Paper Cuts: IT

Sprawling and baggy, deeply flawed, and as white-hot with human misery as anything ever written, IT is the Moby Dick of horror, a reckoning with the interior unknown reflecting Melville’s famous wrestling with the exterior. It fails where Moby Dick succeeds, its turning point marred by heteronormative lack of imagination, its ending overly sentimental, but in its fearless plunge into the underbelly of child abuse in white America and its connection to other forms of societal brutality it plumbs territory few other major works have dared to touch. Compare King’s historical reflections and mocked up articles from the fictional Dairy Town Crier detailing cases of child brutality ranging from the lurid to the tragic with Melville’s frequent digressions on the nature of whales, the symbolic associations we hold with colors. There’s a clear commonality at work, an attempt at encompassing and rendering concrete things at which the mind rebels. The sheer size and power of the whale, the vast and terrible scope of violence against children — as Melville himself put it, if you would write a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

King’s book begins with a brutal act of gay-bashing which today remains hauntingly relevant. An effeminate gay man, Adrian Mellon, is attacked and thrown to his death from a bridge, his still-warm flesh fed upon by the nameless shapeshifting entity which masquerades as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. His quieter, more reserved boyfriend reflects on this night from a remove of many years, recalling the “I Heart Derry” hat Adrian wore the night he was murdered and the nature of Derry itself, a place where children disappear and die at a rate far higher than the national average. Pennywise acts sometimes as an independent entity and sometimes through an intermediary, but its ties to the people of Derry are deep, intimate, and most importantly: mutual. Webby Garton and the other boys who kill Adrian, enraged by his gender presentation, by his hat, by the furious, uncomfortable feelings he engenders in their love-starved bodies, might well have murdered him even without the psychic pressure of the clown bearing them up like a wave. Bill’s parents might still have neglected him and blamed him for his younger brother’s death.

It’s the complicity of the townsfolk that makes the novel. Many readers will have experienced similar abuse at the hands of parents, guardians, and authority figures. Smothering/emotional incest, sexual violence, neglect, battery — virtually every child in the book is touched by abuse in some way. King also takes the rare step of giving us sympathetic looks into the inner lives of brutal bullies, young men deformed by their parents’ bigotry and vicious mistreatment. He thinks through their injuries and fears, as when he considers five-year-old Patrick Hockstetter’s anxiety upon the birth of his baby brother, Avery, that his parents will now tire of him and have him “sent away.” Even as a young child, the sociopathic and solipsistic Patrick understands on some level that he’s broken inside, and he fears the things a normal child would fear. We’re moved to pity this strange, cold, lifeless boy even as we watch him grow and bloom into a sadistic monster, just as we’re moved to pity Henry Bowers for his tragi-comically horrible childhood and upbringing.

Where King slips here is no surprise. There’s no humanity for fat, clinging Sonia Kapsbrak, whose overbearing-bordering-on-Munchausen’s-by-Proxy mothering transforms her son Eddie into a neurotic, submissive nebbish. Even Butch Bowers, an addled child abuser and wife-beater, is accorded more sympathy and understanding by the narrative. It’s an old blind spot of the author’s, a reflexive horror of fatness, especially feminine fatness. The second of its three major faults lies with the infamous “child orgy”, a scene which while well-written and surprisingly sensitive ascribes a sort of magical, passive cleanliness to girlhood and womanhood which mars the segment’s power as a depiction of transition to adulthood. Had it been an actual orgy and not just, for lack of a better term, a gang bang, it might have been one of literature’s great expressions of adolescent independence.

Finally, there’s the creature itself, King’s greatest and most terrifying antagonist, a raunchy, cutesy, grinning monstrosity from beyond the stars which feeds on fear and misery. Where Melville and King diverge most sharply here is that King’s characters triumph over the unknown, drive a stake through their collective childhood trauma, and with the exception of Eddie emerge battered but alive and headed by all appearances for a happy ending. The unknown becomes the known, the book collapses its central source of terror, and in a gripping occult sequence Bill Denbrough challenges the creature to an arcane contest of wills and destroys it. Its eggs are smashed (the horrified realization of “GOOD LORD IT IS FEMALE” honestly still hits) and the town suffers an earthquake and loses the hazy psychic protection of the monster’s aura, which had preserved it as a sour bubble of 1950s small town Americana. There’s no orphan floating in the sea, no ruination of man’s attempt to tame the void. It’s a pulled punch. A nearly bloodless win.

But for all these flaws, IT remains a towering work, an exercise in scope and depth King himself has yet to equal. It rubs our faces in America, in the rancid bigotry on which the country has been built and on the bones and carrion of which it desperately sustains itself. It forces us to sympathize with the most degraded and repulsive people imaginable, with the stock villains of a hundred lesser stories about small town brutality and backwoods bigots. It forces us to consider our relationship as adults to the children under our care and around us in our lives, and to turn the injustices inherent in this dynamic over in our minds. That his prose is at its peak here, that he’s able to replicate perfectly not just the rhythms of life in a town like Derry but the voices of its newspaper writers, of its vendors, of its most trivial background players, is an incredible gift to literature. It’s a book we’ll still be reading in a hundred years.