Stephen King Reading Journal 🎈 Book Critics Hated IT

Contains spoilers for the first 250-ish pages of It

If you opened a newspaper in 1986 and listened to the book critics, you might have skipped It.

“WHERE did Stephen King, the most experienced crown prince of darkness, go wrong with 'It'? Almost everywhere,” novelist Walter Wager wrote in The New York Times. “[H]e has piled just about everything he could think of into this book and too much of each thing as well.”

Kirkus Reviews opted for an off-putting meat metaphor: “King's newest is a gargantuan summer sausage…made of the same spiceless grindings as ever: banal characters spewing sawdust dialogue as they blunder about his dark butcher shop.”

These critiques strike me as exceptionally petty—not because the writers pick on King’s style, that’s fair enough—but because both completely spoil the book’s ending. If you don’t yet know the mystery of Pennywise the Dancing Clown’s identity and origins, be glad you weren’t a reader in 1986 trying to decide if you could splurge on the pricey new hardcover.

King was, by this point, an exceptionally successful writer. A decade earlier, King’s debut, Carrie, had been adapted into a movie that grossed nearly $34M at the box office. ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, and Pet Sematary were among the dozen-plus novels that won awards and flew off bookstore shelves in the years that led to It.

Writing for The New York Review, professor and editor Thomas R. Edwards was somewhat more complementary. “[King’s] work avoids a cynical or exploitative note,” Edwards writes. “I would judge that he believes in what he does[.]”

Yet Edwards, too, finds the public’s hunger for King’s horror novels somewhat puzzling. “[I]f the story of It is negligible, what sells all those books?” he wonders. “King is not simply pandering to a mass audience that’s too stupid to see the absurdity of his stories.”

What, indeed?

Every novel, no matter how sprawling, starts with a sentence. King opens It with the ephemeral image of a fragile paper boat sailing on stormwater:

It’s an uneasy moment. A just before. An everything changed after.

It’s also, upon further inspection, a surprisingly complex sentence. The longer I study the narrator’s tone, the stranger it seems to me. There’s the cautious hedging (“as far as I know or can tell”) that’s balanced by the narrator’s steely, almost academic certainty.  

Then there are the plot points packed in. Right away, we learn that the terror is cyclical: We don’t know what the terror is, only that it recurs. We have a powerful image of that iconic, fragile boat, an object that could so easily disintegrate into pulp. The rain-swollen gutter is such a vivid image you can almost smell it.

We know almost certainly there is a child chasing that boat, without King having to say so at all. Who else would sail a paper boat?

And the ending of this novel is revealed, seemingly, in that very first sentence. “If it ever did end…” There’s ambiguity ahead, and tension, and pain.

Then there’s the “I.” Who could that be?

King takes his time in this first section. He has a lot of work to do: The first section must introduce his large cast of characters as children and adults. He maps the disquieting Maine town of Derry for us, its buildings and houses and vacant areas. Most importantly, he shows us the stakes we’re up against: The shifting, scary faces of Pennywise.

That first chapter is a tight, self-contained horror that could easily stand alone as a short story. In 1958, young Georgie Denborough begs his older brother to help him prepare a paper boat; he sails the boat in the storm-swelled gutters; he meets a monster; and then he dies.

The second flashes forward nearly 30 years to 1984. Police are questioning a gay man named Don, who furiously explains through sobs that his boyfriend has been killed by a group of bigots who pushed him into Derry’s canal. The accused, who are being questioned separately, implausibly claim that a clown killed Adrian Mellon. 

As each side pleads their case to Derry’s cops, the only thing we know for certain is that a poisonous hatred and intolerance has seeped into Derry’s citizens like groundwater. The hatred bleeds up to the surface as graffiti, shouted insults, mean glares. Adrian Mellon dared to be himself, participate in the city’s festive celebrations, and openly love his boyfriend, despite the danger. And some lethal combination of bigotry and something far stranger snuffed out his life. When police recover his body, it’s marred with bite marks. 

(As a side note: I don’t love the bury your gays trope and found Adrian and Don’s tragedy difficult to read. But it was also clear to me that King treated them both as full characters with quirks, plans, hopes, and backstories. King’s decision to include and empathize with a gay couple during this moment in the AIDS crisis—a time when many straight Americans were all too content to ignore or ostracize the gay community—felt surprisingly political in a book about a child-hunting sewer clown.)

Maybe you figured it out sooner, but I was nearly 250 pages deep by the time I learned our narrator is Mike Hanlon, who grows up to become Derry’s librarian. In Chapter 3, King efficiently introduces our six other main characters. There’s Stan Uris, who longs to become a father but struggles with infertility. Richie Tozier, an LA radio DJ known for his character voices. Ben Hanscom, a fabulously successful architect with a mysterious private life. Eddie Kaspbrak, a hypochondriac with mommy issues and a fleet of limos. Beverly (Marsh) Rogan, who barely escapes her abusive husband in one piece. And finally, Bill Denborough, who overcame a childhood stutter and emerged as a world-famous horror novelist. 

Other than Mike, each character has become wildly successful and wealthy in adulthood. They almost exclusively work in the arts, ranging from fashion to literature to architecture to comedy; all are child-free. And with the tragic exception of Stan, who exits this mortal coil immediately after receiving Mike’s phone call summoning him back to Derry, all drop everything to return to their horrible home town and finish what they started as children back in 1958. 

The first quarter of It brings us to Mike’s first interlude, in which he chronicles Derry lore for our benefit and that of future generations. A devoted librarian, Mike dredges up oral histories from elderly residents and collects newspaper clippings that report on Adrian Mellon’s grim death. He’s determined to solve the mystery of it—and put an end to its evil once and for all.

This is the structure that will scaffold the rest of the novel. As our adult cast of characters gradually regain their childhood memories, It shifts between the present and past, adulthood and childhood, then and now. We gradually piece together a rich history of Derry from Mike’s interjections. And although Pennywise is barely present in these early chapters, it soon will become very present indeed.

In the second half of his article, Edwards reviews James Clavell’s Whirlwind, a similarly hefty novel that at the time garnered the highest-ever reported advance a publisher had offered ($5 million). Clavell, a white man, made his name writing a six-book “Asian Saga.” Whirlwind focuses on Iran: “[G]enerally, his Iranians are mostly pictured as an excitable, devious, venal, self-destructive lot,” Edwards observes, clearly disgusted by the racist stereotypes.

Edwards hated this book. “I must say that Whirlwind is by far the worst novel I’ve ever finished,” he wrote. “Stephen King is not quite a ‘serious’ writer, but he can reveal interesting moments of strangeness in ordinary American life; James Clavell’s novel has nothing to do with any life I’ve ever heard of.”

King is by no means a perfect writer. Bury your gays aside, King cannot seem to write a Black character without including slurs. He’s cruel to most fat characters, and even chubby Ben becomes sleek and muscular in adulthood. There’s also that scene.

But for all his flaws, King spends these first 250 pages crafting a story that is richly imagined and recognizably the fabric of American life. Sometimes writers are so busy trying to be important that they forget a story’s sacred, ancient job: to be told and retold, memorized like an incantation, and to afford us glimpses of the uncanny or sublime hidden within our every day lives. It has that solidity.

And we’re only just getting started.

We’ll be back in two weeks: If you’re reading along, the next installment will cover pages 251 to 550-ish. And if you’re not, that’s okay, too! We’ll be taking a closer look at Richie Tozier’s character arc, queer readings of It, and my personal headcannon.

A Collection of Clowns

• Who else remembers the 2016 clown sighting craze?

• The new Clown in a Cornfield movie has earned a very respectable 74% on Rotten Tomatoes. The book series seems universally beloved—I haven’t read them yet, but enjoyed author Adam Cesare’s recent interview on Talking Scared.

• If you’re in Leighton, PA, you can visit Hell House LLC’s Abaddon Hotel. You can even pose with the series’ infamous basement clowns…if you dare!

• Are jesters clowns? Are clowns jesters? Either way, there was once a giant jester-shaped stage floating on an Austrian lake.

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.