I reread It last month, and re-watched the TV miniseries based on it.
1. I don’t know why I never noticed this before–possibly because this was the first time I read one right after the other–but It has got to be the most Clive Barker-influenced Stephen King work around. Chronologically, It was after Barker’s Books of Blood began having their seismic impact on horror fiction, and King’s enormously effusive praise for the collections (as quoted on said collections’ covers) would indicate they had quite an effect on him as well. The most obvious link is the quote from Barker’s short story “The Midnight Meat Train” that King uses as an epigraph to one of It’s subsections, but the very idea of the book–a telepathic shapeshifting creature whose actual physical shape is all but incomprehensible kills and eats children–could for all intents and purposes be a lost Books of Blood chapter, simply blown up to a gargantuan length and sprinkled liberally with Neil Young and Jerry Lee Lewis references.
2. I’m struck by how many friends of mine who’ve read the book instantly reference the pre-adolescent group sex scene towards the book’s end when I tell them I’m re-reading the novel, especially in contrast with how little this scene seems to be brought up when King’s work is discussed in general. It’s a genuinely outre bit of writing, and given the sexual mores of this country I’m a little bit surprised that it hasn’t landed the book and its author in more trouble than it has. (I happen to think it’s remarkable and speaks directly to the primordial sexual feelings of that age group–I remember thinking that when I first read the book, back when I was part of that age group–but I’m surprised that this is not a discussion I’ve ever had the opportunity to have.)
3. Aside from Barker, surely the other huge looming influence in It is Tolkien. Even aside from the references to Shelob and the fall of Barad-Dur and Mordor that form the core of the book’s climax, the book has much in common with The Lord of the Rings, from the “sleeping shadow that is once again taking shape” angle to the constant glimpses of ancient history that are only partially explained (if even partially–we get no more an answer for why Pennywise’s “human” name is Mr. Robert Gray than we do for what the hell the Watcher in the Water is, but of course that’s what makes both so fascinating to me.)
4. Did you realize that from the time each of the grown-ups receives the phone call asking them to come back to Derry to the time their quest is fulfilled is something less than 48 hours? Maybe even less than 36? I never would have guessed that it took that little time before rereading it last month.
5. Only now do I realize how impressive it is of King to place the entire saga’s lynchpin scene–the blood pact sworn by the protagonists’ younger selves–at the very, very end of the action, after we’ve seen the entire rest of the story from beginning to end (save the postscript stuff). It’s not just structurally risky for a maker of bestsellers, but emotionally quite beautiful as well.
6. I don’t know what this says about me, but I’ve read this book (I think) three times now, and this is the first time the depictions of child and animal abuse got to me at all. But my god, did it get to me. I cried several times.
7. A haunted town–more specifically a town that’s grown quietly evil because of that haunting. What a great idea!
8. And it’s haunted by an evil clown monster–another great idea!
9. Casting Tim Curry as that evil clown monster–ANOTHER great idea!
10. That said, the TV miniseries sure did muck up a lot, didn’t it? A lot of strangely arbitrary changes were made, like making the death of Ben Hanscomb’s father in Korea a big deal. First of all, was that even in the book? I don’t think it was. Second, why introduce that? I would imagine that being a fat kid has an entire wealth of psychic scars a writer could exploit without the introduction of the slain air force captain father angle. King managed just fine. Making Richie a stand-up comic instead of a disc jockey, keeping Eddie with his mother instead of marrying him off–lots of little things like that were just sorta annoying to me.
11. More importantly, the TV movie misconstrues the entire nature of It (the monster, not the novel named after it). It can appear as whatever frightens its intended audience the most–that much the movie gets right. But in the movie, that’s all it is–an appearance. Time and time again the characters repeat to themselves things along the lines of “it’s all in my head,” “you’re not real,” etc., and then they open their eyes and POOF! Pennywise or whatever It’s transformed itself into are gone. But the WHOLE POINT of the book is that It IS real, which is why it’s able to kill and eat people rather than just startle them, duh. When It appears as the Teenage Werewolf or the Creature from the Black Lagoon or a giant statue of Paul Bunyan or a swarm of flying leeches the size of your middle finger, It really is there, in that form, and able to get you. The only time characters think “this isn’t real” to themselves in the book is when It takes the form of a relative or friend of theirs–Bill’s slain brother George, Beverly’s dead father Al, the group’s dead friend Stan, etc.–and what they mean is not “this is just a mirage, like a hologram,” it’s “this isn’t ACTUALLY my brother/father/friend come back to life to kill me.” But that It-in-human-form REALLY IS there, and it REALLY CAN kill you. This should not have been a hard concept to comprehend and work with.
12. The qualitative difference between the cast of It and the cast of The Stand turned out to be a fairly substantial one, huh? But it’s not just the folly of having Harry Anderson in a lead role that scuppered It–it’s the aforementioned lack of imagination when it came to translating King’s ideas, and of course a lack of time in which to let King’s sprawling storyline play itself out. I’d love to see one of the cable nets take a crack at doing a season-long maxiseries adaptation of the book, with all the violence and sex and vicious small-town bigotry and hatred intact.
13. Back to the book for a moment, did Eddie’s wife never bother asking what happened to him? Given what King went out of his way to teach us about her, I think it’s far more likely that the author just didn’t bother tying up that particular loose end. Sloppy, but forgivable, given the strength of the rest of the book.
14. One other loose end–King establishes, through the glimpes into the town’s history provided by librarian/historian Mike Hanlon, that each of Its feeding “cycles” begins and ends with a spectacular eruption of bloodshed–a mass axe murder, a gangland massacre, a factory explosion, a racist arson attack, etc. But what were the massive attacks that began either of the two cycles the book chronicles? Obviously they were cut short before the final outburst, but the beginnings should have worked the same as always, right? Another authorial oversight?
15. All in all it’s a really rich combination of various horror strains: King’s “recurring power of evil” theme, Barkerian “shifting anatomies” and transgressive victimization, Tolkienesque “shadow,” ’50s drive-in monsters, Lovecraftian cosmic horror, urban legends, haunted houses, fairy tales, serial killers, sordid small-town secrets, god knows what-all else. I’m very happy I reread it.