two realms of fear – the real and the purportedly imaginary – coexist easily in It, each feeding off one another in a sort of supreme act of mutual parasitism. It should, by all rights, be terrifying. Maybe it was, once, for me. But now, every time I pick up It, I feel a comforting sense of coming home.

There’s a new MasterCard ad on the trains around Boston now, featuring two different placards. One says, “The day you became a Red Sox fan: birth.” And it shows a nice new Red Sox cap. The other says: “The day you became more than a fan: priceless.” And now the hat’s all beaten up and tattered and falling apart. It looks, to my mind, a lot like my original hardcover of It, handed down from my Uncle Doug when he went off to college and left me all his old stuff. See, It isn’t where I started the Stephen King thing. That started back when I was nine, reading my friend Christian’s copy of Cycle of the Werewolf at sleepover camp, and, later, his Creepshow when he stayed over my Grandparents’ house for the night. After I got Doug’s books when I was twelve, first I read some stories in Night Shift. Then I read Rage. Only then did I heft this gargantuan book off my shelf and, with a nervous sigh, flip the cover open and start reading. That’s the day I became more than a fan. Priceless.

See, I came for the monsters advertised on the flap. That’s why, I think, most people come to King. What I didn’t expect, and what none of the previous Stephen King books I’d read had prepared me for, was that the book wasn’t about monsters. Beyond anything, It is a book about friendship, and the bonds between people who love each other. When I was twelve, that concept fired my imagination more than anything else I’d ever read. Young me, bookish and strange, didn’t really have much in the way of friends myself. My buddies were books, and mostly that suited me all right. But inside this book, there were seven people, roughly my age who were a lot like me: kids who were picked on, punched on, outcast, Losers. Kids I could identify with. And it all starts (maybe, just maybe, in more ways than one), with a scared fat kid running from some bullies, and literally falling into some friends along the way.

It takes time to build an indelible bond between seven well-drawn, believable characters, time and pages. It’s that bond that makes up the core of the book: it’s that bond that brings them together to try to kill It for the first time, and it’s that bond that brings them back nearly thirty years later, to finish what they started. That’s King’s main thrust: getting you to fall in love with these people, both in the past and in the present, and understand their ties to each other so deeply that you feel a part of them yourself. But King has another agenda, as well: while building history between the members of the Losers’ Club, he’s also building the history of a town. As Mike Hanlon – the only member of the Losers to have stayed and grown up in Derry, Maine – asks, “Can a whole town be haunted?” Throughout a series of five “Interlude” segments, Hanlon – in the first person – sketches for us a brutal history of Derry. The cycle – a period of intense violence for Derry, coinciding with It’s waking (and feeding) periods, occurring roughly once every twenty-seven years – stretches back through Derry’s long and tortured past. How far back is a revelation in the book I wouldn’t dream of spoiling for the uninitiated; suffice it to say that Mike is there to find that out, too.

I’ve gone into such detail about the Interlude segments – which are really somewhat minor sketches on the edgings of the giant canvas of It – to reveal something about myself. The first two times reading It, I skipped the Interludes almost entirely. They just didn’t seem important to me, so I passed right over them to get back into “the real story,” as some people will (wrongly) pass over the historical chapters in The Grapes of Wrath. On my third read, I’d grown enough as a reader (and as a King fan) to finally delve into the past of Derry a little bit more, and my experience was enriched for it. I think good books – the best books – grow with readers, meaning different things to them at different stages in their lives. I find a little bit frightening that I was roughly the age of the young members of the Losers’ Club when I first read It, and that now, after my twelfth read, I’m closing in on the age of the Losers as adults. It’s a little bit frightening that my experience with this book – published two years before I read it – nearly equals the span of the main narrative itself. Frightening, but a little comforting, as well. As I said before, coming to Derry has always been a little like coming home for me. There will come a time when I will understand the grownups as well as I understand the children, and that’s going to be an interesting day indeed.

So, for all my love of this book, do I have anything bad to say about it? Well, with any long relationship, you’re bound to have some quibbles. For example, I’ve frequently had a problem with King’s endings. When he first destroyed a town in Carrie, the concept was fresh. When destruction came at the end of The Shining, it was the pinnacle of this type of finale. By the time the massive destruction comes near the end of It – no matter how symbolically important – the concept seems a little careworn. I also don’t understand King’s occasional but distracting use of full names. It seems to come at random: “Bill said, Beverly said, Mike said, Ben Hanscom saidÖ” It doesn’t make much sense, and I’d love to know what King’s reason for it was.

Man, I’m not even scratching the surface here. I could throw words at this book all day and all night and still not come up with anything close to a sufficient review or summary. Maybe the fact that I’ve read a book this long this often speaks for itself. I have never read another book I’ve loved as much as It, and I don’t suspect I ever will. Which is why I’m glad it’s always right there, always in my reach.

1997 Review

The novel It stands at the center of King's career. It is the peak of all that had gone before, and the commencement of everyhting which followed. To call it a magnum opus, then, does not seem flagrant or premature, for It is simply Stephen King at his very best.

It follows the lives of seven children, exploring their town, their families, their enemies, and their greatest fears. Often, these outside influences intertwine and build upon each other, until they are indistinguishable. For these children are what as known as "Losers," outcasts of their society in a small maine town in 1958. There is the stutterer ("Stuttering Bill" Dengrough), the fat kid (King's best human creation Ben Hanscom), the abused girl (Beverly Marsh), one of the town's only black kids (Mike Hanlon), the Jewish kid (Stan Uris), the Mama's Boy (Eddie Kaspbrack) and the obnoxious kid with glasses (Richie Tozier). All could be merely sterotypes, symbolic of entire classes, but but King infuses them with a greater humanity. They actually become real.

And they come together, perhaps through benevolent forces greater than them. Similar forces, these dark and sinister, are against them. Their town, Derry, is not like other towns. The murder rate (especially the child-murder rate) in Derry is higher than in any other small town of comperable size, enourmously so during periods every twenty-seven years or so. The Losers begin to peice together a pattern, and discover that the murders can be all followed back to once source: a creature they come to know as It who lives in the sewers of Derry and likes to feed on children.

It is a powerful being, able to read people telepathically and assume to form of the thing they're most scared of. Ben sees The Mummy, Richie sees the Teenage Werewolf, and Bill sees the ghost of his dead brother, George. And they are the lucky ones, the ones who got away. But It, because of It's reliance on Derry, has infused Itself into the town consciousness. In a way, Derry is It, and It is Derry, and the children of the town are the only who know.

The novel shifts from the years 1958 to 1985, two remarkably active periods for It. In 1985, the Loser's Club of 1958 has grown up, become successful, and live lives that are only mere echoes of their pasts. Then, Mike Hanlon makes six phone calls, and they find they now must return home to fight their greatest demon. The question isn't whether they will come, but whether they can become children again, recapture the magic and fear that ruled their lives in those younger days. Can they?

The answer to that question lies in King's most complex and compelling narrative, a wonder of a novel that stands alone as King's best work to date. This book examines fear, faith, belief and magic, creating King's most memorable characters and his most horrifying vision. It is, plainly put, an experience you will never forget (even if the Loser's Club does.)

Personal Observations

Before It, the only King books I'd read were Rage , Cycle of the Werewolf, and Creepshow (plus some assorted Night Shift stories). Nothing prepared me for what It did to me. It became my world, I lived in Derry, I was one of the Loser's Club. Being a reader and not much for society in 1987, I was kind of a Loser myself. This book transported me, became so real to me, that I found I needed to read everything else by this man, this Stephen King. And I've liked quite a lot of what King has written; sometimes, I've liked novels so much they almost matched the feeling It gave me (The Stand, The Dark Half, Insomnia). But I keep going back yearly, reading It as if it were the first time, and that, my friends, is why I am a Stephen King Fan.

Movie Review The miniseries Stephen King's It appeared on ABC-TV during the winter of 1990. Well directed and writeen (though, like the book, the children's scenes are far better than the adults'.) The only major problem was the ending, which worked well in the book as a Lovecraftian psychic war, but failed in the film when we could only see the physical Spider. Otherwise, the film is one of the most worthy King films to date.

Dedication

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.

S.K.

"...By the time I got to the road it was twilight - in the mountains the end of the day comes in a hurry - and I was aware of how alone I was. About a quarter of a mile along this road was a wooden bridge, humped and oddly quaint, spanning a stream. I walked across it. I was wearing cowboy boots with rundown heels, and I was very aware of the sound they made on the boards; they sounded like a hollow clock.

"...I thought of the fairy tale called 'The Three Billy-Goats Gruff' and wondered what I would do if a troll called out from beneath me, 'Who is trip-trapping over my bridge?' All of a sudden I wanted to write about a real troll under a real bridge...."

-from "How It Happened," a selection from Secret Windows.