Note: Since the new film version of the book is coming out soon, I'll put a spoiler warning on this post, if only because someone may be planning on watching the film without having read the book. So here it is:
As I mentioned before, I'm reading Stephen King's It. The book is massive--clocking in at over 1,400 pages--and tells the story of a haunted town called Derry, set in King's home state of Maine. A handful of kids end up being compelled to defeat the evil entity known as It (or Pennywise the Clown), and then, when they get older, they have to return to Derry in order to defeat It once and for all.
So the set up is pretty straightforward, but part of what I found so interesting was how the story was told. Despite its sprawling size, the book is tightly connected. Small details ripple through the narrative, which spans a summer in 1958 and a spring in 1985. Even the paper boat that kicks off the tragedy and terror and leaves by the end of the first chapter ("there it passes out of this tale forever" (20)) is still remembered at the end.
In fact, it's the structure of this book that impressed me so much. King had to not only provide plenty of scares in both the '58 timeline as well as the '85 one, and since you know the kids survive '58 in order to be scared again in '85, this is no small feat. But that leads to the idea of a horror story, which I'm not particularly familiar with in terms of genre, and I don't want to chase a rabbit down that hole. Let me say this: It is scary to me because I (stupidly) watched the trailers for the new movies. The story, the "scary" parts were tense, well written, and captivating, but I never got the sense of being nervous or uncomfortable as I was reading. I've never had a book really do that, as I mentioned before, and after reading the scariest book that the Master of Horror has ever written, I'm not seeing the terror. Now, are there frightening images? Sure; It has a clown as the mascot. That's nightmare fuel right there. And there were some very well described passages that, were they not in a book, would have been fairly frightening. But, yeah. I wasn't scared by it (though It is a scary thing), and I reserve the right to go back on that if necessary.
So, back to the structure of the book--which, as a writer, I really appreciated. The characters have a magical amnesia (magic, by the way, explains all of the horrible things that happen; this is as much a fantasy novel as it is a horror novel) so that the events of 1958 slowly click into place for the crew in 1985. This is a brilliant (if a little convenient) piece of storytelling, because it means that the audience can feel the tension of the '58 pieces. That is, we know they survive, but their adult selves keep remembering things that they had forgotten--scars reappear on their bodies, they have snatches of words that they didn't remember before but they now snap into place--which puts the narrative back into the summer of their childhood. Broken bones and instances with the local bully unfold in such a way that it never feels like I've-heard-this-all-before or Why-don't-they-just-cut-to-the-chase? because the characters themselves haven't "experienced" their childhoods any more than the readers have.
The structure is solid, but I still found myself flipping to the Table of Contents after every chapter, if only to see how what I had just read fitted into the rest of the story. This isn't a bad thing--part of the reason I picked up the book is because I wanted to figure out how King tells a story--it's simply one of my reactions to the different chunks of text.
And, boy, is there a lot of text.
There are a lot of words in this novel. By the end, as everything is building into two main climaxes (one in both timelines), a third culmination happens to the city itself. Derry is almost a character in the novel, kind of like a negative version of Hogwarts. In the end, the city gets partially destroyed by a freak storm (brought on by It), and everything is washed away, but its destruction is written in single paragraphs that span multiple pages. Though this is an extreme version of what's going on in the book in general, it shows the detail with which King slathers his writing. Yet it rarely feels laborious or overwrought or pretentious (the way his book The Gunslinger felt when I read it years ago). The ability to write convincing, correct details is the skill that a dedicated storyteller has to develop, and it felt fully realized in this. Small pieces of late '50s ephemera drift through in the slang they use, or a reference to a song (enough so that I wondered if his book were "historically accurate" in some moments). Often, things would be described with enough freshness that even mundane things were given a surprising modification: one character's mother, for example, during her brief chapter, worries over her son's condition as he lay "in his bed of pain". The phrase, "bed of pain", is repeated in a way that characterizes the mother as well as shows her pattern of fixating and thinking about things. It's a great phrase, and King utilizes it deftly.
The content of the story is...well, a bit of a mixed bag. I was expecting a lot of swearing (there was so much swearing) and of course some gruesome bits (there were some cringeworthy moments, to be sure). I even expected a sex scene or two--which are there. So in terms of it being an "uplifting" book, on that front, it isn't. The characters swear, smoke, drink, and adulterate--which, when put that way, sounds like the whole book is trash. I'm not going to defend what's in there: Violence, gore, and scares aside, this book has some really uncomfortable parts to it. There's a scene of adultery ("but it's okay! They forget they ever did it!" is the unspoken resolution of that thread) that's graphically described, and while those always make me uncomfortable, it was the fact that both characters were having an affair that bothered me more. I always joked that American novelists only know how to write about two things: Affairs and murder. Most of the greatest books in the American canon have both.
The strangest part--and that's saying something because this book has a scene where a giant fountain of blood gushes out of a sink drain, but none of the adults can see the mess in the bathroom--has to be where the one girl in the ensemble cast of seven decides that the only way to get out of the sewers is to have sex with all of the boys. There's something to be said with the sex-positive way that King approaches the scene, but they're all eleven years old. Like, I don't even know what to say to that except..."Wut?" To say it was unnecessary is too broad an analysis, though my instinct is to say that, at this part at least, King's storytelling incorporated the superfluously salacious. Again, the idea that the kids needed this human connection is worthwhile, but...yeah, that part was strange.
I should point out that the ensemble cast is handled with surprising deftness, though Stan Uris, a character whose death in the early pages of the book changes the way I empathized with him in the '58 sections of the story, felt like a non-entity. He had fewer lines to say, fewer point of view moments, and generally fails to contribute in a meaningful way in a lot of the book. Because I didn't know the character when he dies by suicide by page 70 or so, I didn't feel like his absence was a great loss in the other sections of the 1985 sequence. It was always a "Oh, yeah. Stan. He's alive in '58. Almost forgot." So that was an interesting choice, and if I could wish the book longer (I don't), it would be to let Stan be fleshed out.
And that's another area where King really demonstrated his writing chops: With Stan as the notable exception, I really got to know these characters. I enjoyed the '58 story more than the '85 one--in part because the innocence and goodness (despite their language and smoking habits) of the children was obviously a key to how It would be defeated, relying on childhood to do what the adults in the town never could do--and the backstories of each were fascinating and enjoyable as well. Just knowing, for example, how Bill's home life was so broken after the death (at the hands of It) of his little brother had ramifications and important parts throughout the story. There's a lengthy passage about how kids were ghosts to grownups, ignored so long as they remained beneath the adults' sight-lines, that resonated even more remembering how Ben's mother was always working and never saw him. These pieces coalesced to make engaging characters.
And that taught me that if you're going to be a writer, you need to, I guess, be Stephen King so you can get away with writing 1,400 pages worth of your story. In my largest novel, Writ in Blood, I definitely felt that I got to know the characters better, deeper, and with more nuance because I luxuriated in the amount of time I had to tell the story. I cared about the kids (again, the kids more than the adults) because I got to know them so well.
Final thoughts: the parts of the book that made me saddest--or, maybe even came closest to scaring me--weren't the parts with the monster: They were the parts with the abuse. There is physical abuse, verbal abuse, and racial violence throughout the book. Living in 2017, where these ills are just as large as they've ever been, it's hard to read about the fictional burning of a Black-owned bar while white supremacists stood outside, having thrown a torch into the place and letting all the people inside burn. Sure, the point of that was to insist that It was there, egging on the racial violence. But we don't need It to have that happen in real life. We don't need It to have fathers who "love" their daughters, who "worry a lot" about their daughters so much that they feel the need to beat them because they've been playing with boys. Our world has husbands who attack their wives with belts because of a perceived slight--we have that without It.
And maybe that's the point that King is after: It takes the worst in people and makes it even worse, but It doesn't put the evil inside. Similarly, It can't overpower what fellowship, friendship, and even love are capable of doing.
The kids pull through (not a spoiler), and the adults eventually win, though at a cost (minor spoiler). As the narrative winds down, there was this line that really stood out to me, and I think it sums up part of what King was trying to do with It:
Dark, gruesome, grotesque--It has dragged my imagination through bizarre and unusual twists, ending with a large helping of hope.
That is not what I expected when I bought this book.
As I mentioned before, I'm reading Stephen King's It. The book is massive--clocking in at over 1,400 pages--and tells the story of a haunted town called Derry, set in King's home state of Maine. A handful of kids end up being compelled to defeat the evil entity known as It (or Pennywise the Clown), and then, when they get older, they have to return to Derry in order to defeat It once and for all.
So the set up is pretty straightforward, but part of what I found so interesting was how the story was told. Despite its sprawling size, the book is tightly connected. Small details ripple through the narrative, which spans a summer in 1958 and a spring in 1985. Even the paper boat that kicks off the tragedy and terror and leaves by the end of the first chapter ("there it passes out of this tale forever" (20)) is still remembered at the end.
In fact, it's the structure of this book that impressed me so much. King had to not only provide plenty of scares in both the '58 timeline as well as the '85 one, and since you know the kids survive '58 in order to be scared again in '85, this is no small feat. But that leads to the idea of a horror story, which I'm not particularly familiar with in terms of genre, and I don't want to chase a rabbit down that hole. Let me say this: It is scary to me because I (stupidly) watched the trailers for the new movies. The story, the "scary" parts were tense, well written, and captivating, but I never got the sense of being nervous or uncomfortable as I was reading. I've never had a book really do that, as I mentioned before, and after reading the scariest book that the Master of Horror has ever written, I'm not seeing the terror. Now, are there frightening images? Sure; It has a clown as the mascot. That's nightmare fuel right there. And there were some very well described passages that, were they not in a book, would have been fairly frightening. But, yeah. I wasn't scared by it (though It is a scary thing), and I reserve the right to go back on that if necessary.
So, back to the structure of the book--which, as a writer, I really appreciated. The characters have a magical amnesia (magic, by the way, explains all of the horrible things that happen; this is as much a fantasy novel as it is a horror novel) so that the events of 1958 slowly click into place for the crew in 1985. This is a brilliant (if a little convenient) piece of storytelling, because it means that the audience can feel the tension of the '58 pieces. That is, we know they survive, but their adult selves keep remembering things that they had forgotten--scars reappear on their bodies, they have snatches of words that they didn't remember before but they now snap into place--which puts the narrative back into the summer of their childhood. Broken bones and instances with the local bully unfold in such a way that it never feels like I've-heard-this-all-before or Why-don't-they-just-cut-to-the-chase? because the characters themselves haven't "experienced" their childhoods any more than the readers have.
The structure is solid, but I still found myself flipping to the Table of Contents after every chapter, if only to see how what I had just read fitted into the rest of the story. This isn't a bad thing--part of the reason I picked up the book is because I wanted to figure out how King tells a story--it's simply one of my reactions to the different chunks of text.
And, boy, is there a lot of text.
There are a lot of words in this novel. By the end, as everything is building into two main climaxes (one in both timelines), a third culmination happens to the city itself. Derry is almost a character in the novel, kind of like a negative version of Hogwarts. In the end, the city gets partially destroyed by a freak storm (brought on by It), and everything is washed away, but its destruction is written in single paragraphs that span multiple pages. Though this is an extreme version of what's going on in the book in general, it shows the detail with which King slathers his writing. Yet it rarely feels laborious or overwrought or pretentious (the way his book The Gunslinger felt when I read it years ago). The ability to write convincing, correct details is the skill that a dedicated storyteller has to develop, and it felt fully realized in this. Small pieces of late '50s ephemera drift through in the slang they use, or a reference to a song (enough so that I wondered if his book were "historically accurate" in some moments). Often, things would be described with enough freshness that even mundane things were given a surprising modification: one character's mother, for example, during her brief chapter, worries over her son's condition as he lay "in his bed of pain". The phrase, "bed of pain", is repeated in a way that characterizes the mother as well as shows her pattern of fixating and thinking about things. It's a great phrase, and King utilizes it deftly.
The content of the story is...well, a bit of a mixed bag. I was expecting a lot of swearing (there was so much swearing) and of course some gruesome bits (there were some cringeworthy moments, to be sure). I even expected a sex scene or two--which are there. So in terms of it being an "uplifting" book, on that front, it isn't. The characters swear, smoke, drink, and adulterate--which, when put that way, sounds like the whole book is trash. I'm not going to defend what's in there: Violence, gore, and scares aside, this book has some really uncomfortable parts to it. There's a scene of adultery ("but it's okay! They forget they ever did it!" is the unspoken resolution of that thread) that's graphically described, and while those always make me uncomfortable, it was the fact that both characters were having an affair that bothered me more. I always joked that American novelists only know how to write about two things: Affairs and murder. Most of the greatest books in the American canon have both.
The strangest part--and that's saying something because this book has a scene where a giant fountain of blood gushes out of a sink drain, but none of the adults can see the mess in the bathroom--has to be where the one girl in the ensemble cast of seven decides that the only way to get out of the sewers is to have sex with all of the boys. There's something to be said with the sex-positive way that King approaches the scene, but they're all eleven years old. Like, I don't even know what to say to that except..."Wut?" To say it was unnecessary is too broad an analysis, though my instinct is to say that, at this part at least, King's storytelling incorporated the superfluously salacious. Again, the idea that the kids needed this human connection is worthwhile, but...yeah, that part was strange.
I should point out that the ensemble cast is handled with surprising deftness, though Stan Uris, a character whose death in the early pages of the book changes the way I empathized with him in the '58 sections of the story, felt like a non-entity. He had fewer lines to say, fewer point of view moments, and generally fails to contribute in a meaningful way in a lot of the book. Because I didn't know the character when he dies by suicide by page 70 or so, I didn't feel like his absence was a great loss in the other sections of the 1985 sequence. It was always a "Oh, yeah. Stan. He's alive in '58. Almost forgot." So that was an interesting choice, and if I could wish the book longer (I don't), it would be to let Stan be fleshed out.
And that's another area where King really demonstrated his writing chops: With Stan as the notable exception, I really got to know these characters. I enjoyed the '58 story more than the '85 one--in part because the innocence and goodness (despite their language and smoking habits) of the children was obviously a key to how It would be defeated, relying on childhood to do what the adults in the town never could do--and the backstories of each were fascinating and enjoyable as well. Just knowing, for example, how Bill's home life was so broken after the death (at the hands of It) of his little brother had ramifications and important parts throughout the story. There's a lengthy passage about how kids were ghosts to grownups, ignored so long as they remained beneath the adults' sight-lines, that resonated even more remembering how Ben's mother was always working and never saw him. These pieces coalesced to make engaging characters.
And that taught me that if you're going to be a writer, you need to, I guess, be Stephen King so you can get away with writing 1,400 pages worth of your story. In my largest novel, Writ in Blood, I definitely felt that I got to know the characters better, deeper, and with more nuance because I luxuriated in the amount of time I had to tell the story. I cared about the kids (again, the kids more than the adults) because I got to know them so well.
Final thoughts: the parts of the book that made me saddest--or, maybe even came closest to scaring me--weren't the parts with the monster: They were the parts with the abuse. There is physical abuse, verbal abuse, and racial violence throughout the book. Living in 2017, where these ills are just as large as they've ever been, it's hard to read about the fictional burning of a Black-owned bar while white supremacists stood outside, having thrown a torch into the place and letting all the people inside burn. Sure, the point of that was to insist that It was there, egging on the racial violence. But we don't need It to have that happen in real life. We don't need It to have fathers who "love" their daughters, who "worry a lot" about their daughters so much that they feel the need to beat them because they've been playing with boys. Our world has husbands who attack their wives with belts because of a perceived slight--we have that without It.
And maybe that's the point that King is after: It takes the worst in people and makes it even worse, but It doesn't put the evil inside. Similarly, It can't overpower what fellowship, friendship, and even love are capable of doing.
The kids pull through (not a spoiler), and the adults eventually win, though at a cost (minor spoiler). As the narrative winds down, there was this line that really stood out to me, and I think it sums up part of what King was trying to do with It:
Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around--and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question. (1469)I don't think King was trying to convert people with his story; instead, I think he was trying to point at something we all ought to bear in mind: Despite the darkness of the trial, there is light and joy and even happy endings that await us.
Dark, gruesome, grotesque--It has dragged my imagination through bizarre and unusual twists, ending with a large helping of hope.
That is not what I expected when I bought this book.