I Enjoyed All 1,156 Pages of IT

About nine hundred pages into Steven King’s 1986 magnum opus, I figured things out: IT is a combination of The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, One Thousand and One Nights, and Winesburg, Ohio. Let me explain.

If you know anything about the book, the 1990 miniseries that ruined my childhood when I saw it on TV, or the 2017 and 2019 films, you probably think you’re in for a tale about a supernatural murder-clown1 who feeds on the bodies / mental anguish of children. And you are: that’s the Lovecraft part. But mostly the clown is a framing device that connects a bunch of different, more interesting stories. That’s the One Thousand and One Nights part. And those stories are largely about growing up in small-town, twentieth-century America. That’s the Winesburg, Ohio part.

Seriously, all the best parts of this book are about these seven kids who dub themselves The Losers and the decidedly non-supernatural scraps they get into. Hell, the scariest parts of the book are about the non-supernatural scraps they get into! The real villain of IT has a name: Henry Bowers. He starts off as an average bully, but by the middle of the book he’s carving an “H” into a kid’s stomach, and after that he’s willing to shove an M-80 firecracker down someone’s pants. (King correctly notes that this would kill a person.) The big standoff with It at the end of the book has nothing on the rock fight with Henry Bowers and his goons near the middle of the book.

But, yeah, that’s IT. The Losers hang out in the barrens. The Losers build a dam. The Losers build a fort. Ben has a crush on Beverly. Beverly has a crush on Will. Ben and Beverly and Richie go to the movies. Stan goes bird-watching. Life in Derry, Maine, on the verge of adolescence, circa 1950: it’s quite idyllic when children aren’t getting their arms torn off or their heads devoured. Here’s an excerpt:

The day was sunny, breezy, and cool. Richie jived along Center Street toward the Aladdin, popping his fingers and singing ‘Rockin’ Robbin’ under his breath. He was feeling good. Going to the movies always made him feel good—he loved that magic world, those magic dreams. He felt sorry for anyone who had dull duties to discharge on such a day—Bill with his speech therapy, Eddie with his aunts, poor old Stan the Man who would be spending the afternoon scraping down the front-porch steps or sweeping the garage because the pie-plate he’d been throwing around swept right when it was supposed to seep left.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is a Norman Rockwell painting.

That said, life in Derry—even ignoring the monster—isn’t paradise. This book focuses on racism, antisemitism, and sexism more than I would have guessed going in, and I think King handles it well. Mike—the Loser who gets chased by Henry with the M-80—is the only main character who is black, and his race is neither completely defining nor completely ignored. Stan takes a lot of shit from the other Losers for being Jewish, but it struck me as a very accurate representation of how a bunch of ignorant eleven-year-olds would talk seventy-five years ago. Beverly is subject to the male gaze—from both the characters and the novelist—but she’s one of the most richly imagined characters.

Not all the short stories take place in the 50s. The Losers have to return to Derry in the 80s, and the book has a double-climax alternating between their confrontations with It as both kids and adults. Stephen King may be middle-brow, but in a testament to his craft, he actually pulls this off. If you want an example of a story within a story, Mike, the only Loser to remain in Derry after childhood, has to call the other six to tell them It has returned. When he calls Stanley Uris we get a short story about Stan’s loving marriage and success career. In the middle of that we get a short story about Stan’s wife, the antisemitism she faced as a kid, and the deep grief she endures when she can’t get pregnant. Finally—and skip to the next paragraph if you want to avoid a spoiler—Stan, unable to face the return of It, draws and bath and slits his wrists. We never meet his wife again.

If King isn’t traveling into the present for his asides he’s traveling into the past. Remember Dick Hallorann from The Shining? At one point King spends, like, fifty pages writing about Dick’s life in the army, the jazz club he founded, and how a Klan-like group burned it down. King drops the entire narrative to tell us this stuff. I don’t think he can’t help himself.

But, weirdly—wonderfully—I was there for it. I highly enjoyed this book! Could it be shorter? Of course! But why ask that question when you relished every page? It doesn’t hurt that it’s very easy to read. King’s prose is folksy and direct and flies by.

And frankly one of the joys of the book is the whiplash you get from this writer who epitomizes both wholesome Boomer nostalgia and the most fucked up shit imaginable. Case in point: near the end of the book he introduces us to Patrick Hockstetter, the only person more deranged than Henry Bowers. Patrick is mentally slow, keeps a box of dead flies in his desk to show to girls, and murdered his baby brother because he wanted more attention from his parents. He’s a true sociopath in that he feels almost no emotions, and is a natural solipsist who simply assumes he’s the only real person in the world. He also spends his free time suffocating live animals in an abandoned refrigerator in the woods. Just so you don’t think King is all golden oldies and penny candy, here’s an excerpt detailing Patrick’s end. Skip this section if you’re eating lunch.

The pigeon was nothing but a skeleton surrounded by a ragged fall of feathers. There was no flesh left on its body at all. And around it, stuck on the refrigerator’s inner walls, hanging from the underside of the freezer compartment, dangling from the wire shelves, were dozens of flesh-colored objects that looked like big macaroni shells. Patrick saw that they were moving slightly, fluttering, as if in a breeze. Except there was no breeze. He frowned. Suddenly one of the shell-like things unfurled insectile wings. Before Patrick could do more than register the fact, it had flown across the space between the refrigerator and Patrick’s left arm. It struck with a smacking sound. There was an instant of heat. It faded and Patrick’s arm felt just like always again…but the shell-like creature’s pale flesh turned first pink, and then, with shocking suddenness, rose-red.

Although Patrick was afraid of almost nothing in the commonly understood sense of the word (it’s hard to be afraid of things that aren’t “real”), there was at least one thing that filled him with wretched loathing. He had come out of Brewster Lake one warm August day when he was seven to discover four or five leeches clinging to his stomach and legs. He had screamed himself hoarse until his father had pulled them off.

Now, in a deadly burst of inspiration, he realized that this was some weird kind of flying leech. They had infested his refrigerator.

Patrick began to scream and beat at the thing on his arm. It had swelled to nearly the size of a tennis ball. At the third blow it broke open with a sickening squtt sound. Blood—his blood—sprayed his arm from elbow to wrist, but the thing’s jellylike eyeless head held on. In a way, it was like a bird’s narrow head, ending in a beaklike structure, but this beak was not flat or pointed; it was tubular and blunt, like the proboscis of a mosquito. This proboscis was buried in Patrick’s arm. Still screaming, he pinched the splattered creature between his fingers and pulled it off. The proboscis came out cleanly, followed by a watery flow of blood mixed with some yellowish-white liquid like pus. It had made a painless dime-sized hole in his arm. And the creature, although exploded, was still twisting and moving and seeking in his fingers. Patrick threw it away, turned…and more of them flew out of the refrigerator, lighting on him even as he groped for the Amana’s handle. They landed on his hands, his arms, his neck. One touched down on his forehead. When Patrick raised his hand to pick it off, he saw four others on his hand, trembling minutely, turning first pink and then red. There was no pain…but there was a hideous draining sensation. Screaming, whirling, beating at his head and neck with his leech-encrusted hands, Patrick Hockstetter’s mind yammered: It isn’t real, it’s just a bad dream, don’t worry, it’s not real, nothing is real— But the blood pouring from the smashed leeches seemed real enough, the sound of their buzzing wings seemed real enough…and his own terror seemed real enough. One of them fell down inside his shirt and settled on his chest. While he was beating frantically at it and watching the bloodstain spread above the place where it had taken its hold, another settled on his right eye. Patrick closed it, but that did no good; he felt a brief hot flare as the thing’s sucker poked through his eyelid and began to suck the fluid out of his eyeball. Patrick felt his eye collapse in its socket and he screamed again. A leech flew into his mouth when he did and roosted on his tongue. It was all almost painless.

Patrick went staggering and flapping up the path toward the junked cars. Parasites hung all over him. Some of them drank to capacity and then burst like balloons; when this happened to the bigger ones, they drenched Patrick with almost half a pint of his own hot blood. He could feel the leech inside his mouth swelling up and he opened his jaws because the only coherent thought he had left was that it must not burst in there; it must not, must not. But it did. Patrick ejected a huge spray of blood and parasite-flesh like vomit. He fell down in the gravelly dirt and began to roll over and over, still screaming. Little by little the sound of his own screams began to seem faint, faraway.

Just before he passed out, he saw a figure step from behind the last of the junked cars. At first Patrick thought he was a guy, Mandy Fazio perhaps, and he would be saved. But as the figure drew closer, he saw its face was running like wax. Sometimes it began to harden and look like something— or someone—and then it would start to run again, as if it couldn’t make up its mind who or what it wanted to be.

“Hello and goodbye,” a bubbling voice said from inside the running tallow of its features, and Patrick tried to scream again. He didn’t want to die; as the only “real” person, he wasn’t supposed to die. If he did, everyone else in the world would die with him.

The manshape laid hold of his leech-encrusted arms and began to drag him away toward the Barrens. His blood-stained book-carrier bumped and thumped along beside him, its strap still twisted about his neck. Patrick, still trying to scream, lost consciousness.

He awoke only once: when, in some dark, smelly, drippy hell where no light shone, no light at all, It began to feed.

King definitely follows Lovecraft in the cosmic horror tradition: his monster can take the form of not only a clown but a person’s greatest fear. (I didn’t find the scenes where It appears as a mummy or werewolf very frightening because I don’t find those particular movie monsters very frightening.) And whatever form It takes, the effect isn’t merely visual: It has the power to hurt you if you believe It can hurt you: that’s why children are so susceptible. It’s penultimate form—the one It takes when the Losers confront It in the sewers beneath Derry first as kids and then as adults—is a gigantic, egg-laying, alien spider,2 but It’s ultimate form is unfathomable to the human mind, a sort of older-than-the-universe miasma of pure hate.

Speaking of cosmic horror, I heard this book contained a gigantic cosmic turtle. This book does indeed contain a gigantic cosmic turtle. And speaking of sewers, I heard this book contained a preteen sewer gangbang.3 This book does indeed contain a preteen sewer gangbang. The turtle—who apparently farted out our universe while suffering a bout of indigestion—did not work for me. The gangbang was…listen, I don’t want to be put on a list, but all things considered, it was respectfully done. Both aspects were wisely left out of the TV miniseries and films.

Which reminds me—and skip this paragraph to avoid spoilers for both the book and film versions of The Shining and IT—King loves to end his books with huge architectural disasters: in The Shining the Overlook Hotel burns down and in IT damn near all of Derry sinks into the sewers. I love Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining and enjoyed Andy Muschietti’s two-film adaptation of IT, but, man, they should have kept those endings. Both books are superior to their films in that regard.

My biggest critique of the novel is that it wasn’t very scary. But, you know, I think that’s just me. I turned forty-two a few weeks back and my emotions just don’t burn as bright as they used to. (Read all about it.) Sometimes that really gets me down. But when I think about how terrified I was after watching the 1990 miniseries, I tend to think getting older might not be so bad. Because fuuuuuuuuuck that shit.