I've recently started to read Stephen King's IT, after it/It came up in conversation. It's a long novel, which a lot of King's books are. But it has a particular approach to being a long novel. It's made up of chapters and sub-chapters which in many cases could stand on their own, and which initially appear to be disparate.
I'm still in the first quarter, and I have to say I'm impressed with how sparingly the monster, Pennywise the Clown has been used. There've just been a couple of appearances. What the reader sees is the effect that Pennywise, or at least the supernatural evil he represents, has on the adults who came in contact with him when they were kids.
I haven't seen the miniseries, but Tim Curry does seem like ace casting.
I'm still in the first quarter, and I have to say I'm impressed with how sparingly the monster, Pennywise the Clown has been used. There've just been a couple of appearances. What the reader sees is the effect that Pennywise, or at least the supernatural evil he represents, has on the adults who came in contact with him when they were kids.
I haven't seen the miniseries, but Tim Curry does seem like ace casting.
2 comments:
i’d say that if ‘it’ is must-read stephen king, it’s with the understanding that it clearly highlights both his best & worst features as an author. for me:
best features: the bringing alive of derry (which’s like ‘salem’s lot on steroids). the place is very rooted, vivid, & believable. as mentioned, the rare (&, therefore, always effective) appearances of pennywise. i also particularly enjoyed the way the adult characters are introduced, & how it’s left to the reader to piece things together…
worst features: since you haven’t finished, i won’t go into detail, but i’ll only say that i don’t think, as an author, you can afford to start a book off really strong (which i think, in this case, king does) if you haven’t already come up with an even stronger ending…
i hope that latter bit doesn’t wreck your enjoyment of what is frequently a fun book. king, unfortunately, & apparently even among his fans, does indeed have a reputation of simply not knowing how to write good endings. he’s said more than once that he doesn’t write with endings already in mind, &, instead, lets his stories & characters take him to them, & it obviously hasn’t done him any damage, readership-wise, to continue to go with this. i mean, who knows: as likely as not, it’s this open-ended approach that allows for all the spontaneous good stuff, as well, so there you go…
myself, i have one more book to go (bachman’s ‘running man’) before i’m done with my stephen king retrospective (well, i also have ‘the shining’ to re-read, but that’s a known quantity :) ). i read ‘salem’s lot’, ‘it’, the king/bachman cross-overs ‘desperation’/‘regulators’, &, last-but-not-least, the prescient ‘long walk’, the bachman book that came ahead of both battle royale & hunger games in inventing the ‘last teenager standing’ category. oh, yeah, & this’s all after reading the (recently revised) first of the ‘dark tower’ books, ‘the gunslinger’ several months ago (which, btw, i thought was miserable). of them all, ‘salem’s lot’ & ’long walk’ worked best, for me: low-key, straight-forward, & focused. ‘long walk’ lost a bit of momentum down the final stretch, but was otherwise something of a minor revelation. i mean, how has this book not become a movie? :) …
anyway, i’ve now moved back to more 'classic' pulp, dashiell hammett / robert e. howard style (fyi: conan isn’t nearly as interesting as solomon kane). but not without first swinging by clive barker again, who i’d last experience via ‘the great & secret show’, which i found both poorly written & incredibly juvenile to the point of quitting in disgust about 150 pages in. anyway, this time it was ‘damnation game’, his first novel, &, aside from also suffering from the above-mentioned ‘better opening than closing’ phenomenon, i thought it was pretty effective. that said, it did eventually reminded me of what i’d found to be barker’s biggest problem way back when reading his first couple ‘book of blood’ collections: what i’d call his 'putrescence problem’. as in: the guy just loves his putrescence. but, once you’ve begun piling it on (& barker seems almost incapable of not doing this), it all just eventually sorta becomes ludicrous/moronic, eh? :) …
anyway, glad you're enjoying 'it'. the new 2-film version in the works just seems doomed to me, to the extent the adult part (which'd compose the second film) just pales in comparison to the childhood part (which'd compose the first). i thought the way king interspersed the 2 was vital for just this reason. whatever - i'm sure it'll still earn billions! :) ...
I can see where King is coming from, in terms of not having an ending in mind. When you start out knowing how you're going to finish, everything leading up to that can begin to seem rote. Alternately, the planned ending might not make logical/emotional sense in light of the middle. Now how this going in without a plan turns out, I'm not sure yet. What I think is the last "1958" section is over, so I guess I'm in the home stretch. If I stopped to savor every word I'd never get through. But it's somewhat to the author's credit that I haven't just sped through either. There is some stuff to slow down and enjoy.
There are a couple of things I'd note about it. One is that if King had never read Something Wicked This Way Comes this book never would have been written. The child protagonists, the ancient evil's connection to carnivals/circuses, the idea that it can be defeated with laughter and high spirits: the ideas were all there in ovo. King's just enlarged Bradbury's canvas and made it a bit grimier, although he's wisely kept it stagy.
Also I think Bill Dembrough is a kind of decoy author figure. He's the hero, and he's what King thinks he should be. But King clearly enjoys writing the wiseass Richie Tozier more. The all-over-the-place thinking and comic asides reflect the way he enjoys writing.
This writer argues that the kids aren't real children so much as they're idealized child figures: the people we want to remember ourselves as being. I'd have to agree. It's much closer to the Breakfast Club way of representing late childhood/early adolescence than the cringey Welcome to the Dollhouse way of going. That might be why the movie that's filming now is only covering the protagonists in the past. What the filmmakers will do when it's time to cover the present I don't know. Of course the first movie will have to make money to even get them to that point.
I know about Howard but I haven't read him yet. He's got an interesting life story. He was from Texas, yes, which made some people think of him as a cowboy, but seems to have been more of a mama's boy.
Hammett I've read, but only a couple of short things. That's something I may address in the coming year. Of course I know him more through the movies I've seen made from his work, which is a very indirect way.
Clive Barker was an artist before he was a writer. That explains why he likes big set pieces and the grotesque. Sometimes the gore just comes off as padding, though. The best stories in Books of Blood for me were the ones where he let that aspect recede and focused more on paranoia. "Pig's Blood Blues" is a good example.
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