Second Glance: It by Stephen King

The causes of addiction are manifold and since denial is one of the condition’s defining symptoms (Caroline Knapp suggests in Drinking: A Love Story that addiction is, in fact, just another word for denial) the addicts aren’t likely to pinpoint a particular stressor that’s driving them to the bottle, the needle, whatever. A friend of mine who counsels addicts at a free clinic in Miami says that, much as drug abuse might be a problem in somebody’s life, it’s also, for the addict, a solution to some other, deeper, personal problem. Coping with a loss, punishing themselves, making the time pass. The task of treatment is to address that deeper problem with something more constructive than drugs.It’d be reductive to say that Pennywise the Dancing Clown, eponymous villain of 1986’s horror opus It, is a manifestation of Stephen King’s drug addiction, which in the 1980s had ballooned to incorporate a daily cauldron of Miller Lite, cocaine, and hearty gulps of Scope mouthwash, but yes, It is made up, in part, of that addiction. But another thing King was trying to confront in that decade was his explosive success. His debut novel, Carrie, was released in 1974 and then whipped onto the screen by Brian De Palma just two years later. 1980 saw Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, along with the release of Firestarter in hardback. His 1978 behemoth, The Stand, was developing a cult status among fans of sci-fi and fantasy. Then we got Cujo and Christine and Pet Sematary in quick succession. From 1981 to 1984 Stephen King released two novels a year. Then, after a year without a novel, during which his fame fermented, King dropped It in 1986. In the course of the book’s 1,100-page sprawl we see that the children who were terrorized by (and who temporarily defeated) Pennywise the Clown in 1954 all come to enjoy, in their 30s, huge financial success. Could Pennywise, the shapeshifting extra-dimensional clown, be a manifestation of the horrors brought on by sudden success, by the responsibilities of that success, and some anxiety about how it might alienate a person from his or her roots? Probably, sure.Pennywise is many things.It isn’t until roughly 500 pages into the novel that our heroes, as adults returning to their hometown of Derry to defeat the clown one last time, refer to Pennywise as “It.” They know at this point that the clown shape isn’t It’s real form. And we, the reader, have at this point in the text seen It wear the shape of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Karloff’s mummy, a teenage werewolf, a Chevy-sized bird of prey, a pedophilic leper. Actors call it “range.” Pennywise confronts the kids, mostly, when they’re alone, assuming the shape of either the thing they directly fear (the creature of some feature they just saw, like Mike Hanlon being attacked by a huge bird after seeing Rhodan for the first time) or, more often, a manifestation of something deeper. Young Beverly, studying and stressing over her body in the mirror each morning in what she imagines to be the night-to-night transformations of puberty, is met with geysers of blood from that bathroom sink.We’ve also seen, in vignettes where King does some of the best character development of his career a spectrum of everyday horrors and personal demons. Casual racism, a mass murder by the KKK, domestic violence, Munchausen syndrome, obesity. The most prominent hangup among our characters, however, is sex.There’s sexual experimentation between two bullies, sexual advances by the monster, sexual persecution and puzzled, anxious, titillated discourse among the young boys about how exactly women get pregnant. They make nervous jabs about dating, and a young girl gets grilled by her mom about the manner in which her father touches her. As children disappear from town in huge numbers, turning up dead as often as they vanish forever, the parents go nuts with dread at the thought that the murders may be sex crimes as well. These concerns take a bit of a back seat once our characters are adults but, seeing as more words are given to their youth, it’s fair to say that sex, and the fears associated with it, dominate the novel.Makes sense. In 1981 five gay men in Los Angeles were treated for Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), an illness that started appearing often in the LGBT community and among intravenous drug users, and that the Center for Disease Control, a year later, would identify as AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). By 1983, over 3,000 Americans had contracted the virus, about half of them dying. Researchers concluded in the same year that casual contact wasn’t a mode of transmission. It traveled through the sharing of needles, and through natural birth by infected parties, but primarily it traveled through sex. In 1985 actor Rock Hudson’s was the first celebrity death attributed to AIDS. Almost every country on Earth had reported its appearance. The number of cases had climbed to the tens of thousands. The spread of it outpaced the research and it seemed the only thing to be said with certainty is that death was guaranteed.To say that It is largely about AIDS would be a simplification like saying that the clown is a pure manifestation of King’s addiction, but if a book is a reflection of its time then It is a reflection of the sexual terror that held the country during its four-year composition, between ’82 and ’86. King found, for that reflection, a synecdoche in children’s natural fear of sex and all that sex seems to entail: commitment, exposure, discovery, expectation. For the virus’s metaphor he drew a shapeless, unseen, unstoppable force that masks itself in jollity, innocence, fun. Just as AIDS appeared to prey on a target group, so does It focus its appetite on children. Until the final confrontation at the end of the novel, the only adult we see attacked by the clown is a gay man, in the book’s opening pages, is targeted by one of Stephen King’s typical homophobic, sexist, tobacco-spittin’ troglodytes who, seeing the victim walk hand-in-hand with his partner and beaten by the group and called a number of names before being thrown over the bridge, into the canal, where, floating unconscious in the water, he’s eaten by the clown. And who’s the one to see Pennywise at work, and to report him as the killer? The victim’s lover.It is an horror novel and, concerned more with sweeping the reader up in its enormous story than with a forthright and comprehensive exploration of themes, the King’s pacing is uncharacteristically propulsive, the editing more disciplined than in later work, so we don’t get the sort of meditative passages that shed greater light on whatever was on his mind as he was writing. Such writing worked its way into his style in the 1990s, as he started to distance himself from the genre. But here with It, just under the surface of the story, the troubles in King’s personal life seem to be giving way to the writer he’ll later become: less concerned with story than with character, less interested in the problem than he is with how his characters react to those problems.Stephen King got sober in 1990 and the first project he embarked on was a novel called Needful Things, a clunky project with a huge cast of characters and overlapping storylines. It was meant to be his final foray into Castle Rock, an imaginary small town in Maine where King set the novels Cujo and The Dead Zone, The Dark Half, and a few short stories.Needful Things is about a guy named Leland Gaunt, tall and elegant with fingers of equal length, who opens a store called Needful Things where, in various display cases, people from town discover things they can’t live without. A preciously rare baseball card, child pornography, sunglasses worn by Elvis. Essentials. Mr. Gaunt takes as payment a nominal cash fee, sometimes just a few cents, plus a favor. The favors, which are all crimes, cultivate a bizarre airing of everybody’s quietly-held biases and grudges. The town falls into chaos. Almost everybody dies.Apart from being 300 pages too long, the book has some good moments, and there’s something compelling about the idea of King, newly devoted to sobriety, throwing himself into a big, complex, consuming novel. A novel that’s also supposed to close a chapter in his creative life.The book came out to no great storm of praise. King himself has bashed the book in the past few years, along with The Tommyknockers and Insomnia, as being a bit longwinded. But he moved on. The next book, Gerald’s Game, is an achievement. In it, for 350 pages, a woman struggles to free herself from the handcuffs that hold her splayed to a bed. It seems there’s a spectral presence closing in on her, some tall man with a briefcase full of bones, but it’s pretty clear, from our first glimpse, that he’s not actually real. In the course of the novel our hero, Jesse, converses with the various sensibilities in her head about what to do here, how to escape, but also about her marriage, formative life choices, and about the sexual assault from her childhood that she’s been suppressing for years. The story of a person being tied down and forced to confront herself, for hundreds of pages, seems, in retrospect, like the very personal work of a novelist confronting his own issues in the new light of sobriety. Move as you might, go where you please, the idea that you can’t escape into your substance of choice is a shackling feeling. King communicates it well.Then comes Dolores Claiborne, a slim novel told in the first person by a female narrator, which takes the form of a 200-page confession to the police. Dolores Claiborne, though refusing responsibility for the recent death of an elderly woman, confesses to murdering her abusive husband years before. She led him on a chase that culminated in a trap. He fell down a well and died of his injuries at the bottom of it, slowly, alone in the dark with his thoughts.Confession, solitude, confinement and confrontation. We’d seen King do confinement before the 1980s: his protagonist in Misery is held prisoner by a deranged fan, The Shining shows a snowbound family that can’t leave a hotel, Cujo features a woman and her young son trapped in their car by a rabid dog, Eyes of the Dragon is all about a young prince, wrongfully accused of murder, being held prisoner in a tower. But in all those novels there was an opponent, a persecutor, keeping the hero trapped.The addict’s perspective: I wouldn’t be stuck here if it weren’t for this person or that person.With Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne, sister novels that take place on the same night, we have two characters whose own actions have gotten them into a tight spot. There’s no real villain in either one. Just a problem that needs to be resolved. In the mid-1980s, with Pennywise, Stephen King was approaching a more abstract and literary notion of story, and of conflict, within the trappings of the genre that gave him his readership and fortune and name. The 1950s Greaser-style bully in It, Henry Bowers, is a frothing-at-the-mouth racist with two henchmen, he’s not very smart, and has no redeeming qualities at all. He seems, at first, like lots of other King villains before him and many to follow: paper thin, unambiguously evil, fodder for the hero’s righteous third-act sword.Of our heroes, Bowers has a particular bone to pick with Ben Hanscom, who’s overweight and gets picked on relentlessly for it. At first he just latches onto Ben’s size, and makes him miserable as a cat does a mouse, but the reason Bowers ultimately becomes bloodthirsty is because of one quickly-told incident, toward the end of the school year, where Bowers, during a test, leans over to Ben and whispers, “Let me copy.” Ben refuses. Covers his answers and leans over his desk:

[Ben’s first thought] was that if Mrs. Douglas caught Henry cheating answers off his paper, both of them would get zeros on their tests. The second was that if he didn’t let Henry copy, Henry would almost surely catch him after school and administer the fabled double-pump to him, probably with Huggins holding one of his arms and Criss holding the other.

While the reader ignores what a “double-pump” might mean to this bully who later experiments with one of his cronies, Ben ignores the bully’s plea for help and, predictably, Bowers fails the test. But his grades, at the end of the year, aren’t bad enough that he’ll be held back. He’s just barely passed the class. But, as King tells us a few pages later, this will sit worse with Henry’s abusive father. Because now he has to take a summer course:

[The teacher] was passing him, she said, but he would have to take four weeks of summer make-up. Henry would rather have stayed back. If he’d stayed back, his father would have beaten him up once. With Henry at school four hours a day for four weeks of the farm’s busiest season, his father was apt to beat him up half a dozen times, maybe even more.

Bowers, if we’re to group him among other characters in King’s body of work, is a throwaway villain. He puts certain things in motion that reveal our heroes’ true colors, and propels the plot in one direction or another, but there’s never any question that the reader’s itch of contempt won’t be scratched with a gruesome death. Here, however, we’re given a glimpse behind his cruelty. It’s fleeting, but its detailed, and it groups our heroes’ enemy with our heroes in that he, too, is at the mercy of childhood, of his parents, of teachers and grades and, as we find later on, sexual uncertainty.It is King’s most mature work of the 1980s – and might prove to be the most mature work of his career – not just for its scope, or for the great pacing and timing with which he darts around the canvas, character to character and timeline to timeline, but also in that he’s created a monster, in Pennywise the Dancing Clown, that cannot be seen by anyone but for the people it targets, seems to have no definite shape, and, in a sense, is both every monster and none of them.Pennywise lives in the sewer, Derry’s murky gray water, and appears to us, first, during a heavy rain. He haunts the canal. He dwells, like a roach, near standing water. And the activity that unites our cast of heroes, when we first see them together, is building a dam together in a little stream through which that gray water runs, a stream that helps carry the town’s waste out to sea, a stream that’s very much like the train tracks over which these kids are constantly marveling: long running lines that carry scary things, and that run without cease, like time itself, to which they’re discovering their own susceptibility, this heedless, shapeless, eternal monster that’ll carry them into adulthood, into sex, into death.Pennywise is a metaphor for addiction, but can’t exactly be defined by it, same goes for sex and AIDS and ageing. He exploits those fears, and at times embodies them, but he’s more. He’s abusive parents, racism, obesity, illness, disappointment and failure and the responsibilities we pledge to our family and friends. A million little terrifying things that take no definite shape but follow us everywhere:

And [Bill] felt suddenly…that It and time were somehow interchangeable, that It wore all their faces as well as the thousand others with which It had terrified and killed…and the idea that It might be them was somehow the most frightening idea of all.

It’s hard to tell what drives an addict toward their drug of choice. Probably it’s a several different things. The task of treatment is to pinpoint what that driving factor is. It’s difficult for a person to do alone, though. King, at the peak of his drug abuse, knew that. And if he couldn’t quite pinpoint the shape, he did a masterful job of identifying its shapelessness.____Alex Sorondo is a writer and film critic living in Miami and the host of the Thousand Movie Project. His fiction has been published in First Inkling Magazine and Jai-Alai Magazine. This is his first piece for Open Letters Monthly.