Greetings from the Macabre Republic…

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…Home of the red, black, and blue; where there’s a darkness not just on the edge of town, but all along Main Street; and where the heartland lies deep within October Country.

This site is an outgrowth of the blog Macabre Republic (constituted in 2010), which was devoted to the celebration and appreciation of the Gothic in American literature and culture. My goal here is not merely to construct a platform for my own written work, but to build a community of fellow aficionados–all those who feel right at home on the nightside.

Think you might fit in nicely? Here’s a quick citizenship test:

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Eddies Embedded

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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)

 

Fear Its Selves

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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.

 

Mob Scene: The Bradley Gang Massacre in It

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Built over, and suffused with the evil aura of, a chthonian nightmare, the town of Derry, Maine, in Stephen King’s It is a decidedly Bad Place. “Bad things, hurtful things, do right well in the soil of this town,” Mike Hanlon’s father acknowledges. Composing his Unauthorized History of Derry, Mike himself notes that the “murder rate in Derry is six times the murder rate of any other town of comparable size in New England.” After calling his old friends back to Derry in 1985 for a much-needed Losers’ Club reunion, Mike informs them that the town has “an unusually high rate of every violent crime we know of, not excluding rape, incest, breaking and entering, auto theft, child abuse, spouse abuse, assault.” Given all these ugly blots on the town record, it should be no surprise that Derry’s ignominious history is also marked by violent outbreaks of the torch-and-pitchfork variety: the bloodthirsty communal culling of a designated Other that is the angry mob scene.

Such incidents abound in King’s novel, both in brief mention and extended dramatization. Following the murder of Adrian Mellon, interrogating officer Charles Morrison warns Steve Dubay that “tomorrow every bleeding heart in this town is going to be screaming for you guys’s blood.” Detective Lottman sounds an even more intoning note later in the novel, when he tells (the Pennywise-framed) Henry Bowers: “There’s people outside and they ain’t happy, Henry….There ain’t been a lynching in Derry for a long time, but that don’t mean there couldn’t be one.” Indeed, acts of vicious vigilantism have occurred throughout Derry’s history, as researched by Mike Hanlon: “In 1877 there were four lynchings inside the incorporated town limits. One of those that climbed a rope was the lay preacher of the Methodist Church, who apparently drowned all four of his children in the bathtub as if they were kittens and then shot his wife in the head.” Then in 1905, a drunken mob broke into the jail holding Claude Heroux (who had axed down a slew of patrons at The Silver Dollar): “They carried him on their shoulders like a football hero; down to Canal Street they carried him, and there they lynched him from an old elm that overhung the Canal.” In an extended scene (one that is chillingly brought to the screen in season one of It: Welcome to Derry), the Legion of White Decency–a Northern equivalent of the Klan–in 1930 carries an unloving torch for the African-American denizens of The Black Spot, razing the nightclub and killing scores of people trapped inside. This ritualistic massacre brackets with another “monstrous sacrifice,” one that inaugurates It’s feeding cycle for that time period: the 1929 assassination of the Bradley Gang.

Bonnie-and-Clyde-type bank robbers and murderers, the eight members of the Bradley Gang are national outlaws who happen to cross into Derry amidst their fugitive flight. There, they attempt to restock on ammunition, but end up double-crossed by sporting goods storeowner Lal Machen (who recognizes the public enemies and alerts the townspeople of Derry). On a perfectly sunny October afternoon, a group of heavily armed men (of all walks of life, not just law enforcement) take to the streets to lay ambush for the reappearing Bradley Gang. Derry’s illicit militia is of the shoot-first-and-ask-to-surrender-later mindset, so the bullets soon start flying. To call it a shootout wouldn’t really be accurate; with “fifty, sixty men firing all at once,” the criminals cannot withstand such sudden onslaught. The Bradley Gang is gorily dispatched, including the moll Marie Hauser, who emerges from the vehicle with her empty hands held high, but nevertheless ends up gunned down in the street. Derry’s gutters run red from this orgy of bloodletting, in which many shame-laden townspeople will later deny having actively participated.

Already harrowing in its naturalistic particulars, this mob scene is given another turn of the screw when the greasepainted Pennywise is variously observed getting in on the gun-crazy act. Almost looking as if he is floating, Pennywise hangs far out a building window and fires away with his own weapon. According to one witness, he curiously cast no shadow that bright afternoon, but his presence there that day at the town’s “little carnival” of violence illustrates the darkness that palls all of Derry. By placing the mysterious clown (who uncannily surfaces in most of these notorious incidents over the centuries) right alongside the law-ignoring citizens of Derry’s firing squad, King deliberately blurs the line between outside and inside evil. In their savaging of the Bradley Gang, the Derryfolk (even if manipulated by It) prove just as predatorial as the no-longer-hibernating Pennywise. “No worse than shooting mad dogs,” Norbert Keene dismisses the massacre as he recounts the incident to Mike decades later, but Keene’s very callousness suggests that the perpetrating locals might be the real curs here. Ironically, Derry’s inhabitants direct their ire away from the ultimate, cosmically horrific Other against whom they should all be taking up arms. It falls to the young (and later middle-aged) members of the Losers’ Club to form a more positive, heroic fellowship and rid the town of its founding bother once and for all.

 

[NOTE: the preceding is an expansion upon a “Mob Scene” post from 2019.]

 

From Danse Macabre to the Dancing Clown

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Of the scores of books Stephen King has written, Danse Macabre might be the most overlooked and underappreciated. This nonfiction foray provides plenty of revealing autobiographical details (long before 2000’s On Writing), tracing a young fan’s initiation into the genre that he would rule over as an adult. In its consideration of “the entire horror phenomenon,” Danse Macabre forms a masterclass of pop cultural criticism–a broad survey that simultaneously takes deep dives into specific examples from film & TV, fiction and radio. King distinguishes himself as a commentator, but remains ever the entertainer; as much wiseacre as wise analyst, he peppers his discussion with sarcastic wit (e.g., Frankenstein‘s monster promises to retire with his prospective mate to “some desolate wasteland (South America is suggested, as New Jersey had not yet been invented”); “Bernie Casey [in Gargoyles] plays the head gargoyle as a kind of five-thousand year-old Ayatollah Khomeini”). Perhaps most significantly of all, Danse Macabre (published in late April 1981, mere months before King began drafting his monster-mashing magnus opus) in retrospect can be seen to map a clear literary pathway to the novel It.

“It’s my Final Statement on the clockwork of the horror tale,” King writes in his forenote to Danse Macabre. King would couch It similarly, as a summation of his work as a horror novelist: “For now, as far as the Stephen King Book-of-the-Month Club goes, this is the clearance-sale time. Everything must go” with this narrative that “bring[s] on all the monsters one last time,” King asserts in a 1986 interview in Time.  Working toward comparable ends, both books also contain strikingly parallel beginnings. At the start of Chapter I of Danse Macabre, King admits: “For me, the terror–the real terror, as opposed to whatever demons and bogeys which might have been living in my own mind–began on afternoon in October of 1957. I had just turned ten.” His words reverberate in the opening lines of It (a scene also set in October of 1957): “The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years–if it ever did end–began so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”

The childhoods of King himself (as recounted in Danse Macabre) and of his cast of young protagonists in It share many features–consuming Fifties sci-fi and horror films at the Saturday matinee; experiencing incidents of floods produced by unusually heavy weather; vacant-lot baseball games and other summertime shenanigans (in On Writing, King recalls playing as a child in “a huge tangled wilderness area with a junkyard on the far side and a train track running through the middle. This is one of the places I keep returning to in my imagination; it turns up in my books and stories again and again, under a variety of names. The kids in It called it the Barrens; we called it the jungle.”). King’s own childhood fears–such as of a certain scaly green denizen of the Black Lagoon–discussed in Danse Macabre are explicitly dramatized in It. “Dying is when the monster gets you,” King intones in his nonfiction precursor; his novel character Eddie Corcoran learns the same fatal lesson when he encounters the titular cosmic horror in the guise of Universal’s Gill-Man. In that scene’s grim climax, “Eddie’s hands groped at the Creature’s back, feeling for a zipper,” to no avail. In Danse Macabre, King notes: “We may only feel really comfortable with [cinematic] horror as long as we can see the zipper running up the monster’s back, when we understand we are not playing for keepsies.” In the world of It, the zipper-less Creature is a frightfully real nightmare that decapitates the struggling Eddie with a single swipe and then begins “promptly to change into something else” in anticipation of a subsequent predation. Danse Macabre details why children are “the perfect audience for horror”–their fertile imaginations, in one sense, make them ripe for the picking. King’s consideration of childhood “imagination as a mental creature of a hundred different possible forms (imagine, if you will, Larry Talbot not just condemned to turn into a wolf man at the full moon but into an entire bestiary on successive nights; everything from a  wereshark to a wereflea)” perfectly captures the antics of the fearmongering, nefariously shapeshifting Pennywise in It.

As evidenced by Danse Macabre, King has read/viewed copious amounts of horror in his lifetime. Unsurprisingly, a slew of these pop cultural items work their way into King’s novel concerning “the apotheosis of all monsters.” I will cite major examples of this in upcoming posts covering the literary and cinematic influences on It. For now, I will point to some other instances (titles that sometimes only receive passing mention) that illustrate the manifold connections between King’s 1981 study and 1986 novel. Discussing the book Donovan’s Brain, King quotes the “haunting mnemonic phrase–He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts” that proves integral to Curt Sidomak’s plot (and which later echoes throughout It). A footnote in Danse addresses Kate Wilhelm and Ted Thomas’s The Clone, a novel in which an “amorphous creature…forms in the sewer of a major city….In one memorable scene, a little kid is yanked arm-first into the drain of a kitchen sink.” Memorable indeed: King seemingly calls back to it in both Pennywise’s opening attack in the novel and Beverly’s problems with uncanny home plumbing. Georgie’s cycle-triggering death at the start of It can be traced back to King’s commentary in Danse on The Doll Who Ate His Mother: “[Ramsey] Campbell’s novel begins with Clare Frayn’s brother Rob losing an arm and his life,” and climaxes “in the rotting cellar of a slum building marked for demolition” (prefiguring the decrepit edifice at 29 Neibolt Street). Likewise, the runic symbol etched into the door of Its lair links back to details of Harlan Ellison’s “Croatoan,” a sewer-set story singled out by King in Danse. Even King’s throwaway line about a 1979 PBS adaptation of an Ambrose Bierce story seems significant, as “One of the Missing” also forms a chapter title in It.

Countless specific examples can be teased out, but the interconnections between Danse Macabre and It extend to a more general, philosophical level. In the former, King claims that effective horror works “to knock the adult props out from under us & tumble us back down the slide of childhood.” This description also applies to the machinations of It/It: the terrors that the now-adult protagonists face when they return to Derry in 1985 for a second showdown with their nemesis. But as formulated by King, horror does not simply revert people to a stage of helplessness. There is salvation to be found in rejuvenation; analyzing the work of Ray Bradbury in Danse, King highlights the author’s conclusion “that only children are equipped to deal with childhood’s myths and terrors and exhalations.” Tellingly, the Losers prove victorious over It only after they are able to recall the dark, traumatic events of their childhood and to reestablish their fellowship with one another. They look back and ultimately see their way clear of the blackness that has shrouded the town of Derry and their lives. “The imagination is an eye,” King writes in Danse, “a marvelous third eye that floats free. As children, that eye sees with 20/20 clarity. As we grow older, its vision begins to dim.” To narrow into tunnel vision. “The job of the fantasy writer, or the horror writer, is to bust the walls of that tunnel vision wide for a little while; to provide a single powerful spectacle for the third eye. The job of the fantasy-horror writer is to make you, for a little while, a child again.” This sounds ennobling rather than immobilizing. And thus King concludes by extolling the virtue of the horror genre: the danse macabre “is, at bottom, a dance of dreams. It’s a way of awakening the child inside, who never dies but only sleeps ever more deeply.” He ends his study with “that word which children respect instinctively, that word whose truth we only rediscover as adults in our stories…and in our dreams: Magic.” That very word resounds throughout the extended, dual climax of It, as the protagonists realize they have been prompted by a higher power (whether the Turtle or Another mysterious entity) and have had their individual abilities heightened by the force of their interpersonal bonds. They grasp the power of belief, and embrace the magic that turns an inhaler into a sprayer of battery acid, or a speeding Schwinn into a wonder that counteracts the zombifying effects of Its deadlights.

I encourage you, before your next reading of It, to first take a waltz with King through Danse Macabre. This preliminary step will make the experience of the novel infinitely more rewarding. Its settings, scenes, themes, and references that much more recognizable. Its horror-tale poetics understandable, and its captivating narrative of childhood fears and empowering friendships an enhanced source of enchantment.

Back at It

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I can’t believe so much time has passed since my last post. The reasons for this internet equivalent of radio silence range from blogging fatigue to absorption in other writing projects. This year, I also opened my own personal training studio in New Jersey, All Hallowed Fitness. Running my own business has kept me busy, busy, busy these past several months, but throughout this period the desire to return to Dispatches from the Macabre Republic persisted.

Now it’s time to start posting again, and not just because the Halloween season is fast approaching. There’s unfinished business to attend to, such as the continuation of my survey of The Ketchum Canon. My countdown of Flannery O’Connor’s Top Ten American Gothic Stories has been stalled for far too long; I plan to complete it come November (after I am done covering October’s high holiday). But the strongest prompt to resume blogging is the arrival of a very special date: today marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Stephen King’s novel It.

Being roughly the same age as the children of the Losers Club, I was absolutely captivated while first reading King’s horror epic in the fall of 1986. It‘s length no doubt can be daunting, but its literary magic has drawn me back to Derry countless times over the past four decades. I just completed my latest reread, in preparation of commemorating the book’s anniversary here. A series of posts over the next few weeks will focus on It, delving into various aspects of the narrative itself; the literary influences on King’s monstrous endeavor and the novel’s impressive legacy will also be explored. The proceedings will culminate with The Ultimate It Trivia Quiz, a forty-question challenge that’s sure to test the mettle of the book’s savviest connoisseurs. So, get ready, Constant Readers: if you treasure King’s Pennywise-haunted masterpiece as much as I do, you should find plenty of material to float your boat in the coming weeks.

 

Matter of Death and Life

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The Life of Chuck is one of Stephen King’s most unusual works, so perhaps it’s appropriate that I have a strangely mixed reaction to its 2025 film adaptation (currently streaming on Hulu). The narrative–both literary and cinematic–features an experimental structure (three acts presented in reverse chronological order, covering separate periods of the title character’s life) and a curious juxtaposition of tones/genre elements. We move from the grim mystery of the opening (an inexplicable apocalypse plagues civilization) through the light-hearted middle (centered on a joyful dance sequence) to the quiet horror (the dark secrets of Chuck’s childhood home, with its haunted cupola) of the concluding section.

To no surprise, Mike Flanagan displays his directorial expertise in this quite faithful adaptation. Each of King’s three acts receive scrupulous attention, and brim with striking details. The blueish televisual images of Chuck Krantz projected onto the windows of a blacked-out neighborhood was an effectively eerie touch, and the choreography of the dance scene in the outdoor mall is exquisite. Flanagan arguably surpasses King’s novella in terms of interconnecting the different sections. The viewer can’t help but appreciate the various visual echoes and dialogue callbacks that retroactively explain and enrich the opening section.

Aside from flashing some very impressive dance moves, Tom Hiddleston (playing Chuck as a 39-year-old accountant) doesn’t distinguish himself here. But that’s not a knock on his acting, but a reflection of the limitations of the adult role. Granted more screen time, Benjamin Pajak is more compelling as an eleven-year-old Chuck; his interactions with his grandparents and his grammar-school crush are equally endearing. Familiar Flanagan players such as Kate Siegel and Samantha Sloyan pop up here, shining in their brief appearances, and Mark Hamill gives a terrific performance as Chuck’s loving but grief-stricken grandfather Albie.

The film is not devoid of missteps, such as its employment of an omniscient narrator (Nick Offerman). I found such random splashes of voiceover commentary intrusive, confusing (as I wondered what, if any, connection the narrator had with the characters) and facile (a lazy device for conveying exposition). The haunted-cupola plotline also disappoints, but again, this seems to be mainly a flaw inscribed in the source material. King doesn’t elaborate on this paranormal element as much as he likely would in a full-fledged novel. There is little explanation as to how/why the cupola does what it does to visitors; it is a rough maguffin imported to facilitate story development.

My biggest gripe, though, is that film failed to be as emotionally moving as I had expected. Chuck’s struggle is sad but not tearjerking, and the carpe diem theme sounded by the conclusion falls flat. The film lacks the coming-of-age bittersweetness of Stand By Me, or the exhilarating release of Andy Dufresne in the rain after escaping Shawshank prison. Make no mistake: The Life of Chuck is a well-crafted and highly watchable film, but one that is not destined to achieve classic status. Ultimately, it proves less than the sum of its disparate parts. Flanagan did his best with the offbeat source material, but the director’s considerable King-adapting skills can be better focused on other, more canonical works of the author.

 

Horror Highlights

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2025 was an amazing year…in the world of horror fiction, film, and television. Here are ten year-end reviews of the best the genre had to offer:

 

The Lineup: “Mother Horror’s Top 50 Horror Books in 2025”

Fangoria: “The 25 Best Horror Movies of 2025”

The Hollywood Reporter: “The Best Horror Movies of 2025”

RogerEbert.com: “It’s Stephen King’s World: How the Writer Became the King of Hollywood Again in 2025”

Crime Reads: “The Best Books of 2025: Gothic Fiction”

Screen Rant: “The 10 Best Horror Movies of 2025”

Book Riot: “The Best Horror Books of 2025 for When You Really Want a Good Scare”

Bloody Disgusting: “10 Best Horror Television Series of 2025”

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Countdown–Flannery O’Connor’s Top Ten American Gothic Stories: #8

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At loooong last, this countdown resumes…

[For #9 on the countdown, click here.]

 

“The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (1953)

Typical of O’Connor’s fiction, this brief yet resonant story is peopled with grotesques. Old lady Crater is toothless, her feminine frame likened to “a cedar fence post.” Her daughter Lucynell is chubby, “completely deaf,” and mentally challenged (“afflicted,” in the parlance of the narrative). Then there’s the tramp Tom T. Shiftlet (the echo of “shiftless” in his surname underscores an aimless lifestyle) who shows up one evening at the “desolate spot” of the Crater homestead: “His left coat sleeve was folded up to show there was only half an arm in it [he soon explains that he lost the limb fighting in the “Arm Service”] and his gaunt figure listed slightly to the side as if the breeze were pushing him.” When he lifts his arms up, “his figure formed a crooked cross,” a striking image for this offbeat preacher-type (Shiftlet numbers “gospel singer” amongst his many past professions) given to dire proclamations such as “The world is almost rotten.” O’Connor’s story is marked not just by physical disability and intellectual limitation, but also spiritual sterility.

In true American Gothic fashion, appearances deceive in this piece. “Ravenous for a son-in-law,” the old woman works to pawn off her daughter (whom she claims is only fifteen or sixteen, but in reality “[t]he girl was nearly thirty”). The mother seems less interested in securing someone to love and look after her special-needs daughter than in having a handyman around to fix up the decrepit domicile. But the duplicitous Shiftlet is running his own con game, and matrimony is just a ruse to satisfy his material interests. The hero-villain invokes an appropriately Gothic context when told he’ll have to sleep in the Crater car: “with a grin of delight” masking his visage, he asserts that “the monks of old slept in their coffins!” A poor approximation of Christ (after getting the old car running again, he “had an expression of serious modesty on his face as if he had just raised the dead”), Shiftlet proves a quite Satanic figure. When the old woman throws in a new paint job for the car as part of the marriage agreement, “Shiftlet’s smile stretched like a weary snake waking up by a fire.” After getting the mother to finance a weekend-getaway honeymoon, Shiftlet drives off with Lucynell, stopping en route at a roadside eatery whose name points toward the infernal: “The Hot Spot.” Shiftlet commits a stunning, shameful act of selfishness and irresponsibility by abandoning his sleeping bride there and stealing off with the coveted car.

Driving on alone toward Mobile, Shiftlet experiences feelings of depression and perhaps pangs of guilt. He sights a billboard with a warning message to “Drive safely. The life you save may be your own” (at this point of his sinful life, it’s more than just Shiftlet’s physical well-being that is at risk). Back at the Hot Spot, the guy working the counter had observed that the snoring but innocent Lucynell looked “like an angel of Gawd,” to which Shiftlet curtly replied: “Hitchhiker.” Not long thereafter, Shiftlet picks up a runaway boy and starts carrying on that “My mother was an angel of Gawd.” The kid isn’t interested in listening to any sermonizing, though, and tells Shiftlet to “go to the devil!” before jumping out of the moving vehicle. Meanwhile, a storm gathers blackly overhead, leading Shiftlet to feel “that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him.” “Oh Lord!” Shiftlet shouts out. “Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!” Hardly driving safely (speeding towards a doubtful salvation), the slimy Shiftlet floors the pedal and “race[s] the galloping shower into Mobile” in the story’s final line.

American Gothic takes to the open road in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” and travels to a dark place.

 

Crowning Achievement (Book Review of King Sorrow)

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The dark-academia fiction of Donna Tartt meets the epic fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien in this big, bold novel by Joe Hill. Blackmailed by a sleazy pair of drug dealers into stealing rare books from the university library, college student Arthur Oakes turns to his friends for assistance. The group half-jokingly uses an occult tome to summon a demonic dragon (from a shadow world called the Long Dark) to do their bidding. They should have read the fine print on this Faustian bargain, though, because they are then forced to select someone as an annual sacrifice to King Sorrow’s fiery maw or suffer such deadly consequence themselves.

As interesting a premise as this is, it could have been developed quite blandly: the do-gooding sextet of protagonists (when interviewed, Hill has likened his book to a bonus season of Friends reimagined as horror) making the world a better place by singling out the worst actors for a barbecuing comeuppance. To his credit, Hill never settles for the simplistic; he delves deep into the moral conundrum resulting from wielding a fantastic assassin. The toll of associating with King Sorrow is steep, affecting the group members both personally and in their relationships with one another.

For all its otherworldly elements, the novel succeeds because it follows the proven model of Hill’s father, Stephen King, by rooting the extraordinary in the everyday and building believable, relatable characters. The narrative features figures adorable and deplorable. Sometimes the same character will elicit such divergent responses at different points in the novel, as the complexity of Hill’s craftsmanship traces various redemption arcs and falls from grace. Arthur, Gwen, Donna, Van, Allie, and Colin: these six friends are destined to become as storied as the members of the Losers’ Club. In further testament to Hill’s peopling skill, even the minor characters here are unforgettable (including perhaps the most off-color troll in the history of fantasy).

Any discussion of characterization must not neglect the titular antagonist. King Sorrow conveys all the malefic grandeur of Tolkien’s Smaug. Undeniably sly, he also possesses a fiendish wit (never has a dragon been given better dialogue to chew on). Similar to Pennywise the Dancing Clown, King Sorrow likes to play with his food: he torments his designated victims before savagely dispatching them. This terrible denizen of the Long Dark lurks in the background for much of the book, but his appearances (sometimes unexpected) are always frightful, and sublimely scene-stealing.

Epic in its ambitions, Hill’s novel spans–and melds–genres such as horror, romance, fantasy, and techno-thriller. Its expansive plot contains some stunning, emotionally grueling twists. Weighing in at nearly 900 pages, the book is the definition of hefty, but never bogs down amidst its many shifts in genre and jumps in time (like King’s It, King Sorrow tracks the protagonists’ conflict with an eldritch entity over a period of decades). The world evoked by Hill’s words is so well-imagined, so immersive, that explorers will tread delightedly–and be reluctant to leave it behind. Akin to the ouroboros referenced within, engrossed readers might be enticed to circle right back to the book’s opening upon completion.

Joe Hill has already scaled amazing heights in his writing career, but King Sorrow forms his once and future magnus opus. To loft the praise even higher: this book ranks right alongside the best publications of any member of the illustrious King family.

And that (said the dragon to the scorched earthling) is not just a bunch of hot air.

 

A.G. Exemplary? “Midwestern Gothic” By Scott Thomas (Part 4 of 4)

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Part 4 of a series of posts exploring the American Gothic qualities of the novellas in Scott Thomas’s Midwestern Gothic.

For Part 3, click here.

 

One Half of a Child’s Face

Rear Window meets Oculus in this story of voyeurism and the evil workings of a strange object. Sienna Roh is in a bad place: drinking too much, neglecting her work, obsessing over the neighboring apartment building (where her ex-husband lives, and where their daughter is presently spending the weekend). Using her daughter’s telescope, Sienna spies not just on her ex’s residence, but all the apartments facing her own home. Each peeped window is like a television screen, and Sienna christens the various scenes with sarcastic sitcom titles–“The Shouties,” “The Godlies,” “Mr. Loneliness”–that capture the volatility, the mania, and quiet desperation transpiring behind people’s closed doors. Matters turn even darker when Sienna glimpses the delivery (by workers curiously sporting “blue medical gloves” and “large black headphones”) of an abstract and perhaps abnormal artwork suggesting the titular image. Hung up in a seemingly empty eighth floor apartment, the painting proceeds to prey (assuming that Sienna isn’t just having a psychotic break) on deep-seated guilt and resentment. It insidiously drives the building’s adults crazy while luring their children towards its gaping maw.

The Gothicism of the piece grows even more overt based on Sienna’s work-from-home job. Tasked with copyediting a nonfiction book called Scars and Stripes: Thoughts on American Horror, she is currently working on the essay by renowned horror author Sam McGarver (the protagonist of Thomas’s fantastic debut novel, Kill Creek). Paragraphs-long extracts from that essay are interpolated throughout the narrative, with McGarver’s genre insights furnishing thematic commentary on Sienna’s encounter with the “primonatural” (i.e. evincing “powers before [vs. supernaturally beyond] our understanding”) painting. One passage from McGarver’s essay serves an almost epigraphic function at the start of the novella:

So what is the source of Midwestern Gothic? Where did the evil originally root itself? Not in the [haunted] structure but in the very land upon which the structure was built. The land was the prize. And it was won by inflicting misery and death on the native people who found it first. Europeans saw the land, and they had to own it at any cost. So when those proud farm folk stood in the doorways of humble houses built with their own hands, staring out at acres of waving wheat and corn that they planted, the land stared back. A pact had been made. An endless exchange. Misery for misery. Blood for blood. The bounty they enjoyed left a void, and one day that void would demand to be filled.

“The land stared back” at the posing farm couple: this evocative passage practically frames the perspective onto Grant Wood’s iconic painting American Gothic.

A gripping and horripilating tale, One Half of a Child’s Face arguably leaves its mysteries (e.g., the specific origins of the child-hungry artifact, and the human conspiracy that has deposited it at the apartment building) too unresolved to be completely satisfying. But in its meditation on the unnerving features of Midwestern (vs. English or even New England and Southern) Gothic, the novella supplies a perfect conclusion to Thomas’s Shirley Jackson Award-winning collection.