When I was still in elementary school I was fascinated with both impressions and riddles. There was some Apple IIC computer game that contained some very basic math-themed riddles. I don't remember much about it other than that I was determined to get 100% of them right. And without an internet or a set of encyclopedias to help me, I merely went through the series over and over again until I succeeded.

The impressions were another thing entirely. As far back as I can remember I was a mimic. I remember being about five or six when an uncle (technically a sixth or seventh cousin via marriage probably) taught me to do Woody Woodpecker. I could also do Mickey Mouse and Goofy, and when Roger Rabbit came out when I was in fifth grade I made sure the voice was in my repertoire. But the voices were pretty much for me, my family, and my close friends, who were also dorks.

In sixth grade, I had written a story for class that read like a script, and my English teacher asked me to read it to the class. So I read it. With the voices.

I don't remember how the class as a whole reacted, other than, as I went to take my seat, a girl who I had a crush on said "You don't sound like anyone but you."

When Good Morning Vietnam came out, I really wanted to be Robin Williams as Adrian Cronauer...except not in a war...or even in the army. I believed that impression was the height of comedy. So when I first read about Blaine The Mono in The Waste Lands, and saw that this riddle-happy impressionist was viewed as psychotic, I thought...maybe I should ease down on the celebrity impersonations. I didn't remove them entirely from my life, but they became less frequent, and I tried to only use them when a particular character was brought up by someone else, and when I had a punchline that I was at least 75% sure would get somewhere between a chuckle and a meltdown.

Very few of us ever want to be reading a story, and see our behavior reflected in the villain. Having never murdered anyone, not finding myself rubbing my hands together while plotting someone's failure, or making dolls out of the hair of my enemies, I didn't imagine how any of my behaviors could lead me to being seen as a villain. But at fourteen or fifteen, I was seeing myself as maybe others saw me, an attention-seeker, trying to impress people by being like someone they probably already liked and were comfortable with. It was a negative behavior. And while I might have ignored a friend or teacher who told me this, perhaps imagining they were jealous of my "talent", I knew Stephen King had never met me, and had nothing to gain by declaring this behavior as annoying and a red flag of villainy. I wondered how many other people would hear my Roger Rabbit, and think "this annoying fraud is going to lead me to nothing but unhappiness."

I imagine many adult men around my age have felt something similar since the rise in awareness about misogyny, sexual assault, homophobia, and racism. We read a story about someone who has clearly Fucked Up And Hurt Someone, and thought "Oh shit. I said something like that to someone once." or "Didn't I fill an entire Livejournal with posts about someone I loved putting me 'in the friend zone' before I knew how creepy and entitled the concept of 'the friend zone' was?" or "Oh, my edgy humor when I was twenty was just punching down for validation. Why didn't anyone tell---Oh, hmmm...Why didn't I listen when people politely hinted that I was Fucking Up?"

Reading The Waste Lands now, thankfully, felt quite different. I didn't see myself as anyone in the book. I recalled being in similar situations (but with less of a Western apocalyptic theme) but I didn't identify with anyone in the second half of the book, the way I had the first time I read it. When I got to Blane The Mono's appearance, I was instantly annoyed. As much at who I think I used to be, as I was annoyed at the type of people who I now see behaving that way.

Stray observations:

--I had forgotten how many literary references echo throughout The Dark Tower. I remembered the major ones: Wizard Of Oz, Harry Potter, The Waste Land. But I had forgotten about the small references, such as the bear being named Shardik or the people of Lud acting out Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"

--I want a billy-bumbler

--the second section of the book brings us 192 pages further, tick-tock, tick-tock bringing us to 4,567 pages as we barrel towards Topeka

In September, I suggested a reading order for the extended universe of Stephen King's The Dark Tower, a series I loved, but hadn't read any of since Volume 7: The Dark Tower came out in 2004. I realized that I missed the characters from the series, and wondered if the reading order I suggested would really hold someone's interest all the way through. I scoured some local bookstores, and then the internet for the hardcovers of the books, and prepared for my quest to read a Super Long series of books.

The entries about It have been the hardest to write so far, though it's certainly not the hardest book to read. I read this portion while on vacation, and flew through it. 

Anyone who writes for more than ten years will have something embarrassingly out-of-touch in their writing. I'm not talking about the ambiguous use of the word soul or a tendency to overuse a thesaurus, I mean very little writing, no matter the quality of the writer, survives the politicization of time.

When the movie version of It came out, every review, article, and blog post I read mentioned a scene near the end of the book where the lone female character is, essentially, gangbanged by the boys in the group.

It's her idea, her decision, her agency. But it's still really out of left field, and disconnected from much of what happens in the book. But then, what makes the book so riveting is that weird situations and unlikely resolutions are constantly bombarding the reader. They make sense as you read them, but probably aren't how you would imagine the characters would work their way out of the situations.

Still, I dreaded getting to that part of the book.

But why?

Kids fuck too early. And they always have.

Kids fuck for weird reasons. And they always have.

More importantly, the scene is Very Unsexy, Uncomfortable, and is Incredibly Short. Like most first, young, sex. Nothing about it is erotic. It's never meant to trivialize or romanticize the events around it. It's one of many bizarre, seemingly unnecessary things a group of traumatized kids do to try and get over their trauma. It feels like a thing that frightened, idiot kids would do. And, in the realm of Stephen King books, it's not that uncommon. I seem to remember a very unsexy dream sequence between a high schooler and his speech pathologist in Needful Things. And, I remember a scene in another book where a boy gets an inappropriate erection while trapped with a girl he likes, and she offers to help him with it,and when he says yes, she punches him in the balls. But I can't remember if that's a Stephen King book.

This post has already devoted more time to the incident than the book did.

I dwell on it because I saw it saturate The Internet when the movie came out. People really glad that it didn't make the movie script. And, yea, I'm sure Stephen King and Andrés Muschietti really didn't want to film a sequence of adolescent sex. But, also, this book was over a thousand pages long, they had to cut a tremendous amount of stuff, and this brief scene should have been the first to go, not just because it's gross and awkward but because it ultimately means nothing to the plot or character development.

It also gets cut because it's not even a sex scene, it's a heart scene. It's about believing love will help solve trauma. And there are plenty of better,  more believable, and more filmable examples in this last section of the book.

A book about overcoming a monster with love isn't usually my thing. I don't like monster books, and I don't like any book where love conquers _blank_, unless it's love conquers the government because I've reached the age where I would  root for baby-chimp-murdering teacher who failed students who smelled badly, provided (s)he beat an American politician to death somewhere in the book. Maybe this will be one of my horribly dated pieces of writing for including that. I hope it will be because the 2010s become historically known as the worst time ever in American politics, and everything is about to get much better real soon. Excuse me if I don't hold my breath, though.

Where was I?

Right, beating monsters with love instead of science or religion or history (but including all of those just in case the love doesn't work out) isn't usually my thing, but King really makes it work here.  I look forward to reading this book again in 28ish years, when people upload their brainwave feelings about how fortunate it is that the Live Holographic Rendering Of It being broadcast on The Moon leaves out the extremely inappropriate parts about using a bicycle without a helmet.

Stray Observations:

--I remembered almost none of the last third of the book

--Wait, that's it? That's all we get of the Turtle? Maaaaaaan, that doesn't tie into The Dark Tower much at all!

--But Pennywise is totally related to a monster or two that we'll meet later

--I should have written this entry closer to my completion of the book. I'm about two weeks out now, and have so much more recent Tower stuff in my brain, that I barely remember what I had originally intended to write

--we're 4,879 pages into this chronology, and it's turtles most of the way down

In September, I suggested a reading order for the extended universe of Stephen King's The Dark Tower, a series I loved, but hadn't read any of since Volume 7: The Dark Tower came out in 2004. I realized that I missed the characters from the series, and wondered if the reading order I suggested would really hold someone's interest all the way through. I scoured some local bookstores, and then the internet for the hardcovers of the books, and prepared for my quest to read a Super Long series of books.

​The last entry focused mainly on memories and false memories. That continued to plague me throughout the whole reading experience. I expected it. It was to a much higher degree than I expected, but I knew going in that I wasn't going to accurately remember a book I read when I was twelve. What I wasn't expecting was that the reactions I had would be similar. 

If you ask most people who Stephen King is, they will tell you he is a horror writer from Maine. This is somewhat true. But when I think "horror", I think Nightmare On Elm Street, Friday The Thirteenth, Cabin In The Woods. I think of movies where a group of flawed mostly idiots are meticulously murdered in horrible fashions. I think of jumping in movie theater seats and spilling popcorn. I think of sleeping with a nightlight on. I think of bad writing with horrible effects. I don't think much of Stephen King.

We are thirteen sections into this chronology, and there hasn't been a lot of horror. 

The Stand (entries 1-3) is an apocalyptic story about the dangers of science and religion. People die horribly from a plague, and then from simple human shittiness (which was also a huge factor in the plague). It tends to be categorized as "post-apocalyptic fiction", even though much of the book is the step of the apocalypse and the apocalyptic act. Imagine if 60% of The Matrix was Keanu Reeves working his office job , and he didn't choose a pill until fifteen minutes before the end of the film. Imagine if Mad Max was mostly about the structure of the Australian highway patrol until a biker gang shows up 2/3rds of the way through the film. Imagine if Planet Of The Apes spent most of the first movie being about scientific trials on primates instead of...wait...they made that movie, didn't they? Nevermind. The point is, it's arguably not post-apocalyptic, but it's definitely not horror.

The Eyes Of The Dragon (section 4) is straight up European castle fantasy. It's an bedtime bedtime story, which may explain how difficult it was for me to stay awake while reading it.

The Little Sisters Of Eluria (section 5) and The Gunslinger (section 7) are both western motif fantasy. Yea, there are vampires in one, and a wizard in the other, but its really a coming of age story about a badass kid becoming a loner adult in a properly post-apocalyptic world.

Everything's Eventual (section 6) is a coming of age tale with a sci-fi twist. Not "Twilight Zone" or "Black Mirror", more a really intriguing 90s TV sci-fi show with no effects budget (so, I guess, "The Dead Zone").

The Shining (section 8) is the first sort-of horror. But it's not the mummy or the serial killer tracking anyone down. It's a sort of haunted house story, only you don't see anybody die. It's like a ghost hunters TV show where a bunch of people stay overnight in a haunted house, and jump at shadows. They always feel the threat, but bodies aren't being racked up over the course of their stay. So, it's horrifying, but not Scream Queen Horror.

The Drawing Of The Three (section 9) and "Jake: Fear In A Handful Of Dust" (section 10) are, like all of the books in the chronology, speculative fiction, but I'm not sure which subgenre to put them in. They're technically post-apocalyptic because Roland's world has suffered an apocalypse, but huge swaths of the book take place in New York City at times when it was still thriving. It's about addiction, and trauma, and mental illness, but it doesn't present a monster with needles for hands, and the mental illness doesn't turn the person into a subhuman monster, but into a pain in the ass. All of the monsters in the book were humans without powers. And while plenty of people died tragically (and a couple horrifically) in the books, their deaths weren't the driving point of the book.

Salem's Lot (section 11) is a vampire book. The first proper horror book.  But it didn't feel monster movie horror to me. It's the way "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" is vampirey, and therefore horror, but also not very horrifying, even with all the death. I'm occasionally afraid for the characters, and sad at some deaths, but it's not Jump Out Of Your Seat Horror.

Which brings us to It (sections 12-14). It is horror. Yes, at it's core it's about a town's willingness to overlook tragedies when it's not convenient for them. It's about ignoring children's trauma. It's about the inaccuracies of memory. But it's also about a terrifying supernatural creature who sometimes looks like a clown who Murders Children for reasons that aren't truly explained. Because a full explanation would rob the villain of some of its terror.

I don't get scared by books. Movies can frighten me while they're on, but once they're over, I'm more likely to dwell on plot holes than I am to worry that the villain is hiding under my bed or dangling from my ceiling. It had the same effect.

Part of this is that, once the initial death scene takes place, so much of the book is making you care for the main characters. And unlike most horror movies/stories, we don't watch them get methodically picked off throughout the course of the book. We are constantly experiencing new characters just to see them die, while, due to the way time in the book is set up, we Know that most of the main characters are going to live until, at least, just about the end. But you're still terrified for them.

I think that having this be the first horror book I ever read is why I don't enjoy most horror books. For me, this book didn't invert tropes I was familiar with. So when I read a book with tropes, I thought it was garbage because I'd already read something that didn't waste its time setting up the The Rules for the Scream franchise. Also, unlike most horror, the villain doesn't have a set appearance or a set way to kill. Pennywise is happy to slice your fingers off through a picture, turn into a werewolf and chase you through a house, possess children or family members to beat you to death, fight you on the fucken astral plane like it was the goddamned Shadow King, pull your arm off, turn into a massive ugly statue and smush you, or whatever would get the job done. And, unlike Freddy Krueger, it doesn't wait for you to fall asleep, it is happy to kill you in broad daylight in front of a huge crowd of people.

Pennywise is terrifying because Pennywise doesn't give a fuck who sees it murder people because most people can't see it, or else forget about it as soon as it was out of sight. It's obviously part Weeping Angel. And also part Racnoss.

Of course, being a Stephen King book, It is not satisfied with being a Horror Genre book, non-horror related trauma plays as much of a role as the monster.

Much of the second and third section of It deals with the terrible things that happen to kids before they can properly cope, and then how, as grownups, we still can't cope with the things that happened to us when we're young. But instead of having Pennywise serve as a metaphor for the trauma, he is an additional trauma to the variety of things the kids never truly overcome: parental abuse, racism, anti-semitism, monstrously overprotective parents, speech impediments, body issues, and not knowing when to shut the fuck up.

Stray observations:

--it took me several weeks to decide whether or not to post this because it just didn't seem as necessary to me as previous posts

--it took me forever to get through this book,not because of its length or quality but because I was working on other projects

--I was worried, since I hadn't read It for twenty-eightish years that I wouldn't connect with it as much, but I still do really like this book

--if you've read this far, you've grown 4,372 pages older

The little boy in the drain. The clown. The tearing of the arm from the body. The paper boat. The cover of the book with the arm stretching out of the sewer. Spiders. "This is battery acid, you slime." The deadlights. I remember these. Sure. Thirty years later. twenty after the TV movie. The slit wrists in the warm bathtub. The balloons. We all float down here. The barrens. The dam. I remember.

I remember picking up the book in an airport. On the way to Florida for, maybe the first time. Colored pencils and a surreal coloring book. Not the first time. Second, maybe. I remember my mother asking if I was sure It was the book I wanted. Maybe thinking Lord Of The Rings or Chronicles Of Narnia or something that wouldn't make the woman at the register say "You know this isn't a kid's book, right?" Something that wouldn't have my fifth grade teacher call her and ask if she knew I was reading this book. It had sex things!
I don't remember why I wanted it. Just the year before I'd asked to see Gremlins because I thought Gizmo was cute. But I'd spent the whole second half of the film hiding behind the movie theater seat. What do you hide behind when you're reading a book?

I remember the book being divided up into a part where they were kids, and a part where they were adults. Only that isn't precisely true. Or even mostly true.

I remember the horror and the fights in the sewer and the blood in the sink that none of the adults could see. But I don't remember the abusive father. I don't remember the overprotective mother. I don't remember the indifferent parents. I don't remember the father who didn't walk to talk to his son about the town's horrible racist past. I remember a series of phone calls but not who made them. I don't remember that once the child murder happens, the book spends a great deal of time dissecting a hate crime.

How do I not remember the beginning of the book focuses on a man who is beaten due to his sexuality (though ultimately killed by a demon thing that doesn't mind killing people of any sexual orientation)? How do I not remember that the book isn't just about a demon thing that will eventually tie into The Dark Tower, but is also about how a place Hates. How a city is homophobic. How a city is racist. How a city is misogynist. And how a city ignores all those parts of itself?

Because memory is selective. You forget the things you don't want to remember. Which is what this book is about.

It's been almost thirty years since I read this book. Which is about how long it takes between Pennywise's appearance. I am the age of the protagonists as adults now. As, the first time I read this book, I was around the age of the protagonists when they were children.

I have forgotten what made this story good because I only remembered it as the first horror book I ever read. I wasn't too young to understand why I liked it then, but I was too young to hold on to the memory of why I liked it. Isn't that what aging is? Forgetting the nuances, but remembering the trauma?

Michelle saw me reading It during a study break. She was reading whatever book we were supposed to be reading for English, which I had already finished. She came over to ask me where I got the book. I don't remember if we'd ever voluntarily talked before. I remember I had a crush on her. I remember being thrilled she had a reason to talk to me. She wanted to read the book, too. I let her borrow it the next day while I read something from another class.

At the end of the class, Miss Markarian asked to talk to me. Michelle told her I was reading a book I shouldn't be. That it had sexy parts that my parents would not approve of. She was going to have to call my parents. I might be in trouble. I thought Miss Markarian liked me? I thought Michelle liked me. What was this bullshit?

I know the phone call happened because I remember my father telling my mother one of my teachers was on the phone. But that's all. I don't think my parents ever talked to me about it. I know I didn't get in trouble, but I also don't think they bothered to tell me that my teacher called. Given some further interactions between my mother and some of my teachers, she might have even told Miss Markarian to Fuck Off. Probably told her to be happy I was reading.

I don't remember my parents being progressive but they must have been.

Fine fine fine. Memory. But what does this have to do with The Dark Tower?

The turtle. The voice of the turtle. The turtle is mentioned repeatedly in the first section of the book. And if you haven't read any of The Dark Tower books (which I hadn't in 1988), then you probably keep wondering what the fuck the turtle is. It doesn't seem to be the monster of the book. You don't see it. None of the characters talk about it. It's just part of the narration that occasionally there is something about a turtle. Including See the turtle of enormous girth/on its back it holds the earth. Which is familiar, if you've read the first half of The Waste Lands. Roland says it. The Turtle is one of the twelve guardians of The Dark Tower. If that was the only connection, I promise, I wouldn't have put it on this list. And I know this is a long ass book. But I promise, more will come up that connects It to The Dark Tower.

-- this first section of It is only 165 pages but that brings us up to 4,055 pages since the beginning of the chronology