by LE Francis
It was the mid-’90s & I put on a good show. I breezed through a couple of library books a week & could tick off plot points & facts to satisfy any curious adult. Nobody suspected I had the time or steely guts required to sneak a few titles off of my horror-fixated mother’s bookcase. I cried on the playground & wrote in delicate, old-lady cursive & boy did I have them fooled.
By fourth grade I’d read Strieber’s Wolfen & Saul’s Suffer the Children & dozens of other titles by authors like King & Straub & Koontz. I think the only reason it took me awhile to pick up It was an uncertainty as to if the book was actually part of the cinder block structure of the bookcase. It certainly looked the part. Once I finally hauled it away to the safety of my room I remember thinking well, this will take me more than an afternoon to finish.
& it took me nearly a month to get through it. I read it while I officially read Little Women & White Fang & various dry non-fiction selections for my enrichment project. But the doorstop with the blood-scrawled cover captivated me. So, when I picked it up again this summer I could almost feel the time-softened terror of my initial reactions under the absolute annoyance I felt encountering the elements as an adult. Seems like forgetting things is complex & the book about childhood terrors that come back to haunt you brought plenty blaring back to me.
This time it took me the better of three months. Adult me is a lot busier & less tolerant of King’s bullshit. Long-time readers get wise to it — the folksy rambling, the seeming never-ending scenes of off-color idyll only tangentially relevant to the plot, the excessive references to songs that played non-stop on the oldies station hard-wired into my mom’s 1990 Corsica. It’s comfy. It’s masterful. I love it. I love the deeply personal sense of chaos that comes with throwing the book down & saying “what the fuck?” for the fifteenth time in a sitting.
But I’m an unforgiving reader. I have a hateful streak a mile-wide when it comes to fictional characters with bad vibes — Mr. Shitbritches Darcy, Michael “kidfucker” Curry, Angel “insufferable shitbarrel trashworm fucktaint” Claire. I don’t forgive, I don’t forget, & I’m extremely petty. I mean, hats off to the authors who craft such thoroughly punchable characters, but some — like King’s paunchy, middle aged slob-boy Bill Denborough — are supposed to be sympathetic viewpoint characters.
I have a particular, long-standing dislike for Bill that came back like a magical scar. When I read over the offending scenes & descriptions I felt the presence of a long-ago ickiness, a ghost of revulsion that materialized in the holes of my childhood recollection of the plot. The scars didn’t materialize on my hands but in my throat, in my guts, in the irritated “really!?” that escaped when I read Beverly’s spontaneous recollection of fucking the whole crew in a sewer like a lightning bolt to the head mid terror-bang with this paunchy, married, wispy-headed fuckboi.
It’s not the breach of so-called morality that bothers me but the self-righteous loop of excuses that play over & over as if he’s trying to dissipate his self-imposed guilt with the cagiest, most self-satisfied mantra imaginable. It’s insufferable — the idea that he’s such a weak-minded pissboy that he uses all of this mental energy to conjure up this weighty guilt without having the decency to agonize over it. & then being expected to believe that this man’s mental fortitude bested spider mommy, heckled the clown baby, tore the beating heart out of the eater of worlds! You expect too much of me as a reader.
The book ends on a triple punch of childhood sewer sex, fuckboi heroism, & the most saccharine zero-stakes redemption possible. If our boy Pennywise headfucks in a magical way that slowly dissipates, eating all memories of his presence & the character’s involvement in his chaos — then it follows that Audra’s mental damage would slowly heal as well, no bicycle spellwork required. If the damage was physical, no bike, no magic, no withdrawal of the evil presence would bring her back from the sweet grip of oblivion. Which leads me to think that this scene is not for the sake of Audra or the story, but a final plea to the reader — please don’t judge my poor innocent cornball man-child too harshly, he’s really a good husband, see!
For my tastes, the book was too focused on the ghoulishly traumatic when there was a gothic graveyard of lore, terror, & story buried in further exploring the incarnations of Pennywise & his interactions with the community. There were layers of meaning to pull away that would eventually reveal a chaotic core of infestation & its impact (well, har-de-har-har) on the numerous individuals exposed over hundreds of years of Derry’s history. The best parts came in snippets of story passed between Mike Hanlon & the city’s resident geezers. I would have greedily read the volumes upon volumes of folklore he studiously collected while all of his buds were out being famous people or driving them around.
Still, the years that separate my time with Pennywise, with Derry, with the kids I once identified with (Eddie my wan, sickly twinsie), & the consequentially fucked up adults who came up in the unrelatable circumstances of another generation, were filled with thousands of books — so-called classics, thrifted pulp paperbacks, handbound accounts of local histories. So my experience revisiting the book in adulthood varied wildly from childhood & shed new light on my memories of that first read.
& there is something of a parallel there. Something timely about my re-read. Beyond the nearly 27-year gap in time between now & my days of smuggling horror paperbacks in my Captain Planet lunchbox — I was born on May 30 1985, the day the crew returned to Derry to face the torment of their childhoods.
I suspect in some small part I read the first time knowing I’d be back to revisit someday. & all things considered, I’d encourage any first-time readers to give it a go. But for me? I’ve made my two fated meetings & will not be reading it again in this life.
& I’m thankfully, already starting to forget again…
LE Francis (she/her) is not a serious person, but on her better days functions as Sage Cigarettes’ fiction editor & a sometime host/editor of the Ghost in the Magazine podcast. She does other things too & is a solid advocate for our boy, the pleasantly dry grandpa of peace, harmony & boner-flattering slacks, Brick Bardo Highcock. You can find her on Twitter @nocturnical, on Instagram @n0cturnical, or at nocturnical.com
