it stephen king essay

Themes and Analysis

By stephen king.

'It' is a book that taps into themes that relate to our daily lives, from seeking revenge to coming of age and maturity.

About the Book

Article written by Joshua Ehiosun

C2 certified writer.

‘It’  is about the story of seven 11-year-old children called the losers club, who face a monster called It.   Though they have a different life and social problems and face constant bullying, they still fight off the monster who showed himself in their greatest fear. Twenty-seven years later, after a series of tragic events awaken It. The Losers club fight It   once again, defeating him once and for all.

The Victory of Good Over Evil

Throughout the entire book of ‘ It ,’ the losers club faced evil in different forms. From facing Henry Bowers, a bully who terrorized them to facing It and facing the family and social problems they had, they triumphed in the end. It showed that though the losers club were inexperienced weaklings fighting a monster as old as the universe, their will to fight for what was good triumphed over the evil that had encompassed their town, Derry.

Even twenty-seven years after their first encounter, the Losers club had to face the evil they had defeated again. Even though they were grownups, the club still had to fight much evil manifesting in the form of their personal lives, relationships, and love lives. The triumph of the Losers club over their life problems and It showed that good wins in the end.

Stephen King showed bravery as a virtue possessed by the members of the Losers club. Throughout the book, the losers club showed valiance and bravery in dealing with the situations around them.

The bravery of the Losers club contradicted the name they gave themselves, and that bravery led to them ending the monster twenty-seven years later. Ben showed bravery as he fought It, killing him. Other members of the Losers club also showed bravery as they fought It   in the form of their fears. The Losers club also fought their social problems with bravery by defeating Henry, who had terrorized them for a long time. Twenty-seven years after their valiance had made them send ‘It’ to sleep, the Losers club still stood their ground in ending It once and for all.

Coming of Age

The coming of age is a major theme Stephen King defined in his book.  ‘It’  is the journey that showed how each member of the losers club matured into brave adults. The book showed the transition of every member of the losers club from childhood into adulthood. The crucial point marking their transition into adulthood was Beverly having sex with the boys, this showed the losers club getting rid of their innocence and transitioning into adulthood.

Though the losers club showed bravery, they were terrified throughout the book. Stephen King defined  ‘It’  as an epitome of fear as each member of the Losers club had a cross to bear. The burden each member of the Losers club had made It exploit them in the form of what they feared the most. The entire group experiences fear in its final form, with Bill having to face the spirit of his dead brother, whom he loved but got killed by It.

Fear coursed throughout the book as horror kept seeping from the corners, making everyone experience it. Each grueling scene from the book enhanced the feeling of a monster watching and waiting to pounce on its reader. Fear also leads to the death of many people in the book, from Stan killing himself twenty-seven years after they had first fought the monster due to him too scared to want to face ‘It’ again to Tom Rogan dying from fear and shock of seeing It in its final form.

‘It’  showed that though people get brave amid trouble, fear is a tool even more powerful when it is in the form of what we dread the most.

The need to get revenge was Stephen King’s weapon to add elements like bravery into the story of  ‘It.’  Bill was just a stuttering little boy whose drive to get revenge for his dead brother leads him to fight a powerful ancient entity. Stephen King showed that revenge knows no age as the losers club were only but a bunch of children fueled by revenge and a goal to defeat the monster that had terrorized them.

Stephen King did not limit the drive for revenge to only the losers club as other characters in the ‘ It’ sought vengeance. Henry swore vengeance on the losers club after they won in a stone fight. Henry’s quest for revenge was the tool used by It to cajole Henry into wanting to kill the Losers club. Though he was arrested and sent to an asylum, Henry’s quest for vengeance did not stop as he returned for his pound of flesh 27 years later.

Another character who sought revenge was the monster It itself. Having felt defeated by children, It sought to destroy the lives of the losers club by targeting their loved ones, specifically Audra, Bill’s wife, though It got a part of its revenge by killing Eddie.

Analysis of Key Moments In  It

• In October of 1957, George gets killed by a clown who called himself Pennywise after his boat had washed down the gutter.
• The following year, a group of bullies led by Henry Bowers tries to hurt a fat 11-year-old boy call Ben, who escapes and meets six other kids, namely Eddie, Richie, Stan, Beverly, Mike, and Bill. They name themselves the losers club.
• The Losers club share their experience of encountering a monster that came in the form of their fears. They call the entity It.
• The Losers club link murders and tragic events to It as they start unraveling how long the monster had been terrorizing Derry.
• Mike tells the group how he was chased by a prehistoric bird making the group figure out that It was more ancient than they thought.
• The Losers club fight and win Henry and his gang in a stone fight with Henry promising revenge.
• The Losers club decides to perform a native American smoke hole ceremony to hallucinate It’s origin. The group discovers It was millions of years old, and it hibernates for 27 years, awakening after a tragic event.
• Henry breaks Eddie’s arm in July, hospitalizing him.
• Beverly witnesses the death of Patrick, one of Henry’s gang members. The Losers club head to the scene where writing from ‘It’ warned them to steer off his path.
• It tells his story of how he existed in a void between our universe and other universes. He called the void the macro verse.
• The Losers club fights a werewolf, an alternate form of It. They successfully injure the werewolf with two silver slugs Ben made.
• It sends Henry after the club giving him a switchblade with which he killed his father.
• Henry and his friends head into the sewers to kill the losers club but face Frankenstein, an alternate version of It. Henry’s friends die, but he escapes and is sent to an asylum by the authorities.
• Bill discovers a ritual called the ritual of Chud, which made him enter the macro verse where he met Maturin, the turtle who created the universe.
• Bill finally forces It to sleep with the help of Maturin, who told him he could only win through the battle of wills.
• Twenty-seven years later, It awakens, and Mike calls the group to fulfill the promise they made to return should anything happen again.
• On getting a call, Stan kills himself, writing ‘It’ on the wall.
• The group of now six decides to kill It once and for all.
• The group fights alternate forms of It separately while exploring the town to refresh their memory.
• Audra, Bill’s wife, Tom Rogan, Beverly’s husband, and Henry also arrive in Derry.
• Henry attacks Mike and is injured. After being instructed by It, Henry tries to kill Eddie but dies in the process.
• Tom kidnaps Audra and brings her to It, where he dies of shock with Audra entering a state of catatonia.
• The Losers club head to fight It but get lost in its mind after using the ritual of Chud.
• Eddie sacrifices himself to save his friends, and Bill finally kills It.

Style, Tone, and Figurative Language of  It

The tone used throughout  ‘It’  was a scary, frightening, and threatening tone. Throughout the entire book, Stephen King used terrifying explanations to make the reader feel on edge. The book itself makes each character be in a scary situation where one wrong move could blur the line between life and death. Throughout It Stephen King ensured scenes explicitly inflicted fear on the reader’s mind.

Though each character exhibited a little bit of freedom from the author, they still conformed to the rules of the book, which allowed them to face the terror unleashed at every angle of perspective by the storyteller. Stephen King’s deliberate alternation between timelines and his epistolary writing form, which used a combination of letters, magazine articles, and news clippings from books, gave ‘It’ true realism, which made each part of the story have a vivid effect on the reader.

The last part of  ‘It’  showed Stephen King’s exceptional use of figurative language. The statement read:

Or so Bill sometimes thinks on those early mornings after dreaming, when he almost remembers his childhood and the friends with whom he shared it.

Is a metaphor comparing a dreamer, who remembers to a storyteller who writes, and it shows they are bound by the same fate. Other figurative languages include similes and personification. An example is Ben’s poem which reads:

Your hair is winter fire, January embers. My heart burns there, too.

This was a poem written by Ben for Beverly. The poem acts as Ben’s tool in telling Beverly what he felt for her.

Narrative Point of View

As a post-modernist novel, there are many techniques adapted in the writing if ‘It.’ Stephen King employed writing in the third person/omniscient point of view. This perspective of writing allows the storyteller to be the sole controller of events happening in the story. Stephen King’s epistolary form of writing was also adapted in creating ‘It’. Epistolary writing involves the use of quotes, news clippings and literary materials from others to make a writing more realistic and give life to characters and events.

Analysis of Symbols in  It

Bill’s old bicycle represents something Stephen King portrays throughout the book, the innocence of childhood, something Bill and the rest of the losers club eventually lose when they matured into adulthood. Silver also represented not wanting to let go of the past and the memories we keep with us even when let go of everything else.

Bill made a boat for George to play with, but instead, George dies because of the paper boat Bill made. The paper boat represents a painful past for Bill, a haunting feeling that he was responsible for the death of his brother, George. This feeling eventually becomes Bill’s greatest fear, a fear used against him by ‘It.’

Derry’s Canal

Derry’s canal represents something that relates to our society today. ‘It’ represents the evil and corruption beneath a society that seems okay.

The Refrigerator

The refrigerator used by Patrick represents what happens when one stores their deepest darkest thoughts for a long time. The fridge represents a mind tormented with dark thoughts, thoughts that eventually ends up killing one.

Though a character in the book, It symbolizes something else, one’s greatest fear. It was a monster who manifested in the form of what its prey feared, giving it an upper hand. The book showed that if not tamed, one’s fear could end up being our waterloo.

What is the main theme of ‘It’ ?

The main theme of It is the victory of good over evil. It represents the embodiment of evil, while the Losers club represents the force of good.

Is ‘It’ appropriate for children?

No, It is not appropriate for children and even 13-year-olds. the book’s raw depiction of gruel deaths, profane language, and pre-aged sex makes it inappropriate for children

Is ‘It’ based on a true story?

No, It is a work of fiction, and Stephen King’s inspiration was the children’s story Three Billy Goats Gruff.

What is Stephen King’s writing style?

Stephen King uses an epistolary form of writing where he takes news clippings and quotes from other books giving an outstanding realism to his stories.

Did Audra die in ‘It’ ?

No, she entered a catatonic state on seeing the true form It. She was revived by Bill after he took her on a ride on Silver, his old bicycle.

About Joshua Ehiosun

Joshua is an undying lover of literary works. With a keen sense of humor and passion for coining vague ideas into state-of-the-art worded content, he ensures he puts everything he's got into making his work stand out. With his expertise in writing, Joshua works to scrutinize pieces of literature.

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Ehiosun, Joshua " It Themes and Analysis 🎈 " Book Analysis , https://bookanalysis.com/stephen-king/it/themes-analysis/ . Accessed 11 April 2024.

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Stephen King

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

It is the fall of 1957 and it has rained for a full week, causing the streets of Derry, Maine to flood. Ten-year-old Bill Denbrough helps his younger brother, George Denbrough , make a waterproof paper boat so that the six-year-old can go play in the rain. To get paraffin wax for the boat, George must go to the basement, which he hates. George reaches the cellar door, opens it, and stands at the top of the stairs, certain that “ It ” lurks somewhere down there. He proceeds downstairs and finds the can of wax. George stares for a while at the picture of the turtle on the lid, wondering where he has seen it before. When Bill calls after him, George awakens from his daydream and brings up the materials. George watches admiringly as his brother waterproofs the boat. In gratitude, George kisses him before going out. This is the last time Bill sees his younger brother.

George chases after his boat as it rushes through the floodwaters in the street. The boat floats toward a storm drain and gets caught. When George peers down into the drain, he sees a pair of yellow eyes staring back at him. The eyes then turn blue, like those of George’s mother. The eyes belong to a clown who introduces himself as “Mr. Bob Gray, also known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown.” The clown tells George that the storm swept him and his circus into the sewer. George leans closer and smells delectable scents mixed with manure and the smell of dead things. The clown offers George his boat and a floating balloon. As George reaches forward, the clown’s eyes change, and Pennywise pulls the boy into the darkness, ripping George’s arm out of its socket. The boy dies instantly. Dave Gardener , a neighbor, races out of his house and carries George’s body back to the Denbrough house.

It is now 1984. Adrian Mellon , a gay man, is beaten to death and thrown off of the town’s Kissing Bridge into the Canal. The youths who assault Mellon and his partner, Don Hagerty , include Christopher Unwin , Steve Dubay , and their ringleader, John “Webby” Garton . Chris Unwin reports seeing a clown drag Mellon under the Kissing Bridge. Hagerty says that there were thousands of multi-colored balloons under the same bridge. News of the murder and the report of a strange clown prompts local head librarian Mike Hanlon to place six calls to six old friends.

The first call is to the home of Stanley Uris in suburban Atlanta. On the evening of May 28, 1985, Stanley and his wife, Patricia Uris , are watching television. The call prompts Stanley to take an evening bath, which his wife finds strange. When Patricia goes to check on him, she finds the door locked. When she gets the door open, she finds Stanley dead in the bathtub, the water red from his blood. On the wall tile, he has scrawled a message in his blood: “IT.”

The next call is to Richard Tozier , now a Los Angeles radio personality. While Richie makes arrangements with his travel agent, Carol Feeny , the renowned architect Ben Hanscom receives the next call. Hanscom lives in Nebraska. After getting his call, Ben takes what he suspects may be his last drink at the Red Wheel, a bar that he frequents. Eddie Kaspbrak ’s telephone rings around this time. Eddie, the owner of a chauffeuring company, asks his wife Myra to substitute for him in picking up and driving Al Pacino around Manhattan. Myra, an overprotective woman who is similar to Eddie’s mother Sonia begs Eddie not to leave, but he goes anyway. Meanwhile, in Chicago, the dress designer Beverly Marsh Rogan receives a late-night call. She tells her husband, Tom Rogan , that she must leave. Tom forbids her to go and a fight ensues. This time, Beverly refuses to obey her physically abusive husband, whose habits resemble those of her father, and beats him with the belt that he normally uses on her. She becomes so anxious to leave the house that she leaves her wallet behind. With the help of her friend Kay McCall , she is able to get the money that she needs to get back to Derry. The final call goes to the writer Bill Denbrough, who is in England, where he and his wife, the actress Audra Phillips , are working on Attic Room , a film adaptation of one of his novels.

Mike Hanlon is the only one who has remained behind in Derry—a town of 35,000. He collects local folklore and serves as the town’s “watchman,” on the lookout for It. He and his six friends—nicknamed the Losers’ Club—sent It away in 1958. Twenty-seven years later, he tells them that it is time to finish the job they started. They must destroy It and end its reign of terror over Derry.

Every member of the Losers’ Club has a characteristic that makes it difficult for them to fit in. Ben is overweight and overfed, due to fears of poverty harbored by his single mother, Arlene Hanscom . Bill stutters and is as shut off from his parents as he is from his peers. Eddie is the son of an overprotective hypochondriac of a mother who has convinced him that he has asthma. Beverly comes from a poor and abusive home. Richie comes from a comfortable household but unintentionally irritates nearly everyone with his barbed sense of humor. Mike and Stanley come from more secure and loving homes, but they are socially outcast due to being black and Jewish, respectively. Another link that binds the group is that, after the death of George Denbrough, none of them has any siblings, resulting in their ability to find fraternity with each other.

The main tie that binds, however, is that each has a story to tell about It. Richie was the last to experience It, in the form of a werewolf, reminiscent of the monster from I Was a Teenage Werewolf , a film he sees at the Aladdin Theater. He and Bill flee from the monster on Silver , Bill’s bike. In their childhood, the Losers’ Club is able to elude death at the hands of It, but a myriad of other children are found dead or turn up missing. One of these, Edward Corcoran , remains missing until his mother declares him legally dead in the 1960s. Edward, like Beverly, also comes from an abusive household. His stepfather, Richard Macklin , regularly beats him and his brother Dorsey , resulting in the bludgeoning death of the latter. The Losers’ Club knows that Richard is not responsible for Edward’s death, which they sense when it occurs. Edward is attacked and killed by a creature that is half-fish and half-amphibian. Mike Hanlon finds Edward’s pocketknife and spots of blood beside the bench that Edward tripped over on the night of his murder, trying to escape.

It, the children learn, can shapeshift. The group also finds out that It is what the Himalayans call a taelus , or “skin-changer.” Mike has seen It take the form of a giant bird, similar in appearance to a bird that pecked at him once in his infancy. Eddie sees It transform into a leprous hobo at the house on 29 Neibolt Street. When Bill looks through George’s old photo album, It causes the eyes to move in a photo of George. Henry Bowers , the violent bully who breaks Eddie Kaspbrak’s arm and carves a letter “H”—the beginning of “Henry” into Ben Hanscom’s stomach—sees a Frankenstein-monster rip the heads off of his friends and fellow bullies, Victor Criss and Reginald “Belch” Huggins . Meanwhile, Beverly hears voices from the kitchen and bathroom sink drains. In one instance, a gush of blood springs out of the pipes and covers the walls. Her father, Al Marsh , cannot see the blood; only she and her friends can. Later, she sees Patrick Hocksetter get attacked and killed by mutant leeches.

It, the children learn, is not only a terror within their time but a presence that has existed throughout Derry’s history. It is present during Derry’s transformation from “a sleepy little shipbuilding town into a booming honky-tonk.” It is present in 1929 during the town’s ambush of the Bradley Gang and participates in the shootout. It is also present during the burning of the Black Spot in 1930. The Black Spot is a speakeasy formed by Mike’s father, Will Hanlon , Dick Halloran , and some other black soldiers stationed in Derry, which gets burned down by white supremacists.

Bill, Ben, and Richie decide in 1958 that they have to send It away by making a silver bullet. They learn this from the movies. With a silver slug, a slingshot, and her excellent marksmanship, Beverly sends It down a drainpipe. They learn, however, that this only repels It. The key to sending It away for good is by performing the Ritual of Chüd, in which the attacker bites down on his or her tongue, prompting It to bite its own. The attacker then tells jokes. If the attacker laughs first, It earns the right to kill. If It laughs first, It must go away. Through a combination of this ritual, as well Beverly’s insistence that the boys make love to her to solidify the strength of their circle, the Losers’ Club succeeds in sending It away, but not in killing It.

While members of the Losers’ Club go on to achieve success in adulthood, Henry Bowers is locked away in Juniper Hills, a mental institution for the criminally-insane. He has been here since he murdered his father, Butch Bowers , with a switchblade mailed to him by Bob Gray. Henry is also blamed for the murders of his friends, Victor and “Belch,” and for that of Veronica Grogan , whose underwear is found under Henry’s mattress. One night, It leads him out of the institution and back to Derry. Henry first finds Mike in the public library and the two have a knife fight that leaves Mike nearly dead from a wound to his thigh. Mike notices that Henry has been possessed by It, which uses people as its “dogsbody,” or servant. Henry then goes to Eddie’s room at the Town House hotel. Eddie succeeds in killing Henry with a letter opener.

Both Tom Rogan and Audra Phillips have followed their spouses to Derry and unknowingly stay in hotels located beside each other. That night, they each have a dream. Tom dreams that he is Henry and has killed his father. Audra dreams that she is Beverly. When she awakes, Audra suspects that Bill is with another woman. Indeed, he and Beverly have spent the night together. Eddie calls Bill’s room to tell him that he has killed Henry. The group also finds out about the attack on Mike, who is recuperating in the hospital. When the five are back together, they join hands and rescue Mike from an attempt by Mark Lamonica , a nurse who has been possessed by It, to kill Mike with a deadly shot. Tom, too, has been possessed by It, which uses him to kidnap Audra.

That evening, the five remaining members of the Losers’ Club—Bill, Ben, Richie, Beverly, and Eddie—enter It’s lair, and discover that It has transformed into a giant female spider. Also there in the darkness is the Turtle. The Turtle speaks to Bill and apologizes for having made It, along with the rest of the universe, after vomiting from a bellyache. Richie looks up into It’s web and sees Audra. She has entered a catatonic state and appears almost like a waxwork. Richie does his Irish cop impression to make It laugh, and the performance of the ritual saves Bill, but not Eddie, who gets his arm bitten off by the spider. Eddie later dies. While Ben stomps on It’s eggs, Bill squeezes his hands around It’s heart until the organ bursts. It dies.

It is now morning in Derry, and the town is bizarrely experiencing an earthquake. The underground portion of the Canal’s supports collapses, as does downtown Derry. The glass corridor that connects the adult library to the Children’s Library explodes. The remaining four members of the Losers’ club emerge from underground.

Bill notices that his stutter is disappearing. Mike notices that his memory is fading. Ben and Beverly start a new life together as a couple and drive off to Nebraska. Bill, too, is starting to lose his memory. He forgets what led to Audra’s catatonic state, but he is determined to free her from it. He mounts Silver with Audra behind him and drives away from memory “but not from desire.” He pumps the pedals, moving the bike so fast that Audra awakens, startled. Mike has the final word, and surmises that no one will ever see his diary. He concludes that, even if the group forgets each other during their waking hours, perhaps they will remember everything, particularly their love for each other, in their dreams.

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Clowns are creepy no matter what. We can all agree on that, right?

But Pennywise, the dancing clown who tracks down and torments the children of small-town Maine in “It,” is deeply unsettling. At least, he is in the latest incarnation of Stephen King ’s iconic novel. Infamously, Tim Curry ’s take on the character in the 1990 TV miniseries version was so over-the-top, it was laughable—not that you’re looking for understatement in your homicidal clowns.

But what Bill Skarsgard does with the role works well precisely because he doesn’t appear to be laboring so hard to frighten us. He doesn’t vamp it up. He’s coy—he toys with these kids—making his sudden bursts of insane clown hostility that much more shocking.

Even more effective than the horror elements of Argentine director Andy Muschietti ’s adaptation is the unexpected humor he reveals in the story—and, ultimately, the humanity. Finding that combination of tones is such a tricky balance to pull off: the brief lightening of a tense moment with a quick quip, or an earnest monologue in the face of extreme danger. But “It” makes that work nearly every time, thanks to its perfectly calibrated performances from a well-chosen cast.

The kid-bonding parts of the movie are actually stronger than the creepy-clown parts, even though images of that freakish, frilly fiend will be the ones that keep you awake at night. Led by “ Midnight Special ” star Jaeden Lieberher —whose everyman (everykid?) appeal grows with each film—and including a star-making performance from Sophia Lillis as the crew’s lone female member, it’s mostly unknown actors who comprise the film’s so-called “Losers Club.” But their characters are distinctly drawn, each with a fleshed-out backstory that explains why their fears make them so vulnerable to Pennywise’s attacks.

Unlike King’s novel and the 1990 original “It,” the screenplay from Chase Palmer , Cary Fukunaga (the acclaimed writer-director of “ Sin Nombre ” and “ Beasts of No Nation ”) and Gary Dauberman doesn’t jump back and forth in time. It moves the time frame to 1988-89 and sticks with our core group of seven kids while they’re still adolescent misfits, which grounds their story and makes it more immersive. (It also surely will draw comparisons to the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” another supernatural mystery set in small-town America in the 1980s. The nostalgia factor is strong for those of us who grew up then, too.)

Muschietti’s version begins as the book does, though, with innocent, six-year-old Georgie Denbrough ( Jackson Robert Scott ) chasing his toy boat as it sails down a gutter and into a storm drain on a rainy afternoon in fictional Derry, Maine. He’s especially fond of the boat because it was a gift from his beloved older brother, Lieberher’s Bill, a smart, skinny kid who struggles with a stutter. That’s why his choice to chat with Pennywise—who just happens to pop up in the sewer with the boat and a smile—leads to his tragic demise. (Muschietti’s cutaways to a cat who witnesses everything from a nearby porch are chilling; he showed that same delicate mastery of mood with his underappreciated 2013 horror film “ Mama ,” starring Jessica Chastain .)

But Bill insists Georgie has just gone missing, as such an unusually large number of Derry children have over the years. He enlists his posse of similarly bullied, outcast pals to help him get to the bottom of this lingering mystery: wisecracking trash-talker Richie ( Finn Wolfhard , who also happens to be in “Stranger Things”); wimpy mama’s boy Eddie ( Jack Dylan Grazer ); nervous rabbi’s son Stanley ( Wyatt Oleff ); heavyset new kid Ben ( Jeremy Ray Taylor ); and the tough-but-kind Beverly (Lillis). Eventually, the home-schooled farmhand Mike ( Chosen Jacobs ), who’s suffered racial attacks as the only black kid in town, makes them a team of seven.

Despite the many terrifying moments they endure in their quest—scenes that will leave you trembling and giggling at once—“It” is even more powerful in the warm, easy camaraderie between its young stars. Certainly you could view it as a straight-up horror flick, but the underlying allegory of these characters facing their deepest fears as they enter adulthood gives the movie more emotional heft—a bit of bittersweet within the suffering.

These kids have all languished on the fringes—hence the “Losers Club” tag they wear as a badge of honor—whether it’s because of an overbearing mother, an abusive father or a devastating family loss. But they’re also all on the cusp of something. Pennywise knows what frightens them in this precarious state of flux and tries to use that devious, supernatural ability to lead kids to their doom. Confronting those fears rather than running away is what just might save them.

Tonally, “It” feels like a throwback to great King adaptations of yore—particularly “Stand By Me,” with its ragtag band of kids on a morbid adventure, affecting bravado and affectionately hassling each other to mask their true jitters. Wolfhard in particular has great comic timing as the profane Richie. Technically, Muschietti shows some glimmers of early Spielberg, too—the low camera angles, the images of kids on bikes pedaling furiously in a pack, the overall mix of wonder and danger.

“It” could have used a bit of tightening as it builds toward its climax, though. While the imagery is undeniably harrowing and even poignant in the action-packed third act, some of it feels dragged out and redundant. And because the final confrontation takes place within a dark, underground lair, it’s sometimes difficult to tell exactly what’s going on, despite the impressive visual effects on display as Pennywise unleashes his full powers on his young attackers. (That’s one of many ways in which the new “It” is a vast improvement over its low-tech predecessor.)

Not to burst your balloon, though, but the closing credits suggest this may not be the last we’ve seen of Pennywise after all.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Rated R for violence/horror, bloody images, and for language.

135 minutes

Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise

Jaeden Lieberher as Bill Denbrough

Jeremy Ray Taylor as Ben Hanscom

Sophia Lillis as Beverly Marsh

Finn Wolfhard as Richie Tozier

Jack Dylan Grazer as Eddie Kaspbrak

Chosen Jacobs as Mike Hanlon

Wyatt Oleff as Stan Uris

Nicholas Hamilton as Henry Bowers

Owen Teague as Patrick Hockstetter

Logan Thompson as Victor Criss

Jake Sim as Belch Huggins

Jackson Robert Scott as Georgie

Steven Williams as Leroy Hanlon

Javier Botet as The Leper

• Andy Muschietti

Writer (based on the novel by)

• Stephen King
• Gary Dauberman
• Chase Palmer
• Cary Fukunaga

Cinematographer

• Chung-hoon Chung
• Jason Ballantine
• Benjamin Wallfisch

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It: a superb Stephen King adaptation fueled less by scary clowns than by real-life evil

The new film adaptation of Stephen King’s horror classic exposes the dark rotting heart of 2017.

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In August 2014, during the nationwide protests following the death of Mike Brown, a photo went viral. In it, a woman named France Francois held aloft a protest sign reading, “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit.” Francois told press she’d been galvanized by memories of protesting the death of a 14-year-old who died while in detention. While she was at the march, one woman told her she’d been protesting this shit for the last seven decades.

The same profound world-weariness looms over the perpetually overcast town of Derry, Maine, in Andy Muschietti’s new film adaptation of Stephen King’s It.

There’s a common mantra that circulates within social movements that we just have to wait for evil to “die out,” a pervasive belief that every generation inevitably advances society forward over the dead bodies of those who were holding it back. But if the past year has taught us anything, it’s that time is a flat circle and that evil continually resurfaces, armed with ever more powerful weapons. As the keeper of our horror-stricken national conscience, Stephen King knows better than anyone that evil is generational, that it must be routed again and again. King knows, too, that “evil” isn’t about larger-than-life acts, but about the everyday callousness, abuse of power, and indifference to abuse of power that humans practice as they go about their lives.

This truth is what makes Derry arguably the most quintessential fictional town in America. And It pulls off the feat of making Derry’s symbolic decay and encroaching evil a metaphor for the times in which we live, while still delivering the classic coming-of-age fable King fans know and love.

It is as much about the specter of real-life terror as it is the supernatural

In It , the titular evil entity returns every 27 years, and the group who must face it (this time around) is a band of children on the brink of adolescence. They include Jaeden Lieberher as Bill, the de facto leader who grieves his little brother’s mysterious abduction; Sophia Lillis as Beverly, the group’s only girl; and shy Ben ( Jeremy Ray Taylor ). Rounding out the group are smart-mouthed Ritchie ( Stranger Things ’ Finn Wolfhard ), incessant talker Eddie ( Jack Dylan Grazer ), the reluctant Stan ( Wyatt Oleff ), and Mike ( Chosen Jacobs ), who as a homeschooled black kid is the biggest outsider of them all.

Together, they form a charming, funny, and pure-hearted misfit ensemble: the Losers Club. This is a moniker taken from King’s book that’s not so much announced onscreen as it is implied with every awkward social exchange, every insult, every punch thrown by an oversized bully — and Derry abounds with bullies.

Stephen King is known for filling his books with bullied outcasts , from Carrie to Stand By Me — and like each of those stories, the kids in It inhabit an R-rated space that’s typically reserved for adults in the movies, a space full of F-words and violence. But while the bullies are terrifying, in King’s worlds, adults are always worse, exercising terrifying strangleholds over the lives of children. It’s this sinister reality that’s lurking in It ’s corners; come for the fathomless cosmic evil, stay for the reminder that in real life, evil is nearly always mundane.

The events of It kick off when Bill’s little brother Georgie has a shudder-inducing run-in with Pennywise the Clown ( Bill Skarsgård ), the shapeshifting form of fear itself that terrorizes and ultimately devours Derry’s children. The Losers Club are the only people in Derry who seem to be awake and attuned to the sheer horror of the town’s rising number of missing children and a death rate that’s six times higher than the national average. Driven by Bill’s quest to know Georgie’s fate, the Losers, drawn together partly out of friendship and partly out of desperation, begin a heroes’ journey to vanquish It once and for all — a journey that ultimately spans nearly three decades in King’s novel.

Pennywise is the most famous part of It. And he’s suitably creepy in Muschietti’s film, menacing and enigmatic enough to satisfy even the most die-hard It fans and Tim Curry loyalists . But while Curry’s iconic performance overshadowed everything that was mediocre about the 1990 miniseries, Skarsgård’s Pennywise and the many traditional horror scares he engenders aren’t remotely the most interesting parts of this layered, knowing film. That’s because Muschietti understands that Pennywise, in all his Lovecraftian incomprehensibility, is only a symptom of the larger evil in King’s mythos — the darkness that lurks in the hearts of power-hungry men and causes society’s foundations to rot.

It markets itself as nostalgia, but it’s an allegory for 2017

Judging by its record-breaking trailer, It is the most highly anticipated film of the fall of 2017. It could be easy to chalk up this clamor to nostalgia: Muschietti’s choice to relocate the sprawling book’s first timeline from the late 1950s to 1989 caters to that impulse (the second timeline will constitute an entirely separate film “chapter” to come), and the timing of It ’s arrival, between seasons of its spiritual successor Stranger Things , doesn’t hurt any. It is also rife with nostalgic cultural signifiers, from arcade games and era-specific movie posters to a shiny Trans Am and a running joke about New Kids on the Block that encapsulates the film’s loving teasing of its socially awkward protagonists.

But Muschietti’s largely faithful adaptation of King’s story relies not on nostalgia for its emotional underpinnings, but rather a keen sense of the present moment in all its deep tensions and ugliness. Alongside It ’s most famous storyline — Pennywise abducting a string of children from an indifferent population — Muschietti steadily builds out the real-life terrors happening in Derry and the lengths our protagonists must go to in order to effectively combat them.

The main teen bully, Henry Bowers ( Nicholas Hamilton ), is a violent racist who means to do harm and continually levels up in weaponry. Beverly’s father molests her. Eddie’s mother exhibits signs of Munchausen’s by proxy . Mike, in a possible homage to black filmmaker Charles Burnett’s brilliant film Killer of Sheep , is forced to stun sheep using a bolt gun while his uncle informs him that he has to learn to wield the weapon or else it will be wielded against him. Later, a wordless, lingering shot of Mike carrying the bolt gun to fight It reveals how fully he’s absorbed the lesson.

There’s an acute release in watching the Losers face down the onscreen terrors of It in ways we can’t face down real-life terrors. When the Losers finally get fed up and fight back against Bowers and his minions, it’s almost more satisfying than the fight they ultimately wage against Pennywise. Muschietti’s film might seem over-the-top in any other year, with its unsubtle depictions of hate, racism, and othering; instead, in a year that’s seen the dramatic surfacing of those elements , it serves as a grim, temporary catharsis — temporary, because the fight to defeat these social evils is never over.

It understands King’s idea of horror — and his optimism — in a way few King adaptations do

For every strange supernatural development in It , a real-life counterpart looms with equal menace. When not in his resting state as Pennywise, It constantly shape-shifts between horrifying phantasms and images of real people from the lives of our heroes. When Bowers finally seems to go Super-Saiyan in his capacity for evil, It presides over a creepy Candle Cove -like children’s TV show ordering him to “kill them all.” This type of juxtaposition creates a tapestry of magical realism woven out of dread, an atmosphere of omniscient terror that’s far more chilling than the threat of a jump scare around the corner (of which It also indulges in its fair share).

The supernatural elements are creepy, yes: Horror-movie staples like scary dolls, creepy old houses, coffins, geysers of blood, and gruesome visions of dead people are all here in droves. But most of these elements feel like dutiful afterthoughts — or superimposed homages to other King stories like Carrie and Salem’s Lot — rather than the main event. Instead, It is fueled by the ever-present sense of a spiraling loss of control.

In this regard, It joins The Shining and Carrie as the best of the Stephen King horror adaptations — films that understand that King’s novels are never about surface-level scares, but about the countless ways in which individual small-time acts of evil coalesce into terrifying systems of violence, often aided by an increasingly indifferent society.

In 2017, this is the most troubling message It could possibly send. Yet for all its dark social relevance, It is also moving, emotional, and even optimistic. The Losers’ love and loyalty for each other keep the film compelling in moments when the jump scares wane, and it’s this steady warmheartedness that makes It feel like the dream Spielberg adaptation of King that we never actually got in the ’80s.

All of this makes It the perfect end-of-summer movie: a film saturated in waning sunlight, with the innocence of childhood giving way to adolescence while childhood terrors give way to much scarier real threats. For King’s Losers, summer is officially over forever — but they’ll face the grim days ahead together, and for now, that’s enough.

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“Derry: The First Interlude”

“Derry: The Second Interlude”

“Derry: The Third Interlude”

“Derry: The Fourth Interlude”

“Derry: The Last Interlude” - Epilogue

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

It is revealed to be female. Why do you think It chooses the form of a male clown so frequently? 

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The sex scene between the children has become infamous for critics of the book. How did you react to it? Does this scene seem appropriate given the context of the novel?

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Adapting Stephen King's IT: How A Generation Was Successfully Traumatized By A 1990 Miniseries

It’s a tricky thing to make generalizations about the writing of Stephen King , as his body of work is one that never ceases to stop growing. Each new story, with its new characters and new themes, offers new dimensions to the King canon, and has its own way of making Constant Readers evolve their understanding of the author’s capacities. “Definitive” critiques and judgments are continually rendered ephemeral. And yet it’s still so impossibly easy to judge 1986’s IT as the author’s magnum opus.

A book that was developed and written over the course of seven years, IT is a coalescence of everything that the world associates with Stephen King: the all-important bonds of adolescent friendship, as seen in “ The Body ;” the dread of pervasive evil, as depicted in Salem’s Lot ; the scope of The Stand ; and even arguably the psychic battery of The Shining , albeit running an entire town on bad juju instead of a simple Rocky Mountain hotel. And, of course, there’s King’s pure love of monsters. Interweaving stories from two distinct eras, it’s an epic that is as spectacular as it is horrifying.

It’s also yet another novel that George A. Romero very much wanted a crack at bringing to live-action. After his plans to make Salem’s Lot , The Stand , Creepshow 2 , and Pet Sematary hit their respective hurdles, the filmmaker saw IT as his opportunity to helm his first Stephen King adaptation since 1982’s Creepshow , and plans were formulated to turn the material into a massive television event. Unfortunately, executives at the network developed cold feet in regards to the size of the investment, and as the scale of the project was reduced, Romero walked away to work on the 1990 remake of Night Of The Living Dead .

IT ultimately went from being a potential ten-part television event to being a two-part miniseries, with Carrie screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen brought in to write the teleplay, and Halloween III: Season of the Witch ’s Tommy Lee Wallace hired to direct. Cut down as it may have been, however, it is still an iconic adaptation in its own right – one that did a rather effective job traumatizing a whole generation. It’s dense material with a complicated legacy, and I get into all of it in this week’s Adapting Stephen King .

What IT Is About

Much like Cujo , the origin story behind IT begins with a trip to see a mechanic. In 1978, Stephen King and his family were living in Colorado while he was working on The Stand , and on one fateful day the transmission literally dropped out of the author’s AMC Matador. The car was towed to the local dealership to be fixed, and King was told he could pick it two days later.

When he got the call that the repairs were done, King set off on foot to go get it, and at one point found himself walking across a wooden bridge. Listening to the sound his steps made, he was instantly struck with an idea – a moment he describes in the essay “How IT Happened” ( from Secret Windows: Essays And Fiction on the Craft of Writing ) as being akin to being blinded by a flashbulb in a dark room. He was suddenly reminded of the fairy tale “The Three Billy-Goats Gruff,” and he was inspired to write a novel about “a real troll under a real bridge,” only in King’s case, the bridge would be an entire city.

The notion swam about in the writer’s mind, but began to really take shape the following year when the King clan moved back to Maine – specifically to the small city of Bangor. Acclimating himself to his new home, Stephen King spent some time walking all over and talking to the residents so that he could hear their stories. He heard tales about Bangor’s crazy sewer system, and how the Works Progress Administration during The New Deal lost track of what they were building because of an overflow of federal funds. He was told by one individual that a person could take a canoe and travel from one end of the city to the other using the maze of pipes.

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It was through these conversations that King began to envision Derry, Maine, his own special version of Bangor, and the monster that lives in the dank tunnels beneath it.

Further reconsideration of the bridge that conceals the troll in “The Three Billy-Goats Gruff” led to the rest of IT falling into place. Thinking about this classic symbol led Stephen King to remember the small corridor that existed between the adult and children’s sections in the public library he visited growing up, the two rooms featuring distinct aesthetics. It was this that eventually inspired the dual, interweaving narratives of the novel – one following the ensemble of characters as children, and the other examining their lives as adults.

The actual story that emerged from those combining concepts is one about childhood abuse. IT is a book ensconced in the supernatural, with the abstract that is evil given a face and a motivation, but above all else it is deeply human in its analysis of how people process trauma. As much as our instincts may want us to block out nightmarish realities from our past, they are never gone until they are recognized and reconciled.

Flipping back and forth between the late 1950s and mid-1980s, IT 's protagonists make up the members of The Losers Club: Bill Denbrough, Richie Tozier, Stanley Uris, Eddie Kaspbrak, Beverly Marsh, Mike Hanlon, and Ben Hanscom. Each of them is an outcast in their own way, be it because of their race, class, religion, or disability, but when they become friends as pre-teens they form a bond that can be broken by nothing.

Their friendship, in fact, is arguably guided by larger forces of the universe, as it is only their strength as a group that can face the horrors that lurk in the sewers beneath their hometown. Derry, Maine is a historically scary place, one that has to enforce a curfew due to the exceptional rate of kids disappearing, but the adults are all too happy to turn a blind eye to the expansive darkness. This makes it a perfect habitat for IT: an ancient and malicious shapeshifter that awakens every 27 years to feed on fear and children, principally in the form of Pennywise The Dancing Clown.

It’s in the aftermath of Bill’s brother Georgie being killed that The Losers Club forms and begins to understand the nature of the being, and together the young heroes are able to temporarily stop the carnage… but then IT returns in 1984. As Bill, Richie, Stanley, Eddie, Beverly, and Ben approach their 40s, their memories of childhood faded and perspectives narrowed by adulthood, Mike calls them back to Derry for another showdown, and they must confront the horrors of the past while trying to end the horror for good.

How Tommy Lee Wallace’s IT Differs From Stephen King’s Book

Had things gone as initially planned with the television adaptation of IT , it’s possible that ABC could have developed at least a censored facsimile of the text in live action… but, instead, three hours proved to not be nearly enough real estate to cover 1,138 pages of content. As such, Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen had to make some significant cuts from the source material to trim it down to size. But those aren’t the only kinds of changes made for the miniseries. Also mixed into the work are deviations forced by the restrictions of the medium, and some that seem to exist for no reason beyond the predilections of the filmmakers.

Beyond details like the settings being changed to 1960 and 1990 (a 30-year gap instead of 27), the most impactful macro alteration implemented by the screenwriter is in the structure – which treats IT less like a story with a dual narrative, and more like a story with a single narrative that is heavy on flashbacks. Rather than being given equal weight, the sequences set during the protagonists’ childhood unfold as memories that are spurred on when the various adult members of The Losers Club get their respective calls from Mike Hanlon (Tim Reid).

This makes all kinds of sense for the new packaging that is a two-part miniseries, but it also has the side effect of narrowing the scope of the story. As effective as it is to see Bill (Jonathan Brandis), Richie ( Seth Green ), Stanley (Ben Heller), Eddie (Adam Faraizl), Beverly (Emily Perkins), Mike (Marlon Taylor), and Ben (Brandon Crane) experience their respective terrors growing up, what’s lost with the intensified character focus is the larger atmosphere of Derry and its palatable sinister overtones. It also doesn’t make any space for the perspective of IT (Tim Curry) itself – not to mention the book’s far venture into concepts outside of space and time… but I’ll get more into that in a moment.

The more micro snips made in adapting IT for the small screen are too numerous to list in full here, but what’s missing or altered stands out to anyone familiar with the Stephen King book. Adult Richie (Harry Anderson) is a talk show host instead of a radio personality. Stan being Jewish is minimized and replaced with him being a Boy Scout. The Neibolt House isn’t a thing. Tom Rogan (Michael Ryan) doesn’t pursue adult Beverly (Annette O'Toole) to Derry, and he doesn’t abduct Audra (Olivia Hussey), the wife of adult Bill (Richard Thomas), while under Pennywise’s control. The controversial sex scene is excised. And sequences like the attack by the monstrous bird and the flashback to the burning of The Black Spot – featuring a cameo from The Shining ’s Dick Halloran – are wholly removed.

Then there is the ending of the IT miniseries, which I will let Tommy Lee Wallace explain in his own words (from the Blu-ray commentary track):

The thing that was virtually impossible to achieve, and I still wonder if we could have achieved it even if we had unlimited millions of dollars and all the time in the world, was the actual combat with the creature. In the book it’s very cerebral… Try putting that on film. It’s too abstract; it’s too difficult. I would have loved to have tackled it some more, but, of course, for the sake of this drama it had to be simplified and in plain terms. And in Stephen King’s book, we were certainly true to the facts of the book and to the plot itself. IT in the end is this big, horrifying spider.

Is It Worthy Of The King?

Accepted in totality for what it is, Tommy Lee Wallace’s IT is a serviceable adaptation of the Stephen King book. There are a lot of great moments that don’t make the cut, and the material isn’t nearly as graphic as it should be thanks to its network television origins, but it understands all of the author’s intentions, and does a solid job hitting on those themes with its age-separated ensembles.

What makes the IT miniseries iconic, however, is the phenomenal work done by Tim Curry as the titular monster, and its arrival on the airwaves at a key time for the millennial generation.

Having had the rough experience of wearing prosthetics and heavy makeup for his role in Ridley Scott ’s Legend , Tim Curry personally balked at the idea of Pennywise in IT having any kind of extreme look, and it turned out to be perfect call for the adaptation. Sporting basic clown paint, a fright wig, and a bulbous forehead, the villain looks like he comes straight from the local circus –but that simply opens the door to the true terror coming from the actor’s performance. He is a genuine source of nightmares, and an origin point for many fans’ coulrophobia.

That’s an unyieldingly important factor in the reception of IT , because part of the miniseries’ legacy stems from how “90s Kids” (like myself) were exposed to it. It could be called tame by modern standards, but the miniseries was a rather extreme thing to land on while channel surfing as an adolescent, and it didn’t have the barrier of having to get your parents to purchase you a movie ticket.

But then there’s the ending, which, it’s sad to say, will forever taint the experience. When all of Stephen King’s cerebral and metaphysical writing is stripped away, what you’re left with is a giant fake spider made on the budget of a TV movie, and it fails to be either scary or thrilling. Like a locomotive headlamp coming down a long dark tunnel, Tommy Lee Wallace saw this problem coming immediately after he read the book, but he was unable to really do anything to fix it in making the adaptation (even after doing a re-write on Lawrence D. Cohen’s teleplay for Part 2). The director explains on the commentary track,

I remember when I read it, honestly saying, ‘Oh gee, a spider, after all that? It’s just a big spider?’ I tried not to let that sense get in the way for me. I tried to keep a great sense of wonder and a sense of horror about this thing, but there is just an absolute, inevitable feeling to me of, ‘Well, gee, finally now it’s finite’… I think there’s an inevitable disappointment involved, whether we succeeded on our terms or not.

The best advice I can give in reflecting on the IT miniseries is to do the opposite of The Losers Club: forget where it ends, and instead just remember where it starts.

How To Watch Tommy Lee Wallace’s IT

If you now or at some point in the near future find yourself with a three hour gap in your schedule, you could be watching Tommy Lee Wallace’s IT with a click – provided that you have Hulu or HBO Max . If you don’t have accounts on either site, you can also purchase a copy digitally via iTunes . For those of you who are into physical media , the miniseries is available on Blu-ray , featuring a commentary track with the director and select members of the cast.

Looking ahead, Adapting Stephen King will be spending one last week in the year 1990 with what is one of the most beloved titles in the canon: Rob Reiner ’s Misery . What are the origins of Annie “I’m Your Number One Fan” Wilkes, and how does the film hold up today? Look for my column next Wednesday in the movie section here on CinemaBlend, and click through the banners below to find all of my previous installments.

Eric Eisenberg is the Assistant Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. After graduating Boston University and earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he took a part-time job as a staff writer for CinemaBlend, and after six months was offered the opportunity to move to Los Angeles and take on a newly created West Coast Editor position. Over a decade later, he's continuing to advance his interests and expertise. In addition to conducting filmmaker interviews and contributing to the news and feature content of the site, Eric also oversees the Movie Reviews section, writes the the weekend box office report (published Sundays), and is the site's resident Stephen King expert. He has two King-related columns.

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It Literary Elements

By stephen king.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

Setting and Context

Derry, Maine: 1957-1958 and 1984-1985

Narrator and Point of View

Told from a third-person point of view

Tone and Mood

Solemn, Chaotic, Violent, Paranormal, Supernatural, Tense, and Scary

Protagonist and Antagonist

The Losers (Protagonists) vs. Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Antagonist)

Major Conflict

The Losers' struggle to vanquish Pennywise

When the Losers first venture into the sewers to kill Pennywise

Foreshadowing

The line "We all float down here" foreshadows the end of the novel in which the Losers fight - and ultimately vanquish - Pennywise.

Understatement

The strangeness of the Losers' actions in the sewer (i.e. the orgy) is understated in the novel.

"Three Billy Goats Gruff," author Marianne Moore, the history of the construction of the sewer system in Bangor, Maine, the history of the United States in general, geography, and the Bible.

Georgie's paper boat is symbolic of a child's innocence and naivete. As the Losers venture deeper into the dark and violent world of Pennywise, such symbols become less and less prevalent.

Bowers isn't all that intelligent, yet Pennywise and his cronies chose him to terrorize the Losers.

Parallelism

The story of many of the members of the Losers is paralleled in the novel.

Metonymy and Synecdoche

The Losers describes all of its members.

Personification

King often personifies the weather (i.e. "the wind whistled.")

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It Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for It is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for It

It study guide contains a biography of Stephen King, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• Character List

The Secret Meaning of Stephen King’s ‘IT’

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Think Stephen King ’s  IT is all about a spooky clown named Pennywise? Think again. Sure, the terrifying clown with the questionable hair is part of it, but King’s masterpiece of horror has something much more sinister lurking beneath its pancake makeup surface. Something that’s a little bit more ... murky.

In this new video essay, the team at ScreenCrush breaks down the original 1990  IT  miniseries to explore the depths of its real horror. Stephen King has talked about the impact the classic Universal film  Creature From the Black Lagoon  had on his budding mind as a child. Our video traces its influence into his work, and notes just how important water imagery has been throughout the long history of monster movies, before and after  Creature From the Black Lagoon , and up to and including  IT , both the television miniseries and the brand new film version opening in theaters this month from director Andy Muschietti.

This video was written and narrated by Kevin Maher, who hosts the  Kevin Geeks Out  screening series in New York. Check out more of Kevin’s work by following him on  Twitter . We’ve got lots more videos and video essays coming in the future. In the meantime, don’t forget to subscribe to the  ScreenCrush YouTube channel  to catch all our future episodes. And you can watch more of ScreenCrush’s videos below, including Kevin’s previous video about the most traumatic moments in the history of PG movies created before the advent of the PG-13 rating.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Stephen King’s Novels

Analysis of Stephen King’s Novels

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on December 31, 2018 • ( 3 )

Stephen King (born. September 21, 1947) may be known as a horror writer, but he calls himself a “brand name,” describing his style as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s.” His fast-food version of the “plain style” may smell of commercialism, but that may make him the contemporary American storyteller without peer. From the beginning, his dark parables spoke to the anxieties of the late twentieth century. As a surrogate author in The Mist explains King’s mission, “when the technologies fail, when… religious systems fail, people have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night” is a “cheerful” thought in the context of a “dissolving ozone layer.”

King’s fictions begin with premises accepted by middle Americans of the television generation, opening in suburban or small-town America—Derry, Maine, or Libertyville, Pennsylvania—and have the familiarity of the house next door and the 7-Eleven store. The characters have the trusted two-dimensional reality of kitsch: They originate in clichés such as the high school “nerd” or the wise child. From such premises, they move cinematically through an atmosphere resonant with a popular mythology. King applies naturalistic methods to an environment created by popular culture. This reality, already mediated, is translated easily into preternatural terms, taking on a nightmarish quality.

King’s imagination is above all archetypal: His “pop” familiarity and his campy humor draw on the collective unconscious. In Danse Macabre , a study of the contemporary horror genre that emphasizes the cross-pollination of fiction and film, he divides his subject according to four “monster archetypes”: the ghost, the “thing” (or human-made monster), the vampire, and the werewolf. As with his fiction, his sources are the classic horror films of the 1930’s, inherited by the 1950’s pulp and film industries. He hints at their derivations from the gothic novel, classical myth, Brothers Grimm folktales, and the oral tradition in general. In an anxious era both skeptical of and hungry for myth, horror is fundamentally reassuring and cathartic; the tale-teller combines roles of physician and priest into the witch doctor as “sin eater,” who assumes the guilt and fear of his culture. In the neoprimitivism of the late twentieth century, this ancient role and the old monsters have taken on a new mystique. In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argues that the magic and terrors of fairy tales present existential problems in forms children can understand. King’s paranormal horrors have similar cathartic and educative functions for adults; they externalize the traumas of life, especially those of adolescence.

Stephen King’s first published novel, Carrie , is a parable of adolescence. Sixteen-year-old Carrie White is a lonely ugly duckling, an outcast at home and at school. Her mother, a religious fanatic, associates Carrie with her own “sin”; Carrie’s peers hate her in a mindless way and make her the butt of every joke. Carrie concerns the horrors of high school, a place of “bottomless conservatism and bigotry,” as King explains, where students “are no more allowed to rise ‘above their station’ than a Hindu” above caste. The novel is also about the terrors of passage to womanhood. In the opening scene, in the school shower room, Carrie experiences her first menstrual period; her peers react with abhorrence and ridicule, “stoning” her with sanitary napkins, shouting “Plug it up!” Carrie becomes the scapegoat for a fear of female sexuality as epitomized in the smell and sight of blood. (The blood bath and symbolism of sacrifice will recur at the climax of the novel.) As atonement for her participation in Carrie’s persecution in the shower, Susan Snell persuades her popular boyfriend Tommy Ross to invite Carrie to the Spring Ball. Carrie’s conflict with her mother, who regards her emerging womanhood with loathing, is paralleled by a new plot by the girls against her, led by the rich and spoiled Chris Hargenson. They arrange to have Tommy and Carrie voted king and queen of the ball, only to crown them with a bucket of pig’s blood. Carrie avenges her mock baptism telekinetically, destroying the school and the town, leaving Susan Snell as the only survivor.

As in most folk cultures, initiation is signified by the acquisition of special wisdom or powers. King equates Carrie’s sexual flowering with the maturing of her telekinetic ability. Both cursed and empowered with righteous fury, she becomes at once victim and monster, witch and White Angel of Destruction. As King has explained, Carrie is “Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book.”

Carrie catapulted King into the mass market; in 1976 it was adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed by Brian De Palma. The novel touched the right nerves, including feminism. William Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), which was adapted into a powerful and controversial film, had touched on similar social fears during the 1960’s and 1970’s with its subtext of the “generation gap” and the “death of God.” Although Carrie’s destructive power, like that of Regan in The Exorcist , is linked with monstrous adolescent sexuality, the similarity between the two novels ends there. Carrie’s “possession” is the complex effect of her mother’s fanaticism, her peers’ bigotry, and her newly realized, unchecked female power. Like Anne Sexton’s Transformations (1971), a collection of fractured fairy tales in sardonic verse, King’s novel explores the social and cultural roots of evil.

King’s Carrie is a dark modernization of “Cinderella,” with a bad mother, cruel siblings (peers), a prince (Tommy Ross), a godmother (Sue Snell), and a ball. King’s reversal of the happy ending is actually in keeping with the Brothers Grimm; it recalls the tale’s folk originals, which enact revenge in bloody images: The stepsisters’ heels, hands, and noses are sliced off, and a white dove pecks out their eyes. As King knows, blood flows freely in the oral tradition. King represents that oral tradition in a pseudodocumentary form that depicts the points of view of various witnessess and commentaries: newspaper accounts, case studies, court reports, and journals. Pretending to textual authenticity, he alludes to the gothic classics, especially Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). ‘Salem’s Lot , King’s next novel, is a bloody fairy tale in which Dracula comes to Our Town.

‘Salem’s Lot

By the agnostic and sexually liberated 1970’s, the vampire had been demythologized into what King called a “comic book menace.” In a significant departure from tradition, he diminishes the sexual aspects of the vampire. He reinvests the archetype with meaning by basing its attraction on the human desire to surrender identity in the mass. His major innovation, however, was envisioning the mythic small town in American gothic terms and then making it the monster; the vampire’s traditional victim, the populace, becomes the menace as mindless mass, plague, or primal horde. Drawing on Richard Matheson’s grimly naturalistic novel I Am Legend (1954) and Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955), King focused on the issues of fragmentation, reinvesting the vampire with contemporary meaning.

The sociopolitical subtext of ‘Salem’s Lot was the ubiquitous disillusionment of the Watergate era, King has explained. Like rumor and disease, vampirism spreads secretly at night, from neighbor to neighbor, infecting men and women, the mad and the senile, the responsible citizen and the infant alike, absorbing into its zombielike horde the human population. King is especially skillful at suggesting how small-town conservatism can become inverted on itself, the harbored suspicions and open secrets gradually dividing and isolating. This picture is reinforced by the town’s name, ‘Salem’s Lot , a degenerated form of Jerusalem’s Lot, which suggests the city of the chosen reverted to a culture of dark rites in images of spreading menace.

King’s other innovation was, paradoxically, a reiteration. He made his “king vampire,” Barlow, an obvious reincarnation of Stoker’s Dracula that functions somewhere between cliché and archetype. King uses the mythology of vampires to ask how civilization is to exist without faith in traditional authority symbols. His answer is pessimistic, turning on the abdication of Father Callahan, whose strength is undermined by secret alcoholism and a superficial adherence to form. The two survivors, Ben Mears and Mark Petrie, must partly seek, partly create their talismans and rituals, drawing on the compendium of vampire lore—the alternative, in a culture-wide crisis of faith, to conventional systems. (At one point, Mears holds off a vampire with a crucifix made with two tongue depressors.) The paraphernalia, they find, will work only if the handler has faith.

It is significant that the two survivors are, respectively, a “wise child” (Petrie) and a novelist (Mears); only they have the necessary resources. Even Susan Norton, Mears’s lover and the gothic heroine, succumbs. As in The Shining , The Dead Zone, and Firestarter , the child (or childlike adult) has powers that may be used for good or for evil. Mears is the imaginative, nostalgic adult, haunted by the past. The child and the man share a naïveté, a gothic iconography, and a belief in evil. Twelve-year-old Mark worships at a shrinelike tableau of Aurora monsters that glow “green in the dark, just like the plastic Jesus” he was given in Sunday School for learning Psalm 119. Mears has returned to the town of his childhood to revive an image of the Marsten House lurking in his mythical mind’s eye. Spiritual father and son, they create a community of two out of the “pop” remnants of American culture.

As in fairy tales and Dickens’s novels, King’s protagonists are orphans searching for their true parents, for community. His fiction may reenact his search for the father who disappeared and left behind a box of Weird Tales . The yearned-for bond of parent and child, a relationship signifying a unity of being, appears throughout his fiction. The weakness or treachery of a trusted parent is correspondingly the ultimate fear. Hence, the vampire Barlow is the devouring father who consumes an entire town.

The Shining

In The Shining , King domesticated his approach to the theme of parent-child relationships, focusing on the threat to the family that comes from a trusted figure within it. Jack Torrance, a writer, arranges to oversee a mountain resort during the winter months, when it is closed due to snow. He moves his family with him to the Overlook Hotel, where he expects to break a streak of bad luck and personal problems (he is an alcoholic) by writing a play. He is also an abused child who, assuming his father’s aggression, in turn becomes the abusing father. The much beloved “bad” father is the novel’s monster: The environment of the Overlook Hotel traps him, as he in turn calls its power forth. As Jack metamorphoses from abusive father and husband into violent monster, King brilliantly expands the haunted-house archetype into a symbol of the accumulated sin of all fathers.

In Christine, the setting is Libertyville, Pennsylvania, during the late 1970’s. The monster is the American Dream as embodied in the automobile. King gives Christine all the attributes of a fairy tale for “postliterate” adolescents. Christine is another fractured “Cinderella” story, Carrie for boys. Arnie Cunningham, a nearsighted, acne-scarred loser, falls “in love with” a car, a passionate (red and white) Plymouth Fury, “one of the long ones with the big fins,” that he names Christine. An automotive godmother, she brings Arnie, in fairy-tale succession, freedom, success, power, and love: a home away from overprotective parents, a cure for acne, hit-andrun revenge on bullies, and a beautiful girl, Leigh Cabot. Soon, however, the familiar triangle emerges, of boy, girl, and car, and Christine is revealed as a femme fatale— driven by the spirit of her former owner, a malcontent named Roland LeBay. Christine is the medium for his death wish on the world, for his all-devouring, “everlasting Fury.” LeBay’s aggression possesses Arnie, who reverts into an older, tougher self, then into the “mythic teenaged hood” that King has called the prototype of 1950’s werewolf films, and finally into “some ancient carrion eater,” or primal self.

As automotive monster, Christine comes from a variety of sources, including the folk tradition of the “death car” and a venerable techno-horror premise, as seen in King’s “Trucks” and Maximum Overdrive . King’s main focus, however, is the mobile youth culture that has come down from the 1950’s by way of advertising, popular songs, film, and national pastimes. Christine is the car as a projection of the cultural self, Anima for the modern American Adam. To Arnie’s late 1970’s-style imagination, the Plymouth Fury, in 1958 a mid-priced family car, is an American Dream. Her sweeping, befinned chassis and engine re-create a fantasy of the golden age of the automobile: the horizonless future imagined as an expanding network of superhighways and unlimited fuel. Christine recovers for Arnie a prelapsarian vitality and manifest destiny.

Christine’s odometer runs backward and she regenerates parts. The immortality she offers, however—and by implication, the American Dream—is really arrested development in the form of a Happy Days rerun and by way of her radio, which sticks on the golden oldies station. Indeed, Christine is a recapitulatory rock musical framed fatalistically in sections titled “Teenage Car-Songs,” “Teenage Love-Songs,” and “Teenage Death-Songs.” Fragments of rock-and-roll songs introduce each chapter. Christine’s burden, an undead 1950’s youth culture, means that most of Arnie’s travels are in and out of time, a deadly nostalgia trip. As Douglas Winter explains, Christine reenacts “the death,” during the 1970’s, “of the American romance with the automobile.”

The epilogue from four years later presents the fairy-tale consolation in a burnedout monotone. Arnie and his parents are buried, Christine is scrap metal, and the true Americans, Leigh and Dennis, are survivors, but Dennis, the “knight of Darnell’s Ga Rage ,” does not woo “the lady fair”; he is a limping, lackluster junior high teacher, and they have drifted apart, grown old in their prime. Dennis narrates the story in order to file it away, all the while perceiving himself and his peers in terms of icons from the late 1950’s. In his nightmares, Christine appears wearing a black vanity plate inscribed with a skull and the words, “ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE.” From Dennis’s haunted perspective, Christine simultaneously examines and is a symptom of a cultural phenomenon: a new American gothic species of anachronism or déjà vu, which continued after Christine ’s publication in films such as Back to the Future (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), and Blue Velvet (1986). The 1980’s and the 1950’s blur into a seamless illusion, the nightmare side of which is the prospect of living an infinite replay.

The subtext of King’s adolescent fairy tale is another coming of age, from the opposite end and the broader perspective of American culture. Written by a fortyish King in the final years of the twentieth century, Christine diagnoses a cultural midlife crisis and marks a turning point in King’s career, a critical examination of mass culture. The dual time frame reflects his awareness of a dual audience, of writing for adolescents who look back to a mythical 1950’s and also for his own generation as it relives its undead youth culture in its children. The baby boomers, King explains, “were obsessive” about childhood. “We went on playing for a long time, almost feverishly. I write for that buried child in us, but I’m writing for the grown-up too. I want grownups to look at the child long enough to be able to give him up. The child should be buried.”

Pet Sematary

In Pet Sematary , King unearthed the buried child, which is the novel’s monster. Pet Sematary is about the “real cemetery,” he told Winter. The focus is on the “one great fear” all fears “add up to,” “the body under the sheet. It’s our body.” The fairy-tale subtext is the magic kingdom of our protracted American childhood, the Disney empire as mass culture—and, by implication, the comparable multimedia phenomenon represented by King himself. The grimmer, truer text-within-the-text is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein ( 1818).

The novel, which King once considered “too horrible to be published,” is also his own dark night of the soul. Louis Creed, a university doctor, moves with his wife, Rachel, and their two children (five-year-old Ellie and two-year-old Gage) to Maine to work at King’s alma mater; a neighbor takes the family on an outing to a pet cemetery created by the neighborhood children, their confrontation with mortality. Additionally the “sematary,” whose “Druidic” rings allude to Stonehenge, is the outer circle of a Native American burial ground that sends back the dead in a state of soulless half life. Louis succumbs to temptation when the family cat, Church, is killed on the highway; he buries him on the sacred old Native American burial grounds. “Frankencat” comes back with his “purr-box broken.” A succession of accidents, heart attacks, strokes, and deaths—of neighbor Norma Crandall, Creed’s son Gage, Norma’s husband Jud, and Creed’s wife Rachel—and resurrections follows.

The turning point is the death of Gage, which Creed cannot accept and that leads to the novel’s analysis of modern medical miracles performed in the name of human decency and love. Louis is the father as baby boomer who cannot relinquish his childhood. The larger philosophical issue is Louis’s rational, bioethical creed; he believes in saving the only life he knows, the material. Transferred into an immoderate love for his son, it is exposed as the narcissistic embodiment of a patriarchal lust for immortality through descendants, expressed first in an agony of sorrow and Rage , then ghoulishly, as he disinters his son’s corpse and makes the estranging discovery that it is like “looking at a badly made doll.” Later, reanimated, Gage appears to have been “terribly hurt and then put back together again by crude, uncaring hands.” Performing his task, Louis feels dehumanized, like “a subhuman character in some cheap comic-book.”

The failure of Louis’s creed is shown in his habit, when under stress, of taking mental trips to Orlando, Florida, where he, Church, and Gage drive a white van as Disney World’s “resurrection crew.” In these waking dreams, which echo the male bond of “wise child” and haunted father from as far back as ‘Salem’s Lot , Louis’s real creed is revealed: Its focus is on Oz the Gweat and Tewwible (a personification of death to Rachel) and Walt Disney, that “gentle faker from Nebraska”—like Louis, two wizards of science fantasy. Louis’s wizardry is reflected in the narrative perspective and structure, which flashes back in part 2 from the funeral to Louis’s fantasy of a heroically “long, flying tackle” that snatches Gage from death’s wheels.

In this modernization of Frankenstein , King demythologizes death and attacks the aspirations toward immortality that typify contemporary American attitudes. King’s soulless Lazaruses are graphic projections of anxieties about life-support systems, artificial hearts, organ transplants—what King has called “mechanistic miracles” that can postpone the physical signs of life almost indefinitely. The novel also indicts the “waste land” of mass culture, alluding in the same trope to George Romero’s “stupid, lurching movie-zombies,” T. S. Eliot’s poem about the hollow men, and The Wizard of Oz: “headpiece full of straw.” Louis worries that Ellie knows more about Ronald McDonald and “the Burger King” than the “ spiritus mundi .” If the novel suggests one source of community and culture, it is the form and ritual of the children’s pet “sematary.” Its concentric circles form a pattern from their “own collective unconsciousness,” one that mimes “the most ancient religious symbol of all,” the spiral.

In It , a group of children create a community and a mythology as a way of confronting their fears, as represented by It , the monster as a serial-murdering, shape-shifting boogey that haunts the sewers of Derry, Maine. In 1958, the seven protagonists, a cross-section of losers, experience the monster differently, for as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), It derives its power through its victim’s isolation and guilt and thus assumes the shape of his or her worst fear. (To Beverly Rogan It appears, in a sequence reminiscent of “Red Riding Hood,” as her abusive father in the guise of the child-eating witch from “Hansel and Gretel.”)

In a scary passage in Pet Sematary , Louis dreams of Walt Disney World, where “by the 1890s train station, Mickey Mouse was shaking hands with the children clustered around him, his big white cartoon gloves swallowing their small, trusting hands.” To all of It’s protagonists, the monster appears in a similar archetypal or communal form, one that suggests a composite of devouring parent and mass-culture demigod, of television commercial and fairy tale, of 1958 and 1985: as Pennywise, the Clown, a cross between Bozo and Ronald McDonald. As in Christine, Pet Sematary, and Thinner , the monster is mass culture itself, the collective devouring parent nurturing its children on “imitations of immortality.” Like Christine, or Louis’s patched-up son, Pennywise is the dead past feeding on the future. Twenty-seven years after its original reign of terror, It resumes its seige, whereupon the protagonists, now professionally successful and, significantly, childless yuppies, must return to Derry to confront as adults their childhood fears. Led by horror writer Bill Denborough (partly based on King’s friend and collaborator Peter Straub), they defeat It once more, individually as a sort of allegory of psychoanalysis and collectively as a rite of passage into adulthood and community.

It was attacked in reviews as pop psychology and by King himself as a “badly constructed novel,” but the puerility was partly intended. The book summarizes King’s previous themes and characters, who themselves look backward and inward, regress and take stock. The last chapter begins with an epigraph from Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-1850) and ends with an allusion to William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” from which King takes his primary theme and narrative device, the look back that enables one to go forward. During the 1970’s, King’s fiction was devoted to building a mythos out of shabby celluloid monsters to fill a cultural void; in the postmodern awareness of the late 1980’s, he began a demystification process. It is a calling forth and ritual unmasking of motley Reagan-era monsters, the exorcism of a generation and a culture.

Other 1980’s Novels

As for King the writer, It was one important rite in what would be a lengthy passage. After It’s extensive exploration of childhood, however, he took up conspicuously more mature characters, themes, and roles. In The Eyes of the Dragon (written for his daughter), he returned to the springs of his fantasy, the fairy tale. He told much the same story as before but assumed the mantle of adulthood. This “pellucid” and “elegant” fairy tale, says Barbara Tritel in The New York Times Book Review (February 22, 1987), has the “intimate goofiness of an extemporaneous story” narrated by “a parent to a child.” In The Tommyknockers , King again seemed to leave familiar territory for science fiction, but the novel more accurately applies technohorror themes to the 1980’s infatuation with technology and televangelism. In The Dark Tower cycles, he combined the gothic with Western and apocalyptic fiction in a manner reminiscent of The Stand . Then with much fanfare in 1990, King returned to that novel to update and enlarge it by some 350 pages.

King and Bachman

The process of recapitulation and summing up was complicated by the disclosure, in 1984, of Richard Bachman, the pseudonym under whose cover King had published five novels over a period of eight years. Invented for business reasons, Bachman soon grew into an identity complete with a biography and photographs (he was a chicken farmer with a cancer-ravaged face), dedications, a narrative voice (of unrelenting pessimism), and if not a genre, a naturalistic mode in which sociopolitical speculation combined or alternated with psychological suspense. In 1985, when the novels (with one exception) were collected in a single volume attributed to King as Bachman, the mortified alter ego seemed buried. Actually Bachman’s publicized demise only raised a haunting question of what “Stephen King” really was.

Misery , which was conceived as Bachman’s book, was King’s first novel to explore the subject of fiction’s dangerous powers. After crashing his car on an isolated road in Colorado, romance writer Paul Sheldon is “rescued,” drugged, and held prisoner by a psychotic nurse named Annie Wilkes, who is also the “Number One Fan” of his heroine Misery Chastain (of whom he has tired and killed off). This “Constant Reader” becomes Sheldon’s terrible “Muse,” forcing him to write (in an edition especially for her) Misery’s return to life. Sheldon is the popular writer imprisoned by genre and cut to fit fan expectations (signified by Annie’s amputations of his foot and thumb). Like Scheherazade, the reader is reminded, Sheldon must publish or literally perish. Annie’s obsession merges with the expectations of the page-turning real reader, who demands and devours each chapter, and as Sheldon struggles (against pain, painkillers, and a manual typewriter that throws keys) for his life, page by page.

Billed ironically on the dust jacket as a love letter to his fans, the novel is a witty satire on what King has called America’s “cannibalistic cult of celebrity”: “[Y]ou set the guy up, and then you eat him.” The monstrous Reader, however, is also the writer’s muse, creation, and alter ego, as Sheldon discovers when he concludes that Misery Returns —not his “serious” novel Fast Cars —was his masterpiece. Just as ironically, Misery was King’s first novel to please most of the critics.

The Dark Half

The Dark Half is an allegory of the writer’s relation to his genius. The young writer-protagonist Thaddeus Beaumont has a series of headaches and seizures, and a surgeon removes from his eleven-year-old brain the incompletely absorbed fragments of a twin—including an eye, two teeth, and some fingernails. Nearly thirty years later, Beaumont is a creative writing professor and moderately successful literary novelist devoted to his family. For twelve years, however, he has been living a secret life through George Stark, the pseudonym under which he emerged from writer’s block as the author of best-selling crime novels. Stark’s purely instinctual genius finds its most vital expression in his protagonist, the ruthless killer Alexis Machine. Beaumont is forced to disclose and destroy his now self-destructive pseudonym, complete with gravesite service and papier mâché headstone. A series of murders (narrated in Stark’s graphic prose style) soon follows. The pseudonym has materialized, risen from its fictional grave literally to take Thad’s wife and children (twins, of course) hostage. What Stark wants is to live in writing, outside of which writers do not exist. However, the writer is also a demon, vampire, and killer in this dark allegory, possessing and devouring the man, his family, friends, community.

Drawing on the motif of the double and the form of the detective story—on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (c. fifth century b.c.e.), as well as Misery and Pet Sematary —King gluts the first half of the book with Stark/Machine’s gruesome rampages. The last half is psychological suspense and metafiction in biological metaphor: the struggle of the decently introspective Beaumont against the rawly instinctual Stark for control of both word and flesh, with the novel taking shape on the page as the true author reclaims the “third eye,” King’s term for both child’s and artist’s inward vision. Once again, the man buries the terrible child in order to possess himself and his art. The book ends in a “scene from some malign fairy tale” as that child and alter ego is borne away by flocks of sparrows to make a last appearance as a black hole in the fabric of the sky.

In dramatizing the tyrannies, perils, powers, and pleasures of reading and writing, Misery and The Dark Half might have been written by metafictionists John Fowles (to whose work King is fond of alluding) or John Barth (on whom he draws directly in It and Misery). Anything but abstract, however, The Dark Half is successful both as the thriller that King’s fans desired and as an allegory of the writer’s situation. Critic George Stade, in his review of the novel for The New York Times Book Review (October 29, 1989), praised King for his tact “in teasing out the implications of his parable.” The Dark Half contains epigraphs instead to the novels of George Stark, Thad Beaumont, and “the late Richard Bachman,” without whom “this novel could not have been written.” Thus reworking the gothic cliché of the double, King allows the mythology of his own life story to speak wittily for itself, lending a subtle level of selfparody to this roman à clef. In this instance, his blunt literalness (“word become flesh, so to speak,” as George Stark puts it), gives vitality to what in other hands might have been a sterile exercise.

Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne

Some have criticized King’s negative depiction of women, which King himself admitted in 1983 was a weakness. A decade later, King would address, and redress, this in his paired novels Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne . Both present a strong but besieged female protagonist, and both feature the total solar eclipse seen in Maine in 1963, during which a moment of telepathy, the books’ only supernaturalism, links the two women.

Gerald’s Game is the story of Jessie Burlingame, a young wife who submits to her husband’s desire for bondage in a deserted cabin, only to have him die when she unexpectedly struggles. Alone and helpless, Jessie confronts memories (including the secret reason she struck out at Gerald), her own fears and limitations, and a ghastly visitor to the cabin who may or may not be real. In a bloody scene—even by King’s standards—Jessie frees herself and escapes, a victory psychological as well as physical. The aptly named Dolores Claiborne is trapped more metaphorically, by poverty and an abusive husband, and her victory too is both violent and a sign of her developing independence and strength.

Initial reaction from critics was sometimes skeptical, especially given the prurient aspect of Jessie’s plight and the trendy theme of incestuous abuse in both novels. However, King examined family dysfunction in works from Carrie and The Shining to It, and he continued his commitment to women’s issues and realistic strong women in Insomnia, Rose Madder , and other novels. Archetypal themes also strengthen the two books: Female power must overcome male dominance, as the moon eclipses the sun; and each woman must find her own identity and strength out of travail, as the darkness gives way to light again. (King uses mythology and gender issues more explicitly in Rose Madder, which evenly incorporates mimetic and supernatural scenes.)

The books are daring departures for King in other ways. In contrast to King’s sprawling It or encyclopedic The Stand , these books, like Misery, tightly focus on one setting, a shorter period of time, and a small cast—here Misery’s duet is replaced by intense monologues. In fact, all of Dolores Claiborne is her first-person narrative, without even chapter breaks, a tour de force few would attempt. Moreover, King challenges our ideas of the genre horror novel, since there is little violence, none of it supernatural and all expected, so that suspense is a function of character, not plot (done previously by King only in short fiction such as “The Body” and “The Last Rung of the Ladder”).

Character and voice have always been essential to King’s books, as Debbie Notkin, Harlan Ellison, and others have pointed out. Dolores Claiborne is especially successful, her speech authentic Mainer, and her character realistic both as the old woman telling her story and as the desperate yet indomitable wife, the past self whose story she tells. In these novels, King reaches beyond childhood and adolescence as themes; child abuse is examined, but only from an adult point of view. Dolores and Jessie—and the elderly protagonists of Insomnia—reveal King, perhaps having reconciled to his own history, exploring new social and psychological areas.

Bag of Bones

Bag of Bones , which King calls a “haunted love story,” opens with narrator Mike Noonan recounting the death of his wife, Jo, who collapses outside the Rite Aid pharmacy from a brain aneurysm. Both are relatively young, and Jo, Mike learns, was pregnant. Because Mike is unable to father children, he begins to question whether Jo was having an affair. As Mike slowly adjusts to life without Jo, he is forced to make another adjustment. Formerly a successful writer of gothic romance fiction, he now finds that he is unable to write even a simple sentence. In an attempt to regain his muse and put Jo’s death behind him, Mike returns to Sarah Laughs (also referred to as “TR-90” or the “TR”), the vacation cabin he and Jo purchased soon after he became successful. As Mike quickly learns, Sarah Laughs is haunted by ghosts, among them the ghost of blues singer Sarah Tidwell.

While at Sarah Laughs, Mike meets Mattie Devore, her daughter Kyra, and Mattie’s father-in-law, Max Devore, a withered old man of incalculable wealth who is accustomed to getting anything he wants. Having rescued Kyra from walking down the middle of Route 68, Mike quickly becomes friends with both Kyra and Mattie. Mattie is the widow of Lance Devore, Max’s stuttering son. Lance had nothing to do with his father after learning that his father had tried to bribe Mattie into not marrying him. After Lance’s death from a freak accident, Max returned to Mattie’s life in an attempt to get acquainted with his granddaughter, Kyra. The truth is, however, that Max wants to gain custody of Kyra and take her away to California; he will do whatever it takes to accomplish that.

To help Mattie fight off Max’s army of high-priced lawyers, Mike uses his own considerable resources to retain a lawyer for Mattie named John Storrow, a young New Yorker unafraid to take on someone of Max Devore’s social stature. As Mike is drawn into Mattie’s custody battle, he is also exposed to the ghosts that haunt the community. As Mike sleeps at night, he comes to realize that there are at least three separate spirits haunting his cabin. One, he is sure, is Jo, and one, he determines, is Sarah Tidwell. The third manifests itself only as a crying child, and Mike cannot tell whether it is Kyra or some other child. Mike and Kyra share a special psychic connection that allows them to share dreams and even to have the same ghosts haunting their homes—ghosts who communicate by rearranging magnetic letters on each of their refrigerator doors.

As Mike becomes further embroiled in the custody battle with Max Devore, his search to determine the truth about Jo’s affair finally leads him to a set of journals Jo was keeping, notes from a research project that was her real reason for sneaking away to Sarah Laughs. Jo’s notes explain how everyone related to the people who murdered Sarah Tidwell and her son have paid for this sin by losing a child of their own. Sarah Tidwell’s ghost is exacting her revenge by murdering the children of those who murdered her own child. Mike, related to one of the people who murdered Sarah’s child, has been drawn into this circle of retribution from the beginning, and the death of his unborn daughter, Kia, was not the accident it seemed to be. Mike also realizes that Kyra, the last descendant of this t Rage dy, is to be the final sacrifice used to put Sarah Tidwell to rest. Mike’s return to the ironically named Sarah Laughs, it seems, has been a carefully orchestrated t Rage dy. Everything is tied to the ghost Sarah Tidwell’s purposes, even Mike’s writer’s block. Mike’s writing abilities return while he is at Sarah Laughs, but by the end of the novel he realizes it was simply to lead him to the information he needed to put Sarah’s spirit to rest. Sarah’s ghost may have destroyed his wife and child, but Jo’s ghost gives him the means to save Kyra.

The usual King trademarks that fans have come to expect are present in Bag of Bones . The novel, moreover, shares much with the southern novel and its themes. Guilt is a predominant theme of many southern works, especially those of William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, and Tennessee Williams. Racism, not a theme usually associated with northern writers, has been successfully transplanted by King via the traveling Sarah Tidwell. By the end of the novel the evils of the community have become so entrenched in the soil (another similarity to Faulkner’s fiction) that they begin to affect Mike himself, and he has to fight the urge to kill Kyra. Only by reburying the past—in this case, by literally reburying Sarah Tidwell’s body—can matters finally be put to rest. Mike dissolves Sarah’s body with lye and her spirit finally leaves Sarah Laughs. Jo’s spirit also leaves, and all is quiet once more at the cabin.

By the 1980’s, King had become a mass-media guru who could open an American Express commercial with the rhetorical question “Do you know me?” At first prompted to examine the “wide perceptions that light [children’s] interior lives” (Four Past Midnight) and then the cultural roots of the empire he had created, he proceeded to explore the phenomenon of fiction, the situations of reader and writer. During the 1990’s, King continued to develop as a writer of both supernatural horror and mimetic character-based fiction. His novels after Dolores Claiborne—from Insomnia through Lisey’s Story—all provide supernatural chills while experimenting with character, mythology, and metafiction.

Financially invulnerable, King became almost playful with publishing gambits: The Green Mile was a serial, six slim paperbacks, in emulation of Charles Dickens and as a self-set challenge; Richard Bachman was revived when The Regulators was published in 1996. Although he is still thought of as having no style, actually King maintained his compelling storyteller’s voice (and ability to manipulate his reader emotionally) while maturing in the depth and range of his themes and characters.

King, perhaps more than any other author since Faulkner and his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, also creates a sense of literary history within the later novels that ties them all together. In Bag of Bones , King references several of his other novels, most notably The Dark Half, Needful Things , and Insomnia . For longtime fans, this serves both to update King’s readers concerning their favorite characters and to unify King’s body of work. King’s ironic sense of humor is also evident. When Mike’s literary agent tells him of all the other best-selling novelists who have novels coming out in the fall of 1998, the most notable name missing from the list is that of Stephen King himself.

Major Works Long Fiction : Carrie, 1974; ‘Salem’s Lot , 1975; Rage , 1977 (as Richard Bachman); The Shining , 1977; The Stand , 1978, unabridged version 1990; The Dead Zone , 1979; The Long Walk, 1979 (as Bachman); Firestarter , 1980; Cujo, 1981; Roadwork, 1981 (as Bachman); The Gunslinger, 1982, revised 2003 (illustrated by Michael Whelan; first volume of the Dark Tower series); The Running Man, 1982 (as Bachman); Christine, 1983; Cycle of the Werewolf, 1983 (novella; illustrated by Berni Wrightson); Pet Sematary, 1983; The Eyes of the Dragon, 1984, 1987; The Talisman, 1984 (with Peter Straub); Thinner, 1984 (as Bachman); The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King, 1985 (includes Rage , The Long Walk , Roadwork, and The Running Man); It, 1986; Misery, 1987; The Drawing of the Three, 1987 (illustrated by Phil Hale; second volume of the Dark Tower series); The Tommyknockers, 1987; The Dark Half, 1989; Needful Things, 1991; The Waste Lands, 1991 (illustrated by Ned Dameron; third volume in the Dark Tower series); Gerald’s Game, 1992; Dolores Claiborne, 1993; Insomnia, 1994; Rose Madder, 1995; Desperation, 1996; The Green Mile, 1996 (six-part serialized novel); The Regulators, 1996 (as Bachman); Wizard and Glass, 1997 (illustrated by Dave McKean; fourth volume in the Dark Tower series); Bag of Bones, 1998; Storm of the Century, 1999 (adaptation of his teleplay); The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, 1999; Black House, 2001 (with Straub); Dreamcatcher, 2001; From a Buick Eight, 2002; Wolves of the Calla, 2003 (fifth volume of the Dark Tower series); Song of Susannah, 2004 (sixth volume of the Dark Tower series); The Journals of Eleanor Druse: My Investigation of the Kingdom Hospital Incident, 2004 (written under the pseudonym Eleanor Druse); The Colorado Kid, 2005; Cell, 2006; Lisey’s Story, 2006 Short Fiction : Night Shift, 1978; Different Seasons, 1982; Skeleton Crew, 1985; Dark Visions, 1988 (with Dan Simmons and George R. R. Martin); Four Past Midnight, 1990; Nightmares and Dreamscapes, 1993; Hearts in Atlantis, 1999; Everything’s Eventual: Fourteen Dark Tales, 2002. Screenplays : Creepshow, 1982 (with George Romero; adaptation of his book); Cat’s Eye, 1984; Silver Bullet, 1985 (adaptation of Cycle of the Werewolf); Maximum Overdrive, 1986 (adaptation of his short story “Trucks”); Pet Sematary, 1989; Sleep Walkers, 1992. teleplays: The Stand , 1994 (based on his novel); Storm of the Century, 1999; Rose Red, 2002. Nonfiction : Danse Macabre, 1981; Black Magic and Music: A Novelist’s Perspective on Bangor, 1983; Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, 1988 (Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, editors); On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000; Faithful: Two Diehard Red Sox Fans Chronicle the 2004 Season, 2004 (with Stewart O’Nan). Children’s literature : The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-up Book, 2004 (text adaptation by Peter Abrahams, illustrated by Alan Dingman). Miscellaneous : Creepshow, 1982 (adaptation of the DC Comics); Nightmares in the Sky, 1988. Source: Notable American Novelists Revised Edition Volume 1 James Agee — Ernest J. Gaines Edited by Carl Rollyson Salem Press, Inc 2008.

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Stephen King: My Books Were Used to Train AI

One prominent author responds to the revelation that his writing is being used to coach artificial intelligence.

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Self-driving cars. Saucer-shaped vacuum cleaners that skitter hither and yon (only occasionally getting stuck in corners). Phones that tell you where you are and how to get to the next place. We live with all of these things, and in some cases—the smartphone is the best example—can’t live without them, or so we tell ourselves. But can a machine that reads learn to write?

I have said in one of my few forays into nonfiction ( On Writing ) that you can’t learn to write unless you’re a reader, and unless you read a lot. AI programmers have apparently taken this advice to heart. Because the capacity of computer memory is so large—everything I ever wrote could fit on one thumb drive, a fact that never ceases to blow my mind—these programmers can dump thousands of books into state-of-the-art digital blenders. Including, it seems, mine. The real question is whether you get a sum that’s greater than the parts, when you pour back out.

Read: The authors whose pirated books are powering generative AI

So far, the answer is no. AI poems in the style of William Blake or William Carlos Williams (I’ve seen both) are a lot like movie money: good at first glance, not so good upon close inspection. I wrote a scene in a forthcoming book that may illustrate this point. A character creeps up on another character and shoots him in the back of the head with a small revolver. When the shooter rolls the dead man over, he sees a small bulge in the man’s forehead. The bullet did not quite come out, you see. When I sat down that day, I knew the murder was going to happen, and I knew it was going to be murder by gun. I did not know about that bulge, which becomes an image that haunts the shooter going forward. That was a genuine creative moment, one that came from being in the story and seeing what the murderer was seeing. It was a complete surprise.

Could a machine create that bulge? I would argue not, but I must—reluctantly—add this qualifier: Not yet . Creativity can’t happen without sentience, and there are now arguments that some AIs are indeed sentient. If that is true now or in the future, then creativity might be possible. I view this possibility with a certain dreadful fascination. Would I forbid the teaching (if that is the word) of my stories to computers? Not even if I could. I might as well be King Canute, forbidding the tide to come in. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces.

Does it make me nervous? Do I feel my territory encroached upon? Not yet, probably because I’ve reached a fairly advanced age. But I will tell you that this subject always makes me think of that most prescient novel, Colossus , by D. F. Jones. In it, the world-spanning computer does become sentient and tells its creator, Forbin, that in time, humanity will come to love and respect it. (The way, I suppose, many of us love and respect our phones.) Forbin cries, “Never!” But the narrator has the last word, and a single word is all it takes:

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Stephen King: ‘I have outlived most of my critics. It gives me great pleasure’

The writer on his new book about a camp for telekinetic children, being a national treasure and listening to rock music as he works

B orn in Maine in 1947, Stephen King wrote his first published novel, Carrie , in 1974 and has spent the subsequent half-century documenting the monsters and heroes of small-town America. His rogues’ gallery of characters runs the gamut from killer clowns and demonic cars to psychotic fans and unhinged populist politicians.

His best-loved books include The Stand , It , The Dead Zone and Pet Sematary . King’s latest novel, The Institute , revolves around a totalitarian boot camp for telekinetic children. The kids check in – but don’t check out.

Carrie was published against the backdrop of Watergate, Vietnam and the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Is America a more or less scary place to write about now? The world is a scary place, not just America. We’re in the spooky house – on the ghost train, if you prefer – for life. The scares come and go, but everyone likes make-believe monsters to stand in for the real ones.

The Institute is about a concentration camp for children, staffed by implacable factotums. To what extent did Trump’s immigration policies affect the book? Trump’s immigration policies didn’t impact the book, because it was written before that incompetent dumbbell became president. Children are imprisoned and enslaved all over the world. Hopefully, people who read The Institute will find a resonant chord with this administration’s cruel and racial policies.

You were raised in a working-class Republican household. What would your mother make of today’s GOP? My mother bolted the GOP the last time she voted and cast a ballot for George McGovern. She hated the Vietnam war. I was sworn to secrecy, but feel the statute of limitations on that has run out. In Maine, lots of Republicans are more purple than red. It’s how Senator Susan Collins keeps sliding by.

For all the terrors in your work, there’s an underlying faith in basic human decency. This suggests you think most people are basically good. Yes, most people are good. More people are anxious to stop a terrorist attack than to start one. They just don’t make the news.

You started out being dismissed by the literary establishment as a lowly peddler of cheap horror. You’re now a lauded national treasure. How does it feel to be respectable? It feels good to be at least semi-respectable. I have outlived most of my most virulent critics. It gives me great pleasure to say that. Does that make me a bad person?

Isn’t it also partly because the boundary between literary fiction and genre fiction has become more porous? The old high/low distinction doesn’t exist in the same way . Well, there’s still a strange – to me, anyway – and totally subjective line between high culture and low. An aria from Rigoletto, La donna è mobile, for instance – is high culture. Sympathy for the Devil by the Stones is low. They’re both cool, so go figure.

I’ve heard that you like to write to loud music. Isn’t that really distracting? I’m listening to Fine Young Cannibals [right now]. Soon to be followed by Danny and the Juniors and the Animals. I love rock – the louder the better.

But does the music leave an imprint on a book’s tone or pace? Would a chapter written while listening to the Animals, say, differ from a chapter written under the influence of the Ramones? The music I happen to be listening to can sometimes affect word choice, or cause a new line, but never affects style.

You’re astoundingly prolific. What’s your feeling about those novelists who spend years crafting and rewriting a novel? Envy at their rigour? Exasperation ? Some writers take years; James Patterson takes a weekend. Every writer is different. I feel that a first draft should take about four months, but that’s me. And I go over my work obsessively. Here’s another thing – creative life is absurdly short. I want to cram in as much as I can.

Have you ever forced yourself to go slower? Deliberately go slower? No, never. I’ve written longhand [ Dreamcatcher ], but poke along and obsessively polish? No. You keep picking a scab, you’re gonna make it bleed instead of heal.

You’ve said your characters sometimes speak in your head to the point where they blot out the real world. That makes writing fiction sound like a close cousin to mental illness... I don’t think writing is a mental illness, but when I’m working and it’s going really well, time and the real world kind of disappear.

If that’s the ideal state of grace, is it sometimes hard to let go? Do you ever find yourself haunted by books or characters you’ve ostensibly laid to rest? Sometimes characters, like Holly Gibney from the Mr Mercedes books and The Outsider , cry to come back – or Roland of Gilead – but they are the exceptions.

You’ve collaborated with the writer Peter Straub (on the novels The Talisman and Black House ) and your sons Owen and Joe . Is there another you’d love to write a novel with? I loved collaborating with my boys, and with Peter Straub, and will hopefully do it again. I’d love to collaborate with Colson Whitehead, Michael Robotham, Linwood Barclay, Alex Marwood, Tana French. No time, I guess, but those would be cool mixes. The ideal is to groove with someone so completely you make a third voice.

The president orders every book in America to be burned. You have time to save three of your own novels . Which three ? Which books of mine would I save? Dumb question, but I’ll play. Lisey’s Story , The Stand and Misery .

The Institute by Stephen King is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20) To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846 Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

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The Book-Banners: Adventure in Censorship is Stranger Than Fiction

Published as a Guest Column in the March 20, 1992 issue of The Bangor Daily News

"When I came into my office last Thursday afternoon, my desk was covered with those little pink message slips that are the prime mode of communication around my place. Maine Public Broadcasting had called, also Channel 2, the Associated Press, and even the Boston Globe. It seems the book-banners had been at it again, this time in Florida. They had pulled two of my books, "The Dead Zone" and "The Tommyknockers," from the middle-school library shelves and were considering making them limited-access items in the high school library. What that means is that you can take the book out if you bring a note from your mom or your dad saying it's OK.

My news-media callers all wanted the same thing -- a comment. Since this was not the first time one or more of my books had been banned in a public school (nor the 15th), I simply gathered the pink slips up, tossed them in the wastebasket, and went about my day's work. The only thought that crossed my mind was one strongly tinged with gratitude: There are places in the world where the powers that be ban the author as well as the author's works when the subject matter or mode of expression displeases said powers. Look at Salman Rushdie, now living under a death sentence, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in a prison camp for calling Josef Stalin "the boss" and had to run for the west to avoid another stay after he won the Nobel Prize for "The Gulag Archipelago."

When the news stories about my latest adventure in censorship came out, however, I didn't like the way that "the author could not be reached for comment" stuff looked. To me, that line has always called up images of swindlers too cowardly to face up to what they've done. In this case I haven't done anything but my job, and I know it's all too possible to make a career out of defending one's fiction -- for a while in the mid-1980s, Judy Blume almost did make a career out of it -- but I still didn't like the way it felt.

So, just for the record, here is what I'd say if I still took time out from doing my work to defend it.

First, to the kids: There are people in your home town who have taken certain books off the shelves of your school library. Do not argue with them; do not protest; do not organize or attend rallies to have the books put back on their shelves. Don't waste your time or your energy. Instead, hustle down to your public library, where these frightened people's reach must fall short in a democracy, or to your local bookstore, and get a copy of what has been banned. Read it carefully and discover what it is your elders don't want you to know. In many cases you'll finish the banned book in question wondering what all the fuss was about. In others, however, you will find vital information about the human condition. It doesn't hurt to remember that John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, and even Mark Twain have been banned in this country's public schools over the last 20 years.

Second, to the parents in these towns: There are people out there who are deciding what your kids can read, and they don't care what you think because they are positive their ideas of what's proper and what's not are better, clearer than your own. Do you believe they are? Think carefully before you decide to accord the book-banners this right of cancellation, and remember that they don't believe in democracy but rather in a kind of intellectual autocracy. If they are left to their own devices, a great deal of good literature may soon disappear from the shelves of school libraries simply because good books -- books that make us think and feel -- always generate controversy.

If you are not careful and diligent about defending the right of your children to read, there won't be much left, especially at the junior-high level where kids really begin to develop a lively life of the mind, but books about heroic boys who come off the bench to hit home runs in the bottom of the ninth and shy girls with good personalities who finally get that big prom date with the boy of their dreams. Is this what you want for your kids, keeping in mind that controversy and surprise -- sometimes even shock -- are often the whetstone on which young minds are sharpened?

Third, to the other interested citizens of these towns: Please remember that book-banning is censorship, and that censorship in a free society is always a serious matter -- even when it happens in a junior high, it is serious. A proposal to ban a book should always be given the gravest consideration. Book-banners, after all, insist that the entire community should see things their way, and only their way. When a book is banned, a whole set of thoughts is locked behind the assertion that there is only one valid set of values, one valid set of beliefs, one valid perception of the world. It's a scary idea, especially in a society which has been built on the ideas of free choice and free thought.

Do I think that all books and all ideas should be allowed in school libraries? I do not. Schools are, after all, a "managed" marketplace. Books like "Fanny Hill" and Brett Easton Ellis' gruesome "American Psycho" have a right to be read by people who want to read them, but they don't belong in the libraries of tax-supported American middle schools. Do I think that I have an obligation to fly down to Florida and argue that my books, which are a long way from either "Fanny Hill" or "American Psycho," be replaced on the shelves from which they have been taken? No. My job is writing stories, and if I spent all my time defending the ones I've written already, I'd have no time to write new ones.

Do I believe a defense should be mounted? Yes. If there's one American belief I hold above all others, it's that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is "right" and what is "best" should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. No book, record, or film should be banned without a full airing of the issues. As a nation, we've been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn't approve of them."

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Guest Essay

The Rage in ‘Carrie’ Feels More Relevant Than Ever

By Amanda Jayatissa

Ms. Jayatissa is the author of three novels, most recently “Island Witch.”

In “On Writing,” Stephen King’s nonfiction account of his career, he talks about a girl he calls Dodie Franklin. She attended his high school and, he recalls, was often bullied for wearing the same clothes every day. In their sophomore year, on the first day back after Christmas vacation, she came to school wearing newly fashionable clothes with a trendy hairstyle — but the bullying and teasing never stopped. “Her peers had no intention of letting her out of the box they’d put her in,” Mr. King writes. “She was punished for even trying to break free.”

The realization that nothing could change Ms. Franklin’s social standing, coupled with a few more unfortunate examples of young women he knew, helped inform a story about a bullied girl with telekinetic powers who is pushed to her limits and who wreaks brutal revenge on her classmates and, eventually, her abusive mother. “Carrie,” Mr. King’s first published novel, was released 50 years ago, in 1974.

There have been many iterations of “Carrie” since. Horror enthusiasts will recall the classic film directed by Brian De Palma and released in 1976; there have been several remakes, most recently one in 2013 starring Chloë Grace Moretz. There was an ill-fated stage adaptation , “Carrie: The Musical,” which the TV show “Riverdale” once paid homage to. Many things have changed in the half-century since Mr. King’s novel was published, yet Carrie White remains a strikingly relevant and highly relatable figure. She raged her way to a place in pop culture’s pantheon. But why?

I first read “Carrie” as a nerdy, horror-enthused 14-year-old growing up in Sri Lanka. At the library of the Christian school I attended, Mr. King’s books were extremely hard to come by, so when I saw a copy at a friend’s house, I was quick to borrow it. I vividly remember being drawn to Carrie’s wide-eyed gaze on the cover, blood trailing from her forehead and dripping down her chin. “Nobody was really surprised when it happened,” it reads in the opening pages. “Not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow.” I was hooked. What did Mr. King mean by “savage things”? I didn’t realize then that I would spend so much of my adult life thinking about this very question.

I’ve reached for “Carrie” many times since, and my relationship with the story has continued to shift and evolve. Like most teenagers, I suppose, I initially reacted to Carrie’s story with pure horror; I was mortified by the way she was teased, repulsed by the pig’s blood that gets dumped over her at prom and fascinated by the death and destruction she wrought in retaliation. In my 20s, when I revisited the novel, the horror I felt at her tale turned to something closer to sympathy. By that point, I’d moved from Colombo to California to Britain and then back to my hometown in Sri Lanka and had chalked up enough life lessons to understand Carrie’s suffering in a different way.

Now, as a woman in my 30s, I no longer see Carrie as simply a victim to be pitied. I’ve learned to relish her rage. Her anger has inspired much of my own fiction writing and, more important, has taught me that anger, when channeled, can be an asset. This truly hit home for me in July 2022, when I joined thousands of protesters in Colombo marching against corruption and the economic mismanagement of the country’s leaders. Years of feeling powerless finally erupted. We were all angry, of course, but we used our rage as fuel.

In the past year, women in the United States have had many reasons to figuratively burn down auditoriums and destroy towns. The war on women is still very much alive, as Roe v. Wade was overturned, in vitro fertilization procedures were endangered in Alabama and pregnant women are still not allowed to divorce their husbands in Missouri.

These days I see Carries everywhere. At the end of 2023, Gypsy Rose Blanchard — who had been convicted of second-degree murder in connection with the death of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, after years of being subjected to abuse and Munchausen syndrome by proxy — was released from prison. There are many interesting parallels between Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Carrie, the most glaring being the obvious torment of each by her mother.

What struck me as most interesting (read: most depressing) was the public response Ms. Blanchard received after her release. While some hailed her as a folk hero, many labeled her a killer, much like Carrie, for fighting back against her tormentor — not just in a court of law but also in the court of social media. TikTok was rife with hot takes, arguing there was something sinister about Ms. Blanchard or claiming that her husband was actually her brother. Rather than being viewed as a young woman trying to navigate her way through an absolutely horrendous situation, she was criticized for participating in a television series. Many people seemed content when she was the victim, but it infuriated them when she tried to take a stand for herself. What was true of Mr. King’s account of Ms. Franklin proved true for Ms. Blanchard, too: “She was punished for even trying to break free.”

Look at the way that Meghan Markle has been treated — criticized as an attention seeker for speaking out in a society that constantly blames women for staying silent. Or take Britney Spears. We all cried “Free Britney” and lamented the ignorance of our ways when we learned of how those in her life had treated her terribly, yet all it takes is a social media post of her dancing in clothes deemed by some to be too provocative to leave viewers shaking their heads at her again, saying she has gone off the deep end. God forbid women choose to fight back by simply expressing themselves in a way that defies convention.

I believe we still too often look at women who fight back against their oppressors and see them as villains rather than assigning responsibility for their situations to the people who tormented them. Carrie has always been the antidote to that predicament: She forces us to confront our feelings about what happens when women instill some of the same fear in others that they are too often forced to deal with themselves. Carrie’s plight still speaks to feelings in women of rage, helplessness and a desire for justice or, failing that, retribution. None of that has gone away in 50 years.

Beyond being a supremely well-told story, Mr. King’s novel still connects on the same “savage” subconscious level he mentioned at the start of the book. “Carrie” was packaged and marketed as horror, but what is it about the character of Carrie that’s truly horrifying? Is it the revenge that’s exacted by a bullied girl? Or is it the actions of those who stood around and allowed her to be tormented? The question at the heart of the story is: Who is the real monster? Fifty years later, we’ve come to understand that it’s not Carrie but the world that made her.

Amanda Jayatissa is the author of three novels, most recently “Island Witch.”

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