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September 2, 2017 9:03 AM   Subscribe

Kaitlyn Tiffany read her first Stephen King novel, IT, this summer... she kept a diary.

Tim Curry, Rob Reiner Kathy Bates and Andy Muschietti on adapting King for the cinema. (Muschietti has directed a soon to be released new version of IT)
posted by fearfulsymmetry (93 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
She said, “Ohhhhhh man, It is not the best place to start Stephen King,” citing a child orgy and the book’s bonkers length. Whatever, Tasha.

Ooooh, this is good.
posted by Artw at 9:26 AM on September 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


I'm currently in the middle of reading IT. Like many people, I grew up having watched the tv mini-series adaptation. I'm a King fan from way back (I prefer his short stories to his novels, Dark Tower series is a separate beast).

Jumping into IT was interesting. On one level it's great at character building and you really get to know the people and the physical space of Derry. Derry becomes its own horror-show of a character and that works really well. Which I know is obviously the point. The town is a part of IT, the horror that rests just beneath. I really enjoy this aspect of the novel. And I think I like the history of Derry more than anything else.

On another level though, the book is bloated and I feel like it's just too much. It overwhelms at times. I'm still plugging away at it but I find that I have to read it in spurts as its just too much for me. I kind of wish Stephen King had just released a series of short stories set in Derry through it's history. But that's a personal preference.
posted by Fizz at 9:30 AM on September 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


As a King fan, I really enjoyed the diary.

Now is probably a good time to point out that Stephen King is out of control. There is no way an editor even glanced at this book before it was published.

Meh. You should try The Tommyknockers if you want a cocaine-fueled sleigh ride through the author's imagination with only the faintest whiff of editorial intervention.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:32 AM on September 2, 2017 [24 favorites]


Obligatory Onion link: I Don't Even Remember Writing The Tommyknockers
posted by Flannery Culp at 9:36 AM on September 2, 2017 [17 favorites]


I'd never read It or seen the miniseries, so when I saw the movie trailer earlier this year I went and read the Wikipedia plot summary of it. I was doing okay until I got to the child orgy... but reading the OP, not even the Wikipedia article prepared me for how fucked up it was. O STEPHEN KING NO
posted by asterix at 9:40 AM on September 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


Oh, I didn't realize Tim Curry has been using a wheelchair for several years (he had a stroke).

cocaine-fueled sleigh ride

That's a great description of that book. It had some individually solid moments that were just strung together into "what the everloving fuck did I just read?"
posted by rmd1023 at 9:44 AM on September 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


Think I'm gonna start something I've been meaning to do for years and read all of King's short stories and novellas - well at least the collected stuff. I've read the first few collections but I need to catch up on the later ones. Probably combine it with Inktober and do a drawing for each one. I always thought, overall, he was a better short story writer than novelist.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:55 AM on September 2, 2017 [7 favorites]


@fearfulsymmetry If you follow through with this, please MeMail or post in Projects. Definitely interested in this. :)
posted by Fizz at 9:59 AM on September 2, 2017 [8 favorites]


This piece is good and it is amusing and it has convinced me that after having read "It" when it came out, I am probably fine to never read it again.
posted by rmd1023 at 10:02 AM on September 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


Yeah, I place half the blame for the book's flaws squarely on cocaine. As an author who struggles with productivity, though, I can't but feel wistful for a time when you could just buy productivity and snort it up your nose. I'm never going to give it a try myself for a whole lot of very good reasons, one of which is the law, and another of which is the fact that I've already got an anxiety disorder and probably just would straight-up have that heart attack they told us about in DARE class.

The memory of reading Stephen King novels is almost as good as the thing itself. I wasn't supposed to read IT or Cujo or anything like that when I did, at eight or nine or so, but my bed was catty-corner to the wall in a way that created an ideal hiding spot for secret eating and/or reading. It also created an ideal space for me to lie awake at night and wonder if something could be right behind me.

I actually cherish the experience of picking up an enormous book and (on liking it) realizing that there are a huge cliff of pages left to go. Tiffany doesn't seem to like that digressiveness, which is fine, but for one I thought the portrait of Patrick Hockstetter was a jewel of merciless characterization. King nailed the life of the actual sociopathic serial killer: not a devilish brilliant creature, but an automaton of flesh and bone, killing things because it was the only pastime that seemed to register in the world to him.
posted by Countess Elena at 10:03 AM on September 2, 2017 [15 favorites]


I'm reading It at the moment too. Ive had to create a specific reading platform of sofa cushions to deal with the weight.

I think 6/7 main characters getting their own phonecall/backstory/IT meeting/return to Derry story (fairly indistinguishable, as the FPP points out) really bogs it down in bits, but the story bits of Derry are brilliant.
posted by threetwentytwo at 10:04 AM on September 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


Thanks for posting this! Was a hilarious read. I would never recommend someone start reading King with this book. Maybe The Shining, or Carrie instead, is a better place to start.

I remember when my dad gave me IT to read (against my mom's protestations) and I read it in high school. This book is so fucked up, but I still weirdly enjoyed the ride? I do remember that child orgy scene though made me feel gross for months afterwards. I hope the remake isn't just all clowns. The book is so much more than that...
posted by FireFountain at 10:14 AM on September 2, 2017


...but the story bits of Derry are brilliant.

Whenever I talk to other King fans about IT, this is mentioned. He nailed the part about the town and the history and the horror feel of it all. It's just too much of everything else in between and it makes the story so crowded and bloated. It loses some focus and you feel like you're drowning.
posted by Fizz at 10:18 AM on September 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


The Onion article was amusing. The truth is sad.
There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all. I don't say that with pride or shame, only with a vague sense of sorrow and loss. I like that book. I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page.
– Stephen King, On Writing
posted by infinitewindow at 10:19 AM on September 2, 2017 [13 favorites]


The place to start with King is the short stories, as they are both quick and asccesible and some of his best work.
posted by Artw at 10:23 AM on September 2, 2017 [10 favorites]


The place to start with King is the short stories, as they are both quick and asccesible and some of his best work.

100 % this. His short story collections are phenomenal and just the right size. Skeleton Crew is probably one of my all time favourite short-story collections. And this is a reminder that I've not read them in years, I think it's time for me to go back.
posted by Fizz at 10:27 AM on September 2, 2017 [9 favorites]


There is no chance I'm ever, ever going to read this book. Not because of scares, but it just seems intolerable on so many levels.

But this diary was enormous fun. A favorite bit:
Now that I am invested, I’m looking for hints as to how a monster this weird (can be a bird; obsessed with blow jobs) could be defeated by a bunch of 11-year-olds.
I like a LOT of King's short stories, and a couple of his novels. "The Jaunt" is among the most haunting stories I've ever read, especially as a parent. And Misery was a godsend to a grad student in search of lowbrow references good for spicing up papers on audience expectation and reader-response theory. Now, It? The wikipedia plot summary was incredibly tiresome. Can't do it, I only have so many pages I can read before I'm dead.
posted by Caxton1476 at 10:28 AM on September 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


I went through a huuuuuuge Stephen King phase in high school, but a lot of the longer books that are considered his classics (like It and The Stand) were my least favourites because even at that age I was annoyed by how bloated they were (when the new version of The Stand came out in the '90s I naively assumed it would be shorter because...c'mon, man). I agree with the others in this thread who consider his short stories his best work; Survivor Type didn't need several hundred pages of backstory and subplots about Richard Pine's career as a surgeon or whatever.

> I was doing okay until I got to the child orgy

I'm at work so I'm not going to google this phrase, but somebody dubbed that scene the "magical teen gang bang," and now that's the first thing that pops into my head whenever I think of that book.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:29 AM on September 2, 2017 [5 favorites]


I picked up It when I was 8, after I had already stolen The Tommmyknockers and Night Shift from my stepdad's bookshelf (my mother had forbidden me to read them, of course, but then left me home alone during the summer while my parents worked, so...). I really enjoyed it and thought the orgy scene was both disgusting, nonsensical, and unfair, but kept reading whatever King I could get my hands on until I was 14 and picked up Salems Lot and promptly put it right back down again. I guess it took awhile for books and films to scare me, and King is very evocative with his omniscient glimpses into his characters lives.
posted by annathea at 10:29 AM on September 2, 2017


"The Jaunt" is among the most haunting stories I've ever read, especially as a parent.
It's longer than you think, dad! Longer than you think! *shudder*
posted by xyzzy at 10:35 AM on September 2, 2017 [15 favorites]


100 % this. His short story collections are phenomenal and just the right size. Skeleton Crew is probably one of my all time favourite short-story collections. And this is a reminder that I've not read them in years, I think it's time for me to go back.

That and Night Shift are both top-tier short story collections.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:36 AM on September 2, 2017 [7 favorites]


IT is like a 21-inning baseball game. If it were held to a normal length, the excitement would balance out the dull bits. But it just drags on and on, and the same thing happens over and over and over and by the end it's been four hours since the beer concession closed and you just want it to end.

Also during the seventh inning stretch there's kid sex.
posted by uncleozzy at 10:36 AM on September 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


The Raft is still one of the most frightening stories I've read. There's something so dreadful about it. The terror that lurks and is spiteful. *shudders*

And I'm still very much afraid of going out into the middle of a lake to sit on a dock or a pier or anything like that. Good job King. Nightmare fuel locked and loaded.
posted by Fizz at 10:45 AM on September 2, 2017 [8 favorites]


IT itself is actually enormous fun, despite the weird bits. Little bits like the but in the shitty wilderness with the refrigerator and the leaches really stick with you.
posted by Artw at 10:45 AM on September 2, 2017


I read pretty much all the Stephen King when I was twelve - or at least all the Stephen King that had been published at the time.

It was so scary. I read it in, like, a fugue of fear, much more quickly than the diarist did. Things I really didn't like:
1. The whole sex plot, which is obviously dumb and gross and creepy
2. The misogyny of how Eddie's mother and wife are depicted - this bothers me more than the sex plot, actually, because at least with the sex plot everyone is supposed to be having, like, fun.
3. The part where Beverly is a Famous Fashion Designer who none the less only wears inexpensive mass market clothes, because while she needs to have a feminine occupation, we can't have her be, like, vain or anything. The sheer improbability of this has always struck me.

Things that were important to me regardless of their flaws:
1. That the librarian, who was my favorite, was Black. Even at the time I kind of wondered why he was the only Black character, but I also went to a school with literally five Black students in a population of six hundred or so, and in a pretty racist town, so that character seemed really real to me.
2. Beverly's home life really resonated with me, even though my parents are darling people - it was more that the abuse and contraints she experienced really made sense with my own experience in school and the world as a whole.
3. The Black Spot arc. That was a political turning point for me, because it was obvious to me that King was writing, indirectly, about actual racist violence that actually happened in the United States.


Something that I didn't like but that was important:
The book opens with the murder of a "childish" gay man by It. I felt so conflicted about this sequence, because I had access to so little material about gay people, and I could tell that King was, like, trying to be supportive even though it's a pretty awful sequence that reads as homophobic today.

I think you can't really get the same experience reading It now as when it came out. I experienced it as a very educational, left-wing book. (Admittedly, I was twelve.) This was Before The Internet, and if you were not informed enough to seek out certain books and magazines, and particularly if you didn't live in a city, your access to non-right-wing material was super, super limited, ditto for books by authors of color, books by gay people, books about people of color, books about gay people, etc. This was the end of the Reagan era, and just reading a mainstream book that said clearly that racism existed, that homophobia existed, that domestic abuse existed and that these were bad, destructive substrate to American life - that was huge. Today, it's easy to think "why include all this violence, all this abuse? Do we really need to read that?" Let me tell you, if you grew up after the Reagan eighties, you do not know the omerta of those times.

I will always like Stephen King because he tried to talk about stuff that was not acknowledged in official, bien pensant society, even though he didn't always do a perfect job.
posted by Frowner at 10:45 AM on September 2, 2017 [65 favorites]


You know how there's a Star Wars prequels fan-edit floating around? I would love for a real fan to do that for IT and The Stand.
posted by JoeBlubaugh at 10:51 AM on September 2, 2017 [5 favorites]


Her description of reading It is somewhat akin to the experience of trying to read an older, hardbound edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, or maybe the Riverside Chaucer, both of which were/are excellent for upper-body workouts.

I read a lot of King in junior high and high school, including all the doorstoppers. One of those was It. Somewhat bizarrely, I have no memory of the orgy scene, which may be for the best. In retrospect, Carrie and The Shining left the strongest impressions.

I agree that short King, including the novellas in Different Seasons, is considerably better than long King; if I were to make bets on his future reputation, I'm guessing that it's going to be like the Victorian short-story writer/novelist J. S. LeFanu's (everyone reads the short fiction and Carmilla, nobody wants to go near any of the novels except maybe Uncle Silas).
posted by thomas j wise at 10:59 AM on September 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


The book opens with the murder of a "childish" gay man by It.

FWIW, this was based on an actual homophobic murder that had happened recently in Maine. King obviously loves strong female characters, in his own way, but I wish to hell he didn't express that by depicting them getting the shit beaten out of them. He depicted the arc of an abusive marriage so well in The Shining, while completely blowing it with Beverly's husband, who never shows the cycles of promise, repentance, or "hidden depths" that tie real women to abusive men.

Here's something I never wondered about till today: how did It get pregnant? Did I miss that in the raft of verbiage? Maybe It reproduced like an insect, parthenogenetically, or by saving the insemination until the time was right. Just seems like a plot hole that King would have either wanted to fill or left for a sequel.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:06 AM on September 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


The Raft is still one of the most frightening stories I've read.

Seared somewhere into my frontal nightmare lobe are the onomatopoeic words from that story that he used to describe the sound of someone being pulled through wooden decking.

But yeah, Night Shift and Skeleton Crew really sealed the deal for me with King. I had an elementary school librarian who actually read "Trucks" to our class - can't remember exactly which grade, must have been 7 or 8. I checked Night Shift out of the library that very day.

Her description of reading It is somewhat akin to the experience of trying to read an older, hardbound edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, or maybe the Riverside Chaucer, both of which were/are excellent for upper-body workouts.

I had a Chaucer class and a Shakespeare class for which the Riverside Shakespeare and the Riverside Chaucer were the required texts - and the classes were back-to-back on the same day, requiring me to lug those two fuckers around for a whole semester, so I could totally relate to what she was talking about.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:11 AM on September 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


Metafilter's equivalent of the Losers Club is people who read IT when they were twelve.

I blew through the book in one delirious week back in the spring of eighth grade; I, too, managed to somehow forget the orgy scene but the description of the small town gay bar with a fisting backroom stayed with me. (Theory: Stephen King hasn't been to many small town gay bars.) This was one of those nagging memories that I began to question as the years went on, but a couple years ago, I found a copy in a library and cracked it open and was vindicated. Imagine my surprise, earlier this year, reading the second Dark Tower book and finding ANOTHER mention of fisting! Technically, this incidence was an impromptu cavity search, but lets not fool ourselves, Stephen King obviously was spending a lot time imagining men putting their hands inside anuses back in 1986.
posted by roger ackroyd at 11:26 AM on September 2, 2017 [5 favorites]


I , too, managed to somehow forget the orgy scene but the description of the small town gay bar with a fisting backroom stayed with me.

IIRC, the fisting room only existed in the minds of local homophobes like John "Webby" Garton. I think the narration said something to the effect that if anybody circulating such rumours had actually set foot inside, they would have encountered an unremarkable working class bar.

Someone who's read it more recently than 30 years ago can correct me if my recall has failed.

*flashes Losers Club membership card*
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:36 AM on September 2, 2017 [10 favorites]


I believe there are other ITs in the later Dark Tower books, so it could have gotten busy with one of them at some point over the milennia.
posted by Artw at 11:38 AM on September 2, 2017


IIRC, the fisting room only existed in the minds of local homophobes

That makes a little more sense because I also remember the conceit was that the man who ran the bar was a straight guy who had no idea his clientele was gay.
posted by roger ackroyd at 11:47 AM on September 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


RIt's hard to read IT or The Stand now -- they were written for a fundamentally less distracted reader; which doesn't so much excuse their length or meandering, but explains how it made sense to an author and editor to let it go that far. The vast majority of the time there was nothing to watch on television. Immersive video games didn't exist. No web to browse or phones or tablets to do anything on. You'd read the newspaper by breakfast and then that was that until the next morning.

There's a really interesting comparison between novels and television shows, on the one hand, and movies on the other hand. The former have been in the face of changes in technology and lifestyle which have dramatically driven changes in form and function. The latter have accommodated technology to some extent with fancier FX, but the basic form and function have remained intact because the basic moviegoing experience and expectations have ditto.
posted by MattD at 11:57 AM on September 2, 2017


I'm reading the article and I'm gonna keep a diary!

-Four paragraphs in, and at least one joke per paragraph about the length of the book. Hmm. She's gonna milk that the whole way, then?

-Fifth paragraph doesn't have a length joke!

-Oh, wait, it's back for paragraph six.

-Mercifully, not too many more length jokes. Or I've become immune to them and no longer notice.

-OK, some good insights into the structure and problems of the book. And she's gotten King's obsession with pop culture and how he uses it in his work - it's part of the universe, yes, somehow, in some warped weird way he tries to give pop culture meaning.

-Hmmm - she's gotten most of the key themes, but has she missed the importance of imagination and how it's a kind of magic and how the power of belief is kinda central to this whole thing? And how the power these kids had was that they stood on that weird line between childhood and adolescence, where their imaginations could allow them magic? That they, like Pennywise, stand just below the sightlines of adults and as a result, this is the realm where magic can happen? Yes. Yes, I think she did.

Look, there's a fantasy element to IT that is important; these kids are on a quest to defeat evil, and I think that's part of the gorram length of the book. Like the Fellowship of the Ring, the group has to form - but unlike the Fellowship, where Tolkien gave us the extensive backstory of the Shire and the four hobbits, a few shades of Gandalf, and then dropped in the other four members of the Fellowship without much introduction and then sends them out into a world that expands for the reader as it does for the Hobbits, King gives us the backstory of everyone in the Loser's club as well as a good fucking chunk of Derry. This is an epic quest that happens in the backyards, alleys, and neighbourhoods; it's about recreating that mythic feel of a fantasy world in one small town (the way a group of kids might) and sending the protagonists on a quest to destroy evil right there. But he also - because this is King - doesn't make the town a mythical fantasy world alone; it's a real place, with a lot of nasty shit, because its not fucking Middle Earth and the Shire, its home to constantly failing human beings who, unbeknownst to them, live on top of Barad-Dur. And unlike LotR, where only Boromir - flawed, tragic Boromir - falls, King doesn't pull his punches. He kills the deserving and undeserving alike, he demands blood sacrifice for magic to really work, and he kills in very visceral, unpleasant ways.

Anyways. IT is a really challenging place to start with King; it's a weird book that digresses and then reconnects and meanders all over the place; it verges on the inaccessible (only beaten, perhaps, by the initial book of The Dark Tower cycle, which I love to bits but know so many, many people who bounce off it within the first few pages) due to the high level of graphic violence, the wandering timelines, and the utterly bizarre, over the top child orgy gangbang scene.

Please, someone do her a kindness and push Different Seasons into her arms next, or Full Dark, No Stars or Skeleton Crew or Night Shift; it's probably the only way she'll understand why King got away with this bloated novel; the power in his short fiction and early work is what got him to that point, where he could really just mess around in long longform. I mean, she found a lot of things to dislike, and at the same time admits she was crying by the end, because that's what fucking King does somehow - I can tell you all the things he does fucking wrong, and yet...and yet.
posted by nubs at 12:14 PM on September 2, 2017 [24 favorites]


Stephen King is hands-down my favorite author. I've read almost all of his books, and his stuff is my go-to when I'm travelling, going to the library, almost anytime. I love that he goes out of his way write multi-layered female characters, strong, weak, all shades of grey in between. Hell, look at the women in The Stand, alone.

But he is INCAPABLE of introducing a female character without describing her boobs the minute she enters the story.

Not everyone does everything right all the time, and I don't think he should be lashed for it. But as I've grown I've noticed it more and more.

Also, I first read The Mist when I was in the third grade at a summer program, nicked "Skeleton Crew" from a counselor who was in high school. A freakish fog really did roll into the neighborhood before camp let out for the day, and I don't think my feet touched the ground the whole way home.
posted by chinese_fashion at 12:22 PM on September 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


The meandering is the point of a King novel. If you're looking for a "they went and they saw and they did" book then you want Koontz, (although the scary is usually just science in the end) or Preston and Child.
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 12:29 PM on September 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


I read IT in one 9 hour stretch age 15.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 12:35 PM on September 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


I can confirm that the homophobic murder was definitely still fresh in memories of New England gay folks when "It" was published, so that bit was clearly real life with the serial numbers filed off. And, yeah, the gay bar was a storied sexcapade castle in the imaginations of local homophobes but it was clear in actuality it was just ... a bar. (Nobody imagines depraved gay sex quite as much like a Cecil B DeMille epic exhibition of depravity like homophobes do.)
posted by rmd1023 at 12:39 PM on September 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


I read a little King when I was younger, but always felt he ruined things by over-explaining them. A plot of ground that re-animates dead pets is pretty scary: it helps nothing to explain that it is an Indian burial ground, and really helps nothing to introduce a... spoiler alert.... giant woolly mammoth. So I only read "It" last year, because it seemed to mean so much to many of my friends. I was apparently lucky to have a light-weight mass-market paperback version of it. I think when you are young, really long immersive books make a huge impression on you: you have so little of your own experience, that it seems like you are grafting on an additional life, and in the case of this book, seven lives. If you miss that window, the book just won't mean as much to you.
posted by acrasis at 1:02 PM on September 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


I read IT in a twenty-six hour jag after receiving it for Christmas in my mid-20's. At that time I had read everything Stephen King had ever written, and I separate his career into pre-IT and post-IT. IT was the masterwork of his career, the single work into which he wove all of the things he was trying to say in his other stories. After that he kind of ran out of steam and started doing 4,000 page reworks of his older stuff. It was Dreamcatcher that got me to tell the SO to stop giving me the latest King for Christmas.

Of all his works, and I am a definite minority here, The Tommyknockers is probably my favorite. It is very obviously a cocaine fueled sleigh ride, and a very uneven one, but in its clear stretches it does the technology as domestication thing better than anything else I've ever read. Bobbi and Gardner are among my favorite literary characters of all time, because of the way both of them manage to retain some humanity despite the tide of inhumanity rising around them, and in Bobbi's case engulfing her. The mental image of that flying saucer embedded within the Earth and being slowly excavated is seared into my mind. And the ongoing montage of the townspeople going insane with power they don't understand and can't really control speaks to me at a level I can barely describe.

Up through IT I said regularly that King was that mythical creature, the Great American Novelist and that the Great American Novel was either The Stand or 'Salem's Lot. It had to be King because the Great American Genre turns out to be horror, the fear and insecurity of not knowing if we will have a job or the means to survive if we piss off the wrong person or make a wrong left turn at some random point. King, who was barely making it himself until the improbable hardback sale of Carrie, understood that and portrayed it metaphorically with monsters and demonic laundry machines.

It's really too bad he settled so hard into a life that gave him no new stuff to write about. Yeah he tried, but learning to fly didn't really work for him in the literary sense. I miss the King who could give me a twelve hundred page novel and pull me into it so deeply that I couldn't put it down for twenty-six hours.
posted by Bringer Tom at 1:52 PM on September 2, 2017 [11 favorites]


*discretely flashes losers club card* I also read IT at the age of 12 in the summer between elementary and junior high. I have never before or since been so utterly terrified in my life. I had to sleep with the lights on for months. I've reread it a few times and it only just stopped scaring the shit out of me this year.

As a novel IT has lots of problems. As an emotional experience its top notch, if you're the right age.
posted by supercrayon at 2:13 PM on September 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


Of all his works, and I am a definite minority here, The Tommyknockers is probably my favorite.

Oh, for sure. The thing is, I do love the book. I guess my point was that it does stand as his definitive wired-to-the-gills novel. I reread it last year, with at least 25 years between that and my first go-around with it, and it still pulled me in.

Not knowing anything about where King's head was at when I read it as a teenager, I guess the thing I brought to it as an adult - having had the life experience of witnessing a few people fight a life-or-death battle with an addiction - was this sense of "This kind of reads as a cry for help from the author" - it felt like he was writing his turmoil into both Bobbi and Gardner.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:15 PM on September 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


You should try The Tommyknockers if you want a cocaine-fueled sleigh ride through the author's imagination with only the faintest whiff of editorial intervention.

King has talked about Tommyknockers as a allegory for his cocaine addiction; IIRC, when he wrote it, he was sober. Cujo, however, was written when he was deep into his addiction and he says he doesn't remember writing that one.
posted by zardoz at 2:57 PM on September 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


I blew through the book in one delirious week back in the spring of eighth grade;

*discretely flashes losers club card* I also read IT at the age of 12 in the summer between elementary and junior high.

I believe that we're supposed to read certain books at a specific moment in our lives. Sometimes it arrives too early, sometimes too late, and in those rare moments, right on time. It could be during our youth, old-age, or some where in between.

I didn't read IT during my junior high stage of reading, but I did read Skeleton Crew. SC was the right Stephen King collection for me at that time. I'm thinking about that other time-line out there, the one where I pick up IT instead of Skeleton Crew and how that would have shaped my love of reading and my thoughts on King.
posted by Fizz at 3:07 PM on September 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


These days I'm all in for King's tie-ins to the Dark Tower series.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 3:53 PM on September 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


I could maybe see myself re-reading IT (hides his Loser's Club card under the seat) but I will never crack open the pages of The Boogeyman ever again.
posted by Cobalt at 4:21 PM on September 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


Probably combine it with Inktober and do a drawing for each one.

Do it.

Dibs on The Sun Dog.
posted by RolandOfEld at 4:54 PM on September 2, 2017


My parents owned a used bookstore when I was a kid, and my first retail job was working there, so naturally I had access to all the books I wanted to read (heaven) and read It when I was 14 or 15 (I think my first King book was Cujo when I was 10). I've read it several times since then and always liked it (in that "make you avoid the bathroom drain for a week" kind of way). I love Stephen King's books, and I love reading about people reading Stephen King books. My personal favorite is Rage, the first Bachman Book where Charlie Decker goes nuts and takes his English class hostage. The imagery and wordplay in that story is incredible. But one reason I love King is how he puts his scary taint on everything ordinary, so that you never think of it the same way again.

From the article:

Can you imagine for a second what it is like to read about a fortune cookie full of pus in the middle of the night, in a bedroom with no working light bulbs, while attempting to eat a piece of strawberry rhubarb pie? This book is twisted.

Good thing she's not reading Thinner!
posted by Autumnheart at 5:16 PM on September 2, 2017 [5 favorites]


It is one of the few books I've read in my life that scared me badly enough that I had to bury the book under a pile of other books and face the open end away from my bed in order to get to sleep. (Obviously, so that if the monster tries to get out of the book, it can't open it. And, if it manages to knock the other books off, it emerges headed away from me.)

As I get older, I see more and more problems with Stephen King's work and I no longer feel that I can recommend him without caveats to my friends who want to experiment with the horror genre for the first time. But he remains one of my formative favorite authors and, when I return to his books, they feel comfortable in a way that few other things do.

It's been probably 10 years since I last read It - I should do that again. I think I can get it on my kindle from the library, though that will mean figuring out new ways to keep the monsters contained.
posted by darchildre at 5:40 PM on September 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


I first read "IT" around the age of the kids of the losers club. I just finished listening to the audiobook some good years past the age of the adults. This book is really fascinating to me for a myriad of reasons beyond the sugarbowls-full-of-coke writing. It really captures a certain kind of middle-class white male baby boomer's outlook perfectly, holy shit. The casual racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-semitism, utter self-absorption.

As a Gen-Xer, I feel like our generation may be the last generation that would be able to read the days of the losers' youth and be able to relate to being able to just run free all day all summer long. Most kids don't get to do that anymore, right?

The world really has changed a lot, not just since the days of the losers' youth (obviously) but the days of the adults: There was a section where one of the characters felt self-conscious about dressing like a kid in jean, sneakers, a t-shirt or riding a bicycle.

But King really did nail the bittersweet nature of childhood and growing old, though. Jesus.
posted by entropicamericana at 6:21 PM on September 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


57th-ing the "Stephen King's short stories are his best work" thread, because it is true. "The Reaper's Image" from "Skeleton Crew" is one of my favorites because it is short and creepy AF.

King's greatest contribution to literature, though, IMHO, is the use of small caps to denote a tone of voice more intense than italics.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:25 PM on September 2, 2017 [5 favorites]


Since we're talking about our favourite King short stories, I thought I would mention Dolan's Cadillac and End of the Whole Mess, both from Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Neither of them are scary in any way, but they are good reads!
posted by bitteroldman at 7:06 PM on September 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


Losers club member. Still remember being creeped out by the magical gang bang more than IT, and the detail noting that fat kid Ben had a big dick. Wtf.
posted by benzenedream at 7:08 PM on September 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


Dolan's Cadillac and End of the Whole Mess, both from Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Neither of them are scary in any way, but they are good reads!

I've always felt some of King's best work is when he focuses on more psychological horror rather than supernatural; where the horror/dread/monster comes from what we are capable of on our own, without any clowns in the sewer.
posted by nubs at 7:17 PM on September 2, 2017


Okay, I was a big horror and Stephen King fan for as far back as I can remember. I got my parents to buy me It as soon as it came out, just after I had turned 10. I had the hardcover version - probably the first edition - and I took the dust jacket off immediately. The bare cover was just plain black and I carted that thing around with me everywhere I went for months. It was fucking huge and I probably read it five times, accumulating dozens of dog-eared pages until the spine started to come off.

Loved the book, though the ending was a little much, even for me. But even though I don't think I'd like them as much now, I loved all the Stephen King books as a kid, even Tommyknockers, messed up as it was. The Shining was the scariest book I've ever read, other than House of Leaves. Christine for some reason, was one of my favorites, maybe because it was the first one I read? I can't really remember. Also loved the short stories, and remember being particularly creeped out by Apt Pupil, though I could not tell you anything about the story now, other than it was about a Nazi.

I sometimes wonder what kind of effect a childhood spent reading Stephen King and V.C. Andrews (and others) books had on me, and how I might have been different had I not read such fucked-up stuff. Though I also read fairly wholesome stuff, like Beverly Cleary and The Babysitters Club, so maybe it all balances out. Was it an 80s thing, or are kids today reading books that feature preteen orgies and siblings with incestual relationships*??

Anyway, the trailer for It looks very creepy and I'm hoping it lives up to its promise.

*Don't even get me started on Go Ask Alice
posted by triggerfinger at 7:58 PM on September 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


Seriously, I also read "Flowers In The Attic" as a tween. During the same phase I watched "Heavy Metal" and Pink Floyd The Wall. It was a different time.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:47 PM on September 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


bitteroldman: "Since we're talking about our favourite King short stories, I thought I would mention Dolan's Cadillac and End of the Whole Mess, both from Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Neither of them are scary in any way, but they are good reads!"

I loved both of those. I vividly remember reading Mess when it was first published in Omni Magazine, and thinking, "Damn."
posted by Chrysostom at 8:53 PM on September 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


Started on King at 12, with Needful Things. That's still one of my faves, the slow progression of a town hotwired to explode into violence and madness creeps me good.

I read It a few years later, at summer camp, and finished it on an overnight camping trip by flashlight after everyone else had gone to sleep. I was so freaked by the end I put it outside the tent before I fell asleep, and overnight rain ruined it. I could at least then move on knowing that I had enabled nature to defeat the evil within those pages.
posted by yellowbinder at 8:54 PM on September 2, 2017


I'm another who read It as a teen. I wouldn't say it's one of my favorite books, but I definitely love it something special. I feel pangs of defensiveness when people talk smack about it, even though I know it's got some deep flaws.

I'm looking forward to the new movie. I never cared much for the TV movie--Tim Curry was the best part by far--and the trailers look sufficiently terrifying.

Agree with the other commenters that King's short stories are the best gateway. "The Jaunt" sticks with you for days. Same for "Survivor Type"--a real old-school EC horror comics gross-out style story. "Dolan's Cadillac" would go nicely with a glass of Amontillado. I quite liked "N", a very Lovecraftian novella from Just After Sunset. "1922" from Full Dark, No Stars is creepifying.
posted by lovecrafty at 9:06 PM on September 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


On the subject of Stephen King's shorter works. I highly recommend Mile 81, a short from his Bazaar of Bad Dreams. You'll never look at an old station wagon the same way again. It is one of his strongest short works in many years.
posted by Fizz at 5:42 AM on September 3, 2017 [2 favorites]


Why would it take one an entire summer to read a pulp novel?

I read it in 24 hours at age 20.

Then again, I was home babysitting my siblings while my parents attended a family funeral near Pittsburgh, and by the time I was about a third of the way in I was so terrified that sleep just wasn't an option, so I finished the damn thing.

The child orgy: what the actual fuck was he thinking?
posted by tully_monster at 11:22 AM on September 3, 2017


Oh, and there is something unutterably pretentious and banal about juxtaposing rock lyrics with modernist poetry, which is another thing that always annoyed me about Stephen King. That, and the notion that people who teach writing are talentless hacks from whom creative outsider geniuses can learn absolutely nothing and in whose presence they will only suffocate (Koontz is also incredibly annoying that way). A couple of generations of bad writers, mostly male, grew up on that crap.
posted by tully_monster at 11:29 AM on September 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


>The mom in Donnie Darko, an intellectual misplaced in Midwestern suburbia and played with daunting coolness by Mary McDonnell

Donnie Darko is set in Middlesex, Virginia, which is a fictional town whose precise location is uncertain but, in any case, I am pretty sure is not in the Midwest.
posted by kcds at 11:54 AM on September 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


Since we're talking about our favourite King short stories, I thought I would mention Dolan's Cadillac and End of the Whole Mess, both from Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Neither of them are scary in any way, but they are good reads!

See, End of the Whole Mess was far and away one of King's better fucking-me-up stories. No matter how well he writes about something supernatural, you still set the book down and say "okay, but vampires aren't real", whereas that one was just terrifyingly existentially plausible. Not that "the true fuckup here is humanity" is unusual in his work, but that was a straight dose and it got me good.
posted by cortex at 1:19 PM on September 3, 2017 [2 favorites]


Since we're talking about our favourite King short stories

lady fingers they taste just like lady fingers
posted by entropicamericana at 1:57 PM on September 3, 2017 [6 favorites]


Such an ugly word, trunk.
posted by Flannery Culp at 2:58 PM on September 3, 2017


I guess I read James Tiptree Jr.'s The Screwfly Solution before End of the Whole Mess, so gradual imbecility didn't scare me as much as the femicide plague.
posted by benzenedream at 4:42 PM on September 3, 2017


lady fingers they taste just like lady fingers

oh my god why
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:45 PM on September 3, 2017


The Screwfly Solution is an ugly, ugly story.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:36 PM on September 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


Yeah, it is.
posted by wintermind at 10:28 AM on September 4, 2017


It's fucking chilling. There was a pretty good adaptation of "screwfly solution" as part of the "masters of horror" anthology program. My favorite throwaway bit in it was billboards that had been graffiti'd with "GENESIS 3:16" (for folks unfamiliar with Christian graffiti, this would be instead of the not-uncommon "John 3:16")
posted by rmd1023 at 10:33 AM on September 4, 2017 [2 favorites]




Woo. Spooky. I've just started watching Haven as something to have on in the background while I code. I zipped through the first season last week, and now season two starts up with a small boy in a yellow raincoat watching and walking alongside his small paper boat (sealed properly the way his brother instructed him no doubt) as it floats down the street kerb-side after a recent rainfall. It eventually disappears into a storm grate.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 3:56 PM on September 5, 2017


as an aside... my favorite part of king novels in the mid-90s, when i bought paperbacks from media play, was his "author's intro" where he addressed us, his constant readers, in forwards of his older books. now, reading them as they come out, i don't get that fun experience. have his 2000s books come out with those "constant reader" prefaces? i would get them just for that.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 3:15 PM on September 7, 2017


Seven children and It

A novel isn’t always about what we initially suspect it is, and when I think back to It now, the last thing that comes to mind is the killer clown in the sewers or the convoluted cosmology that assumes center stage in the book’s untidy conclusion. What I love, instead, are King’s descriptions of a clubhouse in the woods, of a first crush, and of how it feels to live in an inner world still peopled by creatures from comics, movies, and horror novels. And King’s inimitable voice, often copied but never equalled, has drawn me back again and again.
posted by Artw at 8:11 AM on September 8, 2017


Oh, and... spoilers? How Does the New It Movie Deal With Stephen King’s Orgy Scene?
posted by Artw at 3:21 PM on September 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


(actually a fair amount of spoilers not related to that question)
posted by Artw at 3:26 PM on September 8, 2017 [1 favorite]



Oh, and... spoilers? How Does the New It Movie Deal With Stephen King’s Orgy Scene?


Well, it's a solution but not a good solution. FFS, do you have to take away Bev's agency? As problematic as the gangbang is, the Beverly in the books stands on her own beside the rest of the Losers and doesn't need any saving.
posted by nubs at 3:30 PM on September 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


It sounds rather graceless, and TBH not all that in line with the creatures usual MO.
posted by Artw at 4:16 PM on September 8, 2017


James Tiptree Jr.'s The Screwfly Solution

Alice Bradley Sheldon's The Screwfly Solution. :)
posted by Emily's Fist at 5:10 PM on September 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


Raccoona Sheldon's James Tiptree Jr.'s Alice Bradley Sheldon's The Screwfly Solution.
posted by Artw at 5:18 PM on September 8, 2017


Yeah, she published it as Raccoona Sheldon, so.

Analog, June '77
posted by Chrysostom at 6:21 PM on September 8, 2017


Looks like IT is going to have a massive opening weekend at the box office.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:57 AM on September 9, 2017 [1 favorite]




It's interesting to me that part of his comments on it are how the act connects childhood and adulthood, which I think is a big thematic part of IT; there's a lot of words devoted to how children and adults are different but connected states of being. And sexuality is certainly one of the divides there. But the fact that he thought a gangbang was an appropriate way to illustrate that, to illustrate that the Losers were moving into adulthood remains bizarre to me; the act was meant to recreate the connection between them all, to illustrate how much they loved each other - but there are so many other choices in how to do that without involving sex. As far as his opinion on how times have changed with respect to how that scene is viewed - man, I read the book when it first came out in 1986 and it squicked me out then. I don't think views have changed with time; I think we're all just more comfortable with speaking out about shit we see that seems wrong in our media.

I've long thought there's a series of essays to be written about sexuality and King's work; I read a lot of King as an early adolescent and it certainly had an impact; there's a real streak of "kinky", weird stuff, usually with violent under and overtones.
posted by nubs at 6:13 PM on September 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


I like King, he saws a lot of sound stuff in his nonfic, but he also thinks Kubrick's The Shining is bad and the TV movie is great so he's def someone with some weird blindspots... "why would people think the tween sewer orgy is weird?" is def one of the weirder and bigger ones though.
posted by Artw at 6:16 PM on September 9, 2017


I have no affection for either adaptation of the Shining, but I'm with you on the weird blindspots. We all have 'em, though; most of us just aren't famous enough to have this level of attention on them.
posted by nubs at 6:42 PM on September 9, 2017


Whatever you might think of that sex scene toward the end of the book, good or bad, it is neither a child orgy, nor a gangbang.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 4:49 PM on September 11, 2017




Of Course Pennywise From It Has a Horny Tumblr Fandom

Read through to make sure there was a "whatever floats your boat" joke.
posted by nubs at 7:53 AM on September 18, 2017 [1 favorite]






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