what Stephen King understands about climate anxiety

The last week I have fallen into a rabbit hole. The shape of that rabbit hole is the sewers under Derry, Maine. My media diet recently included rereading Stephen King’s It, then reading climate reporting about London’s fifth heat wave in a year, the fact Britain seems to have a ‘fire season’ now, then watching the film and tv adaptations of It. They’ve all settled into my head together into a melange of climate anxiety.

Stephen King’s stories are famous because they both say a lot and say nothing. King himself is a big proponent of the belief that his stories are stories and nothing more, that it’s enough to just tell a good story. In Danse Macabre he vigorously defended himself against accusations of doing allegory. J.R.R. Tolkien was the same, determined not to be accused of secretly talking about the first world war. I’m not such a shameless literary critic that I’ll bulldoze right over his objections and say he’s wrong, he’s lying, and I’ve discovered the secret code he didn’t want to tell anyone else.

But it’s also a truth of literary analysis that meaning can be dug out of a text without the author having buried it there on purpose. Reading in the summer of 2026, It has a huge amount to say about the climate crisis. Its disasters are more watery than the ones we are seeing at the moment. Pennywise can do many things to the people of Derry but he works much more in floods than wildfires. But I read an article today about how much more vulnerable to flash flooding London will be when we finally get some rain on the overbaked ground. I imagine there will be a day this autumn when the drains can’t cope and the weather conditions are perfect for playing with a little boat made of waxed paper. I think I’ll always associate this summer with having It playing in my headphones while I scroll through the climate news, trying to gather the courage to click on headlines that make me miserable.

So let’s talk about what It has to say about the environment. And in particular, let’s talk about how It voices a middle class, middle America fear of the world becoming unruly around you.