Author: Tyson Blue

I was sitting in a golf cart with Frank Darabont one day during the filming of The Green Mile, talking Stephen King with him while waiting for a shot to be set up. “What’s your favorite King novel?” he asked me. With no hesitation, I replied “This one,” meaning The Green Mile. I wasn’t being sycophantic; I’ve read the novel more times than any of King’s other books, and listened to the audio version even more times. Nothing else in King’s oeuvre comes close. “Next in line,” I continued, “I’d probably have to say It.” Darabont gave me a look. “Really?” he asked. I nodded, and then explained why I felt that way. That answer forms the bulk of this essay, although fleshed out more than I did that day on the Warner Hollywood Studio’s lot. To put it succinctly, the answer is — kid stuff. King’s novel spins a story about a monstrous creature which has existed in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, since It landed in the Earth’s primordial past, and which lives on fear, which It generates by taking on the form of the things Its victims fear the most. It then takes the victims to Its subterranean lair, where they are stored and later eaten. In order for the novel to succeed, King has to create an air of verisimilitude, to persuade his readers to willfully suspend their disbelief and accept the story as real, at least for the time it takes to read the book — a sizable investment in the case of this 1,192-page work. One of the primary ways King achieves this goal is to create characters that the readers like, that they care about, and one of the ways he does that is to place those characters in situations that are familiar to them, that resonate off things that are familiar to them, part of the common experience that is familiar to them. And he succeeds at this to great effect in It, primarily through the experiences of the children who are the main characters of the story, both as children and adults. King also tells two stories at essentially the same time, following the adult members of the Losers Club as they begin coming back together to keep — with one exception — a promise they had made almost three decades earlier. At the same time, he tells the story of the Losers and how they came together, one summer in their childhood, largely due to their encounters with It. But it is what they do in between their encounters with the monster in the sewers that makes this book one of my favorites. Because it is what they do when they are just being kids that draws the reader in, that creates a sense of familiarity and having something in common with these characters, that gives us a familiar hammock to fall back into and enjoy the tale of wonder and horror that King unfolds. I can best illustrate what King does in the novel by explaining how it resonated with me. I grew up in Franklin, New Hampshire, a small city of about 5,000, best known as the birthplace of Daniel Webster, who went on to become a Congressman who at various times represented both New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and was considered the greatest orator of the pre-Civil War era, although he is largely unknown today outside of historical circles. When I was there, in the 1950’s and ’60’s, Franklin was a typical New England mill town, largely supported by a large textile mill and other factories which made hosiery, needles and saw blades. These plants had grown up on the shores of the Winnepesaukee River, which flowed through the downtown area and provided power to run the machinery in the plants before merging with the Pemigewasset River just below the high school to form the mighty Merrimack River, which was in the 19th Century the most industrialized river in the world. Stephen King is five years older than me. Thus, the New England in which we both grew up was essentially the same. Both Maine and New Hampshire were — and are — states full of small mill towns, surrounded by sprawling evergreen forests. Poverty is widespread, and the people were — and are — hardy and hard-working for the most part. For entertainment, there was AM radio and black-and-white television from dimly-seen stations in Boston and WMTW, whose antenna was perched atop Mount Washington and got out farther than most. Aside from a smattering of local stations whose signals didn’t get out too far due to the hilly terrain, there wasn’t much else beyond the second-run movies that came to town. In those days, when school let out for the summer, parents would basically thrown open their doors and say “See you in September!” Kids would play outdoors largely unsupervised, from morning until it became too dark to see, with breaks for meals. And sometimes there were more games under streetlights until parents began calling them in at bedtime. As I have said on many occasions in similar essays, if you want to know what my childhood was like, read It. We ran around town, often to places where weren’t supposed to be — places like the Boston & Maine railroad trestle over the Winnepesaukee, which we would cross (if we dared) to head on up the tracks to look for adventures only kids can enjoy, much like the four boys in King’s novella “The Body”, which was the basis for the classic Rob Reiner film Stand By Me. We also made occasional trips to the town dump, poking around in the old cars and trailers and other detritus for things we could make some use of, also avoiding the watchman, who had no idea what a treasure-trove he was guarding, but thought only of one of us cutting himself on a rusty piece of metal and needing to have a tetanus shot, or worse. He didn’t have a junkyard dog, like Chopper in “The Body”, but when I read the story, I knew what it was like to sneak into a dump, again because I had done it myself, which made it easier to feel for the boys in the novella. I remember one time when three or four of us found a small stream which followed into the Winny, as we called the river, and spent most of a day damming it up, much like some of the Losers did in It. We used two boards to make a framework, then filled it with rocks, gravel and dirt, in order to make it as sturdy as possible.This is a significant technique, because when I read about it in the novel, I knew exactly what it felt like, sounded like, smelled like, because I had done it, and the actions of the boys in the story resonated with my own experience to create an instant and subliminal connection between myself as reader and the Losers as characters which made me side with them in the adventures which followed. There had been a paper mill farther up the river, which had burned down around the turn of the 20th Century, and the ruins of the buildings had been largely overgrown by weeds and wild grasses and vines, all of which combined to make them a perfect place for boys to explore and play in. Sure they’re not safe, not structurally sound, and parents would have a stroke if they knew their kids were playing in them, but all that really means is that boys are drawn to them like iron filings to a magnet. This is similar to the ruins of the Iron Works in Derry in the novel, where Mike Hanlon encounters It in the form of a gigantic, Rodan-like bird. We were largely left to our own devices back then, and the games we played were ones we made up on the spot. A favorite game of ours was “guns” — that was the name of it; not army, not cowboys, but “guns”. It accommodated any kind of cap pistol or pop-gun rifle we had, whether it was Western, or military, it didn’t matter. We’d hide in the trees or among the ruins of the old mill, waiting for a victim to come by and firing away, with accompanying sound effects. If we had caps, there was a sharp popping sound, with a puff of smoke and the smell of powder; if not, the sounds were vocalized. We also played in a wooded area with streams running through it, dotted with large, cone-shaped wells that led down to the sewers that carried waste from the houses atop the hill to the east of where we played, before it was ultimately dumped into the waters of the Merrimack. I’m not sure what those wells were actually for, but they reminded me of nothing so much as the wells leading to the lair of the Morlocks in the 1959 version of The Time Machine, directed by the great George Pal. And decades later, when King described the wells which dotted the Barrens in Derry, I knew exactly what they looked like. A short distance away from these wells, up a small hill, we had an underground hideout, its roof made of logs covered with leaves to make it invisible from above, much like the one King would create in his novel for the Losers’ clubhouse, which also figures prominently in It: Chapter Two. In fact, the one in the film looks uncannily like the place we built. We said things like “Jeezum Crow!”, an expression that is pretty much unique to New England (along with “Cool as a Moose”). We drank vanilla Cokes at the soda fountain at the corner drug store, where we’d go to pick up prescriptions, much as Eddie Kaspbrak does in the novel. Sometimes, we’d drink Moxie (which figures more in 11/22/63 than it does in It, but they all go to show how King uses childhood cultural motifs to give his characters a shared experience that bonds the reader to them.) Some of the experiences King uses to strike a familiar chord with his readers are not so pleasant. The most prominent is bullying. Several characters are bullied in one way or another, and that is an experience all too many readers can relate to. Most of the Losers are bullied in one way or another, primarily by Henry Bowers and his gang, particularly Ben Hanscom, who is picked on because he is overweight, and Bill Denbrough, because of his stutter. I had my own nemesis when I was younger, a kid named Randy. He never tried to carve his name in my stomach with a switchblade, but he would punch me in the face or kick me with his pointy-toed cowboy boots. I never fought back, and he got tired and went away fairly quickly. A quick funny aside: one...