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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1575 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 13, 2026

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I just read IT on my tour of King’s great works. Spoilers below, kinda, but more just don’t bother reading it if you aren’t familiar with the book.

-- Add IT to the list of "Great Boomer literature that's ultimately about relitigating the 60s. Technically the 60s happen mostly off camera in the book, but the cultural conflicts of the period form the moral core of the book and the Boomer protagonists catharsis over their childhood demons. The villains poisoned by Pennywise are vile racists who spout nigger at any passing black, they are homophobes who bash queers just for existing, they are child abusers and bullies and bigots. The Losers' Club protagonists rebel against the eternal forces of evil, overcome it as children, then return and kill the ancient symbolic manifestation of all racism and bigotry and evil. The symbols of Reagan-Era greed and excess, the shopping malls and greedy developers, sink into the pit created when IT is killed. It's a fundamentally optimistic view of history that is very of its era. ((Contrast: on my King tour I just got to Salem's Lot, a decade earlier, post-Watergate era, same "horror author goes back to his long abandoned Maine home town which is being stalked by a demon representing socio-economic and cultural decline" plot, and the ending is much more ambiguous with the protagonist killing the big bad, but his life is ruined in the process, everyone else in town dies including most of the Scooby gang, it's not even clear that they will ultimately clear the town of all the vampires))

You can actually look at the historical cycle, the famed “every twenty-seven years,” and it lines up perfectly to make each occurrence in the work (1985, 1958, 1930, 1903) line up with a Republican president, so maybe IT is just Republicans in the White House according to King. King talked about IT in terms of Reagan’s nostalgia for the 50s, with the story meant to be illustrative of the ways that Americans in the 80s had repressed the sins of 1958. King misses

-- IT is ultimately a book about Noticing. Ben says about the bullying the kids face from other children:

“This alarmed Ben more than anything else. He understood instinctively, as most kids did, that they lived below the sight-lines, and hence the thought-lines, of most adults. When a grownup was ditty-bopping down the street, thinking his grownup thoughts about work and appointments and buying cars and whatever else grownups thought about, he never noticed kids playing hopscotch or guns or kick-the-can or ring-a-levio or hide-and-go-seek. Bullies like Henry could get away with hurting other kids quite a lot if they were careful to stay below that sight-line. At the very most, a passing adult was apt to say something like “Why don’t you quit that?” and then just continue ditty-bopping along without waiting to see if the bully stopped or not. So the bully would wait until the grownup had turned the corner . . . and then go back to business as usual. It was like adults thought that real life only started when a person was five feet tall.”

Which is a metaphor for the entire 27-year child murder monster cycle thing. Mike explains earlier in reference to the murder cycle:

“If I were an insurance man instead of a librarian, I’d draw you a graph, maybe. It would show an unusually high rate of every violent crime we know of, not excluding rape, incest, breaking and entering, auto theft, child abuse, spouse abuse, assault...Derry is a violent place to live in an ordinary year. But every twenty-seven years—although the cycle has never been perfectly exact—that violence has escalated to a furious peak . . . and it has never been national news.”

"How many?" Bill repeated. “Nine. So far.” “It can’t be!” Beverly cried. “I would have read about it in the paper . . . seen it on the news! When that crazy cop killed all those women in Castle Rock, Maine . . . and those children that were murdered in Atlanta . . .” “Yes, that,” Mike said. “I’ve thought about that a lot. It’s really the closest correlative to what’s going on here, and Bev’s right: that really was coast-to-coast news. In some ways, the Atlanta comparison is the thing about all of this that frightens me the most. The murder of nine children . . . But we all know that doesn’t really cut it with the way the world is today. The communication web is there, and at some point the story should have broken nationally. But it didn’t. And I think the reason is just this: It doesn’t want it to.”

The information about the murders is available, each murder and disappearance is reported in local news, and if anyone from outside asked about the murders people would tell them. There's some indication that IT has the ability to prevent people from noticing, or to convince people to turn away, and that might be true in certain cases in the book. But at a larger, town-wide level over decades, the story is one of selection. There's no force field that prevents people from leaving Derry, and some people do. It's noted that during the summer of murder in 1958, a lot of families send their kids off to summer camps. The people who live in Derry and choose to remain are simply those who do not Notice, who are not concerned about it. They don't recognize the pattern, or trust their unease, they just get through it and keep living their lives and accept that certain things happen.

Derry is noted as thriving despite the murders, and leaving aside the blessing of the eldritch blood god living in the sewers, it seems that the blood letting makes the city healthier rather than weaker? The population selected for acceptance of child death is a fully functional city. Maybe the people who are just willing to accept the risk of gruesome death is actually better at living in the modern world than the rest of us, and the cowards who flee from it are the idiots?

-- I'd heard tell of the child-orgy-gangbang thing, and honestly I think people who get politically correct about it are cowards. It's weird to draw a line between what's ok to portray in a horror book and what's not, and put child mutilation murder on one side of the line and sex on the other. It’s a horrifying scene, and that’s the point it’s a horror book. A lot of woke reviews of the book complain about using terms like Rape too much in the novel, because it’s “traumatizing,” and it’s just so weird to me because traumatizing you is kind of the point of the book.

The novel is famously massive, early reviews note its 4lb weight, but weird thing is that when a book is that long is that it nearly always was supposed to be longer. IT was just about at the physical limits of bookbinding. Any longer and it becomes a series, and turning a single story into a series changes the rhythm. It reduces the number of readers who will actually consume the whole story, and how they consume it. Reading one long book is different from reading three shorter books. King clearly wanted to tell this story in one novel, and you can see the remnants of other plot directions that King considered and possibly started but then abandoned or edited out to make the story fit into a single book. Which leads me to my fan theory about the Child Orgy: there was meant to be a second orgy.

The Child Orgy is a symbolic passage into adulthood. Grady Hendrix writing about revisiting IT after thirty years says:

It draws a hard border between childhood and adulthood and the people on either side of that fence may as well be two separate species. The passage of that border is usually sex, and losing your virginity is the stamp in your passport that lets you know that you are no longer a child (sexual maturity, in most cultures, occurs around 12 or 13 years old). Beverly is the one in the book who helps her friends go from being magical, simple children to complicated, real adults. If there’s any doubt that this is the heart of the book then check out the title. After all “It” is what we call sex before we have it. “Did you do it? Did he want to do it? Are they doing it?”

But this isn’t, really, a one way passage. Sinatra sings: “You make me feel so young, you make me feel so spring has sprung.” When adults fall in love, we say we feel like a little kid again. When a grown woman has a crush we say she is “giggling like a schoolgirl.” The climax of IT is built around the adults, on return to Derry, having to regain their childhood memories and beliefs, regain the feelings and gestalt of youth. I think King originally intended the group to have another Orgy, which would bring them back together, reunify them, and take them back to youth. This ties into the other theory I have about abandoned pathways in the novel: there was supposed to be a new seventh loser.

Throughout the 1985 portions of the book, we’re reminded over and over again that with Stan’s death they are one short. Six, can we do it without seven? Seven was powerful, six isn’t enough. Then they lose Mike too and have to do it with five. At the same time, the three non-Loser’s Club characters Originally, I think, Bill’s wife Audra is meant to link up with the Losers’ Club and become the seventh loser, and then participate in a Losers’ Club orgy with the other six to “get back” to childhood belief in things like open relationships.

-- Structurally, IT is more of a fantasy-heroic book than a horror book. Thematically and vibes, it's horror. But really you have the Fellowship form, you have the quest, you have the hero stepping up, you have Gandalf/Mike lost before the final confrontation forcing Aragorn/Bill to step up and lead. King was a big Tolkien fan, and I wonder to what extent he consciously wrote his magnum opus in imitation of LOTR.

I wonder to what extent he consciously wrote his magnum opus in imitation of LOTR.

Do you consider IT his magnum opus? In On Writing, he bemoaned the fact that The Stand is widely considered his best work i.e. he did his best writing 22 years earlier.

That isn't exceptional. For example, Asimov was an extremely prolific writer - probably the most prolific out of well-known ones, and wrote for over 40 years - and yet the stuff he's most remembered for now are the things he wrote in the 1950s - robots, Foundation, etc. It's not to say the rest of his writings were bad or completely ignored - they enjoyed their success, but they weren't the best.

Oh I'm aware. I was just under the impression that The Stand was widely considered King's masterpiece, as opposed to IT.

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