A lot of attention has been lavished on Stephen King’s It in my recent posts celebrating the book’s 40th anniversary, but I’d be remiss not to address that scene. You know the one–its notoriety hasn’t faded with the passing decades. A scene so controversial, one wonders how Constant Readers ever got to eyeball it (any other author than the publishing powerhouse King likely would have had it censored out of manuscript existence by their editor). Yes, I’m talking about the sex scene between the 11-to-12-year-old members of the Losers Club.

When the Losers get lost in the sewer tunnels under Derry after battling It in August 1958, Beverly seizes upon a desperate measure and has each of her male friends sexually penetrate her in turn. The group is panicking in the darkness and on the verge of splintering, so Beverly sees the need to reinforce the fellowship. “I know how to bring us back together,” she announces. “And if we’re not together we’ll never get out.” King works to bring thematic resonance to the scene; mid-tryst, Beverly thinks of her fellow fifth-grade girls, about how “they only marvel at how gooshy sex must be, and now she realizes that for many of them sex must be some unrealized undefined monster; they refer to the act as It. Would you do It, do your sister and her boyfriend do It, do your mom and dad still do It.” Nevertheless, the scene is problematic on several levels. For starters, it carries on for page after page, lingering on the sex acts in uncomfortable detail (such as when Beverly reacts to the different sizes of the boys’ genitalia). King might try to wax poetic, writing how Beverly and Ben “break into the lifelight together” in the throes of orgasm, but the strain toward sophistication cannot erase the sense of prurience that marks the scene.

The ostensible significance of the Losers “doing It” itself ends up compromised. Surely this is a momentous event, one that will forever alter the characters’ relationships with one another, but Beverly simply and unrealistically determines that afterward “it must never be spoken of, not to anyone else, not even to each other.” Sexual initiation conceivably ought to propel the Losers across the threshold from childhood to young adulthood, yet Beverly concludes the scene/chapter by resolving “now we can go back to just being kids again.” The storytelling falters, but the most serious misstep is on moral grounds. In an exercise of poor taste that verges on the pornographic, King crafts a scene that goes on and on about minors getting it on. To reduce the proceedings to blunt summary: a pre-teen lets all her male friends run a train on her, and readers are forced to bear witness.

All that being said, I would argue that this isn’t even the most problematic Loser liaison.

That underground sex scene will never not be cringe, but its infamy perhaps has overshadowed other carnal moments in the novel. While walking back to the Derry Town House after a trying, Pennywise-haunted day in 1985, Beverly invites Bill to sleep with her. Her marriage with Tom Rogan is now effectively over, so she admits that this isn’t cheating or an attempt to get back at her awful husband. But Bill is supposedly still in a loving relationship with Audra, and the question of his marital infidelity here is completely glossed over. King attempts to rationalize the hookup in terms of chronological connection: taking Beverly in his arms, Bill is “overwhelmed by the feeling of rightness–the feeling of the circle between past and present closing with triumphant seamlessness.”  The sex serves a definite plot function, as it causes Beverly to remember what she did with the Losers to escape the sewers back in 1958. At the same time, though, the character of Bill, who is cast as a shining knight throughout the narrative, suffers a loss of luster. The fact is, he has been facilely unfaithful to Audra, a woman who (unbeknownst to him) has just made a transatlantic trek to Derry out of concern for her husband’s well-being. She ends up in the clutches of Pennywise, while Bill foolishly pounds his childhood friend.

My point in calling attention to this second sex scene is not to decry sinful behavior. No, the big issue I have with Bill mussing the hotel sheets with Beverly is that it makes the novel’s epilogue (a section as saccharine as it is anti-climactic) seem false, forced. To reverse Audra’s deadlights-induced catatonia, Bill goes racing through the streets with his wife on his old bike Silver. Audra comes back to life and laughingly cops a feel of Bill’s (ugh) “huge and cheerful erection,” but she’s oblivious to where Big Bill’s been sticking it as of late. Answering Audra’s declaration of love, Bill asserts on the book’s last page, “I love you too…And what else counts?” Oh, the hypocrisy! Bill fails to account for having voiced his love for Beverly while in the sack with her. The schmaltzy, superficially happy ending that King offers unravels when one considers that Audra’s heroic rescuer is also an adulterer seemingly intent on keeping his cheating a secret.

King has written an indisputably epic horror novel, but the epilogue doesn’t do It justice.

My previous post commemorating the 40th anniversary of It‘s publication went heavy on the Eddies, from Eddie Cochran (and Eddie Corcoran) to Eddie and the Cruisers. Today, the name game continues, courtesy of a scene that recounts one of the wildest and grisliest moments in Derry’s dark history.

I am referring to the novel’s Fourth Interlude, which explores the September 1905 massacre at The Sleepy Silver Dollar. Claude Heroux, with “a woodsman’s double-bitted axe in his hand,” turns into a maniac lumberjack as he avenges the gruesome murder of his friend and pro-union activist Davey Hartwell (whose corpse was found sporting a mouthful of severed toes). Heroux’s Pennywise-influenced slaughter (which inaugurates It’s next feeding cycle) of the poker-playing patrons of the beerjoint reads like a restaging of the Grand Guignol in rural Maine. But on another, authorial level, the scene might also be seen to play out family drama. One of the victim’s of Heroux’s bloody rampage is identified as Eddie King. That surname surely rings bells; even more intriguingly, “Edwin” is the middle name of not only Stephen King but also his father Donald.

Donald Edwin King walked out on his wife and two young kids when Stephen was only two years old. The abandonment understandably left emotional scars, and King (in an episode of FInding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) has expressed his lingering bitterness and anger: “I can remember as a kid, thinking to myself, well, if I ever meet my dad, I’m going to sock him in the mouth for leaving my mother. And as I got older, I would think, well, I want to find out why he left and what he did, and then I’ll sock him.” King never did get to confront his wayward, deadbeat dad, but via Claude Heroux (Hero?), the axe-grinding author appears to have exacted literary revenge.

The poker players/murderous mercenaries at The Silver Dollar that fateful night are categorized as “part-time lumbermen, part-time railroad bulls, and full-time trouble.” In particular, Eddie King is depicted as “a bearded man whose spectacles were almost as fat as his gut”–a description that echoes the one Stephen King gives of his father in Danse Macabre: “a bit podgy, bespectacled.”  As Heroux moves to dispatch him, the terrified Eddie King pleads: “Please, Claude, I just got married last month!” This might just be the lie of a desperate man, but if true begs the question: then, why aren’t you home with your family? The ruffian’s marital status is soon rendered a moot point, as the unstoppable Heroux serves up a garish bit of E.C.-Comics-style comeuppance:

The axe came down, its head almost disappearing in King’s ample gut. Blood sprayed all the way up to the Dollar’s beamed roof. Eddie began to crawfish on the floor. Claude pulled the axe out of him the way a good woodsman will pull his axe out of a softwood tree, kind of rocking it back and forth to loosen the clingy grip of the sappy wood. When it was free he slung it up over his head. He brought it down again and Eddie King stopped screaming. Claude Heroux wasn’t done with him; however; he began to chop King up like kindling-wood. [p. 889 in the first edition hardcover]

From its inclusion of favorite media titles to its featuring of a horror-author hero, It constitutes one of Stephen King’s more autobiographical works. In the deadly dismemberment of Eddie King, the author also seems to have scripted a fantasized attack on his own family tree. When recording the subsequent lynching of the marauding Claude Heroux, Mike Hanlon notes: “Pennywise had been there, guiding [the mob] down the path toward another gaudy sacrifice–just one more in Derry’s long history of gaudy sacrifices.” But the gaudy sacrifice of a character christened Eddie King makes for a singular Interlude scene. To borrow the tagline from Jaws: The Revenge: this time it’s personal.

In hearkening back to his protagonists’ (and his own) childhood in It, Stephen King invokes various aspects of late-1950’s pop culture–films, tv shows, comic books, and American rock and roll. That last item forms more than just background noise; it helps sound key themes and figures prominently into the novel’s plot. King’s young characters are tuned into the burgeoning music scene, discussing hit songs on the radio and performances on American Bandstand. They also repeatedly note (as King establishes the gulf between Derry children and adults in the novel) how strongly their parents disapprove of such music, and the antics of such rockers as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Rock and roll also plays into the antics of the ancient antagonist Pennywise, such as when It tauntingly haunts the grown-up Trashmouth by transforming the City Center marquee into an advertisement for “THE RICHIE TOZIER “All DEAD” ROCK SHOW.” Below the names of such ill-fated stars as Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper, the sign ominously hails: “WELCOME HOME RICHIE! YOU’RE DEAD TOO!”

As an epigraph to Part 2: June of 1958, King cites the lyrics of rocker Eddie Cochran: “Sometimes I wonder what I’m a-gonna do, / There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues” (Cochran’s “Come On Everybody” supplies an epigraph at the start of Danse Macabre–yet another parallel between King’s nonfiction study and epic horror tome). “Summertime Blues” is an apt description of the angst experienced by the novel’s adolescents during that dark season in Derry. The biography of Eddie Cochran himself is even relevant here. The rocker had a promising career cut short at age 21 by a fatal car accident, and the similarly christened King character Eddie Corcoran also dies tragically young when the flight from an awful home life puts him on a collision course with It. Elsewhere in the novel, Richie notes being “transported with joy” by songs such as Cochran’s: “There was power in that music, a power which seemed to most rightfully belong to all the skinny kids, fat kids, ugly kids, shy kids—the world’s losers, in short. In it he felt a mad hilarious voltage which had the power to both kill and exalt.” Pennywise taps into and abuses this power in 1985, when every station on the stereo of the car the Losers are riding in dials up Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula” or “Eddie Cochran singing ‘Summertime Blues.'” Pennywise further pirates the radio broadcast by cutting in to announce “this morning’s graveyard-shift guest deejay, Georgie Denbrough!”

The real deejay in It, though, is Richie, and I would argue that this signals (alongside the explicit refences to Eddie Cochran) a more subtle pop cultural invocation–of the 1983 film Eddie and the Cruisers. Richie “Records” Tozier’s career choice matches the profession (after his stint managing the Cruisers) of “Doc” Robbins in the film. Hyped as “The Man of a Thousand Voices,” Richie also echoes Doc’s talent for impersonation (each character can be seen/heard to make strategic use of voice work). The ostensible allusion seems less unlikely when one considers that P.F. Kluge’s 1980 source novel–which, like It, flashes back and forth between its present day and the late 1950’s–is much darker and bloodier than the 1983 film adaptation (some climactic murders occur, and Doc suffers a more harrowing fate than his cinematic counterpart). With King being such a voracious reader and ardent fan of rock and roll, it would not be shocking if he was familiar with both versions of Eddie and the Cruisers. In this light, a seemingly throwaway line resonates with much more significance: Richie “put the car in gear and went, feeling again how easy it had been to slip through an unsuspected fissure in what he had considered a solid life–how it easy it was to get over onto the dark side, to sail out of the blue and into the black.” King makes a double allusion here, to the lyrics of Neil Young’s “My My Hey Hey” and the song title “On the Dark Side,” which figures prominently into Eddie and the Cruisers both in print and on screen (and became a hit single for the soundtrack-providing John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band). The dark side calls for King’s heroes, courtesy of Pennywise’s repeated attempts to snuff out their lives–or worse, toss them out into the limbo beyond the cold blackness of space during the Ritual of Chüd. For sure, those were some “Wild Summer Nights” for the Losers during June/July/August of 1958, a veritable “Season in Hell” as It endeavored to blight their “Tender Years” and tenderize them with fear.

Eddie Cochran 1958 publicity photo (from Michael Ochs Archives)

At 1,138 pages, Stephen King’s It goes to epic length to deliver horror. The novel’s eponymous monster adopts various guises in its effort to terrorize/tenderize Its prey: first comes the frights, then the bites. Given its commitment to scare tactics, the narrative unsurprisingly features innumerable instances of characters experiencing stark fear. One wonders how King is able to avoid repeating himself. After all, there are only so many physiological responses to fear, and most of these (e.g., a pounding heart, icy spine, stiffened or whitened hair) have long since grown familiar to readers. The author strings together many of these together early on, as Georgie ventures into the dark cellar, with “his heart a warm, beating hammer in his throat, the hair on the nape of his neck standing at attention, his eyes hot, his hands cold” (7; all page numbers are from the first edition hardcover). It almost seems as if King is working to get the cliches out of the way, because time and again after this he composes more imaginative passages that capture his characters’ afraid state. Here are a baker’s dozen examples of such descriptive treats:

1 & 2. Chapter 3 Six Phone Calls (1985)

When Stanley Uris ominously locks himself in the bathroom, his frightened wife Patty has panic come “into the front of her mind like a prowler walking quietly up a flight of stairs” (56). King provides a vivid image of mounting terror, invoking a home-invasion scenario that easily creates unease. Patty’s increasingly overwrought state is emphasized a few paragraphs later: “Panic was rising in her mind again–it was like bitter black coffee threatening to overflow the rim of a cup” (57). One can almost taste the poor woman’s trepidation, and the use of the word “threatening” underscores the sense of impending unpleasantness.

3. Chapter 3 Six Phone Calls (1985)

When Mike Hanlon reaches out with a request to return to Derry, Richie Tozier’s repressed childhood terror surges to consciousness: “You’re not Rich ‘Records’ Tozier down there [in the cracked-open vaults of memory]; down there you’re just Richie ‘Four-Eyes’ Tozier and you’re with your buddies and you’re so scared it feels like your balls are turning to Welch’s grape jelly” (64). King strikes a calculated low blow here; the male reader, especially, cringes at the transmutation conjured by the simile. On a more sophisticated level, the resort to the second-person signals a desperate attempt at disassociation.

4. Chapter 3 Six Phone Calls (1985)

Likewise summoned by Mike to return to his hometown, Eddie Kaspbrak envisions a late-night train ride north toward Derry, “his suitcase overhead and his tote-bag full of nostrums between his feet, the fear sitting on his chest like a rancid Vicks-pack” (92). The notion of something frightful sitting heavily on the chest suggests the night terrors horrifically depicted by painter Henry Fuseli in “The Nightmare.” And the image of medicine-gone-bad is quite fitting for Eddie, who was reared by a rotten, hypochondriacal mother.

5. Chapter 3 Six Phone Calls (1985)

After Bill Denbrough gets his respective call to attend the Losers’ Club reunion, his fear manifests verbally via the sudden return of his stutter, and epidermally as he realizes the flesh of his arms “had humped into gooseflesh. Not little bumps but huge white knobs like insect eggs” (133). The trite image of horripilated skin is rendered freshly chilling by the association with parasitic infection. “Insect eggs” also prefigures the climactic encounter with It’s spidery progeny.

6. Chapter 11 Walking Tours

Beverly Marsh wonders if her encounter with Mrs. Kersh/Pennywise was just a dream, but then spots the dirt on her clothes and the chocolate on her fingers. The verification of a nightmarish experience causes Beverly to flee her old apartment: she walks “away fast, her face hot, her back cold as ice, her eyeballs seeming to pulse in and out with the rapid thud of her heart” (574). Once again, King takes the familiar signs of fear and twists them in a different direction. Horror has been known to make eyeballs pop, but they aren’t supposed to pulse! The strange sensation highlights the uncanniness to which Beverly has just been subjected.

7. Chapter 14 The Album

After young Mike speaks of a run-in with a giant bird, the shocked “Stan looked as if someone had clipped him with a brick. His face had gone so pale it was the color of muted November sunlight” (713). The prosaic is made poetic: what a beautiful, evocative description of turning ashen.

8. Chapter 14 The Album

Stan is similarly overwhelmed when a taunting, threatening Pennywise invokes the dead boys from the Derry Standpipe: Stan’s “eyes bulged above bruised-looking crescents of skin–shockflesh, Bill thought randomly, and it was a word he would use in a novel twelve years later, with no idea where it had come from, simply taking it, as writers take the right word at the right time, as a simple gift from that outer space (otherspace) where the good words come from sometimes” (731). The horror-writer-in-the-making Bill conjures a poignant neologism–shockflesh sounds much more daunting a condition than mere gooseflesh. And this passage overall forms a nice riff on the film title It Came from Outer Space.

9. Chapter 17 Another One of the Missing: The Death of Patrick Hockstetter

Beverly is frightened when she stumbles upon the scene of naked teens making flamethrowers of their flatulence. Here nemeses Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, and Belch Huggins are all there, but worst of all is the quintessentially creepy Patrick Hockstetter: “‘Ten feet,’ Patrick giggled (just the sound of it made Bev feel cold and revolted, as if she had seen a worm squirm its way out of her salad)” (820). The precise, grotesque image facilely elicits a visceral response, allowing the reader to share in Beverly’s revulsion.

10. Chapter 17 Another One of the Missing: The Death of Patrick Hockstetter

Following the apparent crib-death of baby Avery, Mr. Hockstetter “looked down and saw a pair of tracks on the hardwood floor. They had been made by the snow melting off Patrick’s yellow rubber boots. He looked at them, and a dreadful thought rose briefly in his mind like bad gas from a deep mineshaft” (828). The simile perfectly expresses the surfacing of an unhealthy thought from the depths of the psyche–the terrible consideration that the only five-year-old Patrick is a sociopathic fratricide.

11. Chapter 19 In the Watches of the Night

Catching glimpse of a pumping-station in the Barrens and knowing that it leads to It, Henry Bowers is thoroughly unnerved: “His skin seemed to be tightening, his eyes widening so that they were able to see more and more; it seemed he could feel the tiny hairs in his ears stirring and moving like kelp in an underwater tidal flow” (945-6). That last image is at once wonderfully original and nearly vertigo-inducing.

12. Chapter 19 In the Watches of the Night

For Eddie, fear and pain go hand in hand, thanks to the dread of being hurt instilled in him by his overprotective mother. An appropriate juxtaposition occurs, then, after an adult Eddie has his arm broken by Henry (whom Eddie then manages to kill), and Eddie dials the hotel’s front desk (so he can be connected to Bill’s room): “The hand holding the phone was trembling in convulsive little bursts. There was a nest of waspy, rotten-ugly singing in his other arm” (969). Synesthesia to buzz about, as these aural images strongly convey a tactile sensation.

13. Chapter 20 The Circle Closes

About to descend below the city for a final battle with It, Bill is poleaxed by the discovery of a purse belonging to his wife Audra (until then, presumed to be residing safely in England): “All the spit was gone out of his mouth, leaving his tongue and inner cheeks as smooth and dry as chrome” (1004). Instead of settling for a standard reaction (i.e. growing incontinently cotton-mouthed), King extends the description so that the reader can sense Bill’s fear in all its metallic unpalatableness.

There are scores of other descriptions of being scared in the novel that might have been cited here, but these thirteen examples provide testimony of what a deftly constructed fear factory It is.