Like some down-home Hitchcock, Stephen King has made a (second) career out of brief acting appearances in film and TV adaptations of his works. By the time of the publication of his monster opus IT in September 1986, King had already portrayed the gone-to-weed Jordy Verrill in Creepshow and a man rudely insulted by an ATM in the opening of King’s directorial debut (and perhaps thankfully, finale) Maximum Overdrive. These appearances established a pattern of darkly comedic, happily hammy cameos that has continued for decades now, but King took a much grimmer approach when working himself into the pages of one of his own books.

In the “Derry: The Fourth Interlude” section of his novel IT, the author shows up in somewhat thinly-veiled disguise. I refer to the character Eddie King (Edwin is Stephen King’s middle name), who is self-deprecatingly depicted as “a bearded man whose spectacles were almost as fat as his gut.” Eddie King’s sharply abbreviated role in the book consists of playing one of the victims of Claude Heroux’s gruesome axe attack  inside Derry’s Silver Dollar tavern in 1905. Amidst this Pennywise-inspired slaughter, Eddie (whom the labor organizer Heroux targets as part of a group of murderous union-busters) suffers some especially bloody redress:

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, king of rocking it back and forth to loosen the clinging 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.

King would go on to incorporate his real-life near-death experience (his rundown by Bryan Edwin Smith’s van in 1999) into the Dark Tower series, and has also appeared in the (cleaved) flesh in a recent Mr. Mercedes cameo (pictured above), but nothing can beat this scene in IT where the nominal stand-in for the horror author ends up pulped. The interlude sections of the novel serve to trace Derry’s long, dark, and deadly history, and it appears the haunting influence of this fictional locale even extends to the town planner himself.