Confronting Pennywise's Cosmic Horror in IT 🎈

Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re concluding our It read-along, so if you haven’t read the novel, beware that I’ll be discussing spoilers for the second half. If you missed the first few issues in this series, you can find them in my archive!

The second half of It begins with (for me) the novel’s scariest scene.

Henry Bowers has a problem with the moon. Formerly the Losers Club’s primary bully, Henry’s been incarcerated in Augusta State Mental Hospital since murdering his abusive father as a teen. Now well into adulthood, he’s still tethered to Pennywise’s influence. And as the Losers return to Derry, Henry’s past is demanding more and more of his attention. It’s as though the pale face of the moon is calling to him, demanding his attention with growing urgency.

One night in the dormitory, as the other inmates snore nearby, Henry awakens to discover that Victor Criss, his old friend—his long dead friend—is inexplicably underneath his bed. “You’ll have to go back to Derry,” Victor instructs. “I need you, Henry. We all need you.”

As Henry and Victor make their way out:

I mean, seriously: What the fuck.

Thanks for reading Scare Me! Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to receive a new edition every Thursday.

It’s not the imagery itself that frightens me, although the idea of a doberman-headed clown-thing is a genuine nightmare. It’s that Henry and Koontz see two completely different visions. To Henry, Pennywise is freedom, escape, comfort. To Koontz, Pennywise is a terror beyond imagination. Pennywise is deeply, deviously manipulative, and worse, seemingly able to reshape reality on a whim.

In the second half of It, the many dominoes King carefully sets up in the novel’s first half begin to fall faster and faster. As the extravagance of the doberman-clown demonstrates, he’s letting the story truly rip. The twin narratives—during the Losers’ childhood and adulthood—speed toward eclipse as the Losers piece together their past and prepare for the final showdown the book is building toward.

During that long, strange summer of 1958, the Losers use every available resource to identify the creature stalking Derry’s children. Ben delves into the library stacks and dusty archives; Bill leads an expedition back to the crumbling house on Neibolt Street; and in a heady haze of smoke, several of the Losers share a bizarre vision of Pennywise crash-landing on Earth, an otherworldly presence that is profoundly wrong from the start.

Perhaps most significantly, the Losers’ Club is finally made complete by the arrival of Mike Hanlon during a spectacularly stressful rock fight with Henry Bowers’ crew. As Henry and his friends hurl stones at the younger, scrawnier kids they’re hell-bent on bullying, the Losers find that they’re able to stand their ground by standing together. The apocalyptic rock fight also reveals the first hints that there is something more deeply disturbed about Henry, something even his friends are becoming afraid to follow.

These are some of It’s most memorable events, and for good reason. Through them, we not only begin to unravel the mysteries of Pennywise—but we also begin to see the Losers’ bonds grow into a deeply felt and moving friendship.

This is probably also a good time to admit that I had qualms with the 2017 adaptation. It (Part One) exclusively covers the childhood timeline—and to me, it seemed plagued by a profound insecurity in its ability to hold the audience’s attention. In the novel, King gives the story a surprising amount of breathing room. There are stretches of summer where absolutely nothing abnormal happens at all. I think that’s what makes the book so much more effective. The horror is interspersed with stretches of normality just long enough to make Pennywise seem as though it might be a bad dream or hallucination—only for the horror to rear its hideous head again, suddenly and forcefully rupturing summer life in suburban Maine.

The movie has a frantic, desperate pacing where scares are heaped on scares, and the Losers rarely have a moment that isn’t marred by a lingering stare at Beverly’s boobs or Richie cracking a dick joke. There’s a cheapness that isn’t part of King’s novel, where childhood has a burnished glow of something serious and important and sincere.

In the present day, the adult Losers are plagued by disturbing recovered memories of these events, triggered by their return to Derry. As they wander the streets, each encounters a vision of Pennywise or some other unnerving echo of the past.

This portion of the novel contains more of my favorite moments, including Richie’s encounter with Pennywise at the library. There’s another weird, unsettling doubling that happens here: None of the other patrons can hear Pennywise’s taunts or see the balloons that erupt menacingly from thin air. Yet King also makes it clear that Pennywise is real, corporeal, present. It isn’t a hallucination that’s contained solely within Richie’s mind.

The two tracks of the narrative careen toward a twinned pair of climaxes. In both the past and the present, all roads lead deep into Derry’s labyrinthine sewers.

I often struggle with the final acts of contemporary horror novels. So many of the newer releases I’ve read in recent years build dread and suspense brilliantly—only to fumble the climax with clumsy explanations, lackluster confrontations with the Big Bad, or attempts at surrealism that miss the mark.

Take Such a Pretty Smile, for example; its muddled conclusion left me genuinely confused about basic plot points, despite its genuinely brilliant depictions of the main character’s unnerving and potentially supernaturally-inspired sculptures. Marcus Kliewer’s mega-popular We Used to Live Here offers plenty of highly effective images, but it introduces idea after idea and brings none of them home. Both books left me with a handful of interesting but ultimately unsatisfying narrative threads.

In It, King’s action crescendos into two final confrontations with Pennywise down in Derry’s sewers—but then he escalates the narrative stakes even higher, into cosmically existential planes of existence that human consciousness can’t fully comprehend. I’m talking about the deadlights.

I fucking love the deadlights.

While Pennywise famously has a true earthly form as a giant, pregnant spider-like creature, its real form exists outside of our reality, in an extra-galactic space that contains our entire universe and more besides it. If Pennywise is able to draw its victims into this cosmic realm and confront them with the reality of its form of pure light and energy, the realization is enough to permanently unmoor victims from their sanity. It’s an abstraction that comes alive in peculiar, uncanny details; vivid but vague, forcing the reader to conjure their own image of what horrors might lie in the outer reaches of whatever void that contains us.

I think many people have the images from the 1990 miniseries in mind when they consider this ending—which is a shame, because the book is so genuinely terrifying. I adore the 1990 adaptation, which is perfectly cast and generally well-crafted. But the final showdown goes full B-movie, with a sluggish, plasticky spider lurching onscreen. The actors sort of lamely kick at the giant puppet until it topples away.

There’s a wonderful documentary about this miniseries—2021’s Pennywise: The Story of It—that gets into the weeds of what went so terribly wrong in this climactic scene. It essentially boils down to an effects studio that got so deep into their own obsession with crafting the creature’s finer functionalities and details that they lost track of how it would appear onscreen.

There seems to be some lingering bitterness between the director, who felt betrayed and humiliated by how badly the It-spider missed the mark, and the effects team, who feel that their creation never got the flowers it was due. It’s honestly very funny and a familiar dynamic to anyone who’s worked on creative teams where multiple disciplines are forced to come together.

The Losers ultimately do vanquish It (unless…?). They make their way out of the sewers—with the heartbreaking exception of Eddie, whose lifeless body they’re forced to leave behind—and emerge through a giant sinkhole that’s opened up in the middle of town. As soon as the battle is finished, their memories begin to fade again, this time with alarming speed. They’re aware of this slippage as it’s happening, but barely. Soon, everything they’ve endured and fought for, even the strength of their friendship, will be no more than a nagging sense of something barely remembered, like a dream receding and lost forever.

After spending more than a thousand pages with these characters, this ending—tragic in the way Greek myths are tragic, with their deep humanity and the protagonists’ helplessness to withstand fate—mirrored what I knew would happen to me, too. Bill, Ben, Beverly, Mike, Stan, Eddie, and Richie had been my companions for six weeks of reading; but soon, new stories, my job, the holidays, all of the busy tedium of adult life would cause them to recede from my memory. Even writing this newsletter, I’ve had to refer to my copy of the book repeatedly to make sure I’m getting things right, and I still might not have managed even that.

Fortunately, if I ever fully forget It, there’s a simple solution. I’ll read it again, and again, and love and lose the Losers every time.

Next Up: Dracula Daily

I recently had a delightful conversation with Matt Kirkland, a designer and creative person who publishes the Dracula Daily newsletter. Nearly a quarter-million people (including me) have subscribed to receive serialized installments of Stoker’s epistolary novel on the dates when the events described occur.

Matt and I talked about Victorian novels, our shared love for delving into research tangents, and why brainrot might not spell the end of literature after all. It was a fun conversation, and I’m excited to share it next week!

I have a bit of a dream interview this week with Scottish horror novelist David Sodergren (!) and several more scheduled for the weeks to come. I didn’t plan for this to be an interview newsletter but I’m having too much fun to stop! I love talking to horror people. If there’s anyone you’re interested in hearing from, hit reply and say who.

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.