by George Beahm
So there you have it: I consider It the best thing Stephen King has ever written. So far.
MICHAEL COLLINGS ON IT
It presents reviewers and critics with a complication of plot beyond anything King had yet attempted or has attempted to date. Interweaving seven characters at two critical junctures in their lives twenty-seven years apart, moving back and forth from childhood to adulthood for each narrator, controlling the pace at which each remembers key elements of the childhood experience and can relate them to what happens to the fellowship as adults, with frequent forays into earlier, deadly twenty-seven-year cycles that have haunted Derry, Maine, throughout its history—all of this is enough to keep writer and reader constantly at attention. Adding the typographical convention of shifting from italics to roman typeface to indicate a parallel shift from narrator as child to narrator as adult helps control the temporal sequences, but even so, It requires intense concentration as it spins its sometimes perplexing tale of a Lovecraftian Great Old One–style monster that emerges periodically to glut itself on the physical and psychic suffering of Derry’s children. To be fair, however, both the length and the complexity are justified by what King is attempting in It. He has frequently referred to the novel as an act of closure, as the summation of all of his preceding children-under-threat novels.
All of this is to say that It does in fact climax a stage in King’s development as a novelist. For the first time, he successfully and completely combines children and adults, innocence and experience, naive energy and studied maturity. His monster is as multifaceted as the fears that face all children and all adults. It may be defeated in one form but returns in another. Some monsters are nonhuman, the stuff of myths and legends and stories told at midnight. Others, and often the most dangerous, bear the guises of other children whose disturbed impulses lead to viciousness and violence, especially against the loners, the outsiders—the losers. Or they may appear as fathers of preadolescent girls who “worry a lot” about their daughters. Or as mothers of frail young boys, whose sole purpose in life seems to be to keep those sons frail and dependent. Or otherwise goodhearted parents whose grief over the loss of one son almost causes them to lose another. Repeatedly, It moves from one level of fear and horror to another, from the physical to the psychological, from the material to the spiritual, from the external to the emotional.
Throughout all of this complex maneuvering, however, King does not lose sight of his primary objective: storytelling. Complicated as It becomes, each of its parts is involving, drawing readers ever deeper into King’s imagined world. Small episodes merge to create larger movements of characters and events. Past memories link with present events to create tapestries of understanding. The children who fought and almost defeated a faceless monster deep in the sewers beneath Derry in 1958—and who are inextricably linked during that experience by their initiation into adult sexuality (one of the few times in a King story when teenage sex does not lead inevitably to death)—grow up to be adults, almost without exception capable and willing to risk all a second time to complete what they hoped was finished twenty-seven years before. The fact that all the adults enter the story childless is significant, since only by retracing the paths of their own childhood, and remaking the decisions that brought them to where they are, can they take the final steps into adulthood and become parents themselves.
Monsters—both symbolic and real—have been met and, finally, convincingly defeated.
“Stephen King, the Master of Pop Dread”
One month after It landed in bookstores nationwide, Time magazine honored Stephen King with a cover story in its October 6, 1986, issue. Titled “King of Horror,” it shows how far he has come since the story ran.
The story stated that with the publication of It, “Stephen proves once again that he is the indisputable King of horror, a demon fabulist who raises gooseflesh for fun and profit. At 39, he seems to be the country’s best-known writer.”
The story goes on to say that “King has become a brand name himself, and his publishers ordered a supernatural first printing of 800,000 copies—and then demanded five additional printings, for a current total of 1,025,000 copies. When an author receives that kind of recognition, two factors are at work: his skills and the vitality of the genre.”
The Time magazine cover story on Stephen King (Oct. 6, 1986).
Michael Collings on Stephen King as Storyteller
King has always had the strength of being a storyteller. Whatever else scholars and critics might find lurking in his texts (and subtexts, and probably sub-subtexts), he has always given his readers the sense of a fair payback for the time spent in reading. This has led him into taking real risks: the length and narrative complexity of It, for example, or the even greater length and scope of the unexpurgated Stand.
When King tells stories—and they are often important stories—he simply cannot be touched. When his message shouts louder than his narrative voice, the techniques that make his best works strong seem to act against him, making him seem strident, aggressive, and assertive.
I think some of King’s works have a strong chance to last. ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Dead Zone (in spite of its sometimes dated historical setting), It, The Stand (unexpurgated version)—all of these are remarkable narratives told with authenticity and truth. All of them lend themselves well to both the classroom and scholarly/academic study. All of them repay the reader/critic with new insights into life, society, literature, and art. And all of them are unique artifacts of the movement of American life in the final quarter of the twentieth century, chronicled by an unblinking and highly perceptive eye. I think that at least these—and probably several others—should have a long, long literary life.
An aerial shot of downtown Bangor.
A cemetery in Bangor.
53
SK TOURS OF MAINE:
STEPHEN KING’S MAINE HAUNTS
Bangor is a working-class town. There are no fancy restaurants and no fancy hotels, unless you count the Lucerne Inn, fifteen minutes away by car. It’s also not an accidental destination: from Kittery, the first town after crossing the Kittery Bridge from New Hampshire into Maine, Bangor is two and a half hours by car; even by plane, it’s an end destination, not a hub. Tourists coming for the Maine experience head to Bar Harbor or, if they want to shop, to Freeport, home of L.L. Bean. They don’t usually come to Bangor … unless they want to get spooked or, more specifically, to see the sights, and sites, that Stephen King calls home most of the year. A snowbird, he and his wife take off to Florida for the winter, and who can blame him? In January and February, Bangor’s one big icebox.
The Kenduskeag Stream running through a canal in downtown Bangor.
An aerial shot of the Standpipe, which figures prominently in It.
Stuart Tinker of SK Tours of Maine, LLC.
Statues with crucifix in the Bangor-Orono area.
Downtown Bangor.
Oil storage tanks on the waterfront in Bangor, which inspired the Trashcan Man from The Stand.
Clay bricks mounted on a wall in the Bangor Public Library, each etched with the names of the donors who raised funds for its restoration.
The third brick down, on the left hand side, records for posterity two significant donors: the Bangor Daily News, and Stephen King.
The Bangor Public Library.
But good weather or bad, seven days a week, year-round, fans come.
They come by car and by bus, and they come with digital cameras dangling like necklaces and shoot picture after picture of a red-colored house on West Broadway. They come because it’s Stephen King’s main home.
The most famous house in Bangor is indisputably a tourist magnet, but then, for Stephen King readers, so is the town itself, which can be found in the pages of one of his longest novels, It, which is set fictionally in Derry, Maine, but is based on Bangor. Armed with a copy of It with pages marked, die-hard fans make the trek to see how many real-world places they can identify. They also
buy a local map to mark it up and use that as a guide to get around town.
But there’s an easier and better way: spend forty bucks for a three-hour tour to see thirty sites of major interest to King fans.
So how good is the tour?
In a 2014 article in Yankee magazine, “Best Attractions in Maine,” an Editors’ Choice Award was given to SK Tours of Maine because it’s the “best tour of Stephen Kingdom.”
Ayuh, it’s the way to go: in a van driven by Stuart Tinker, a lifelong resident of Bangor, and best known in Stephen King circles as the previous owner of Betts Books, which specializes in Stephen King books and memorabilia.
In fact, TripAdvisor praised the tour’s operator:
Stuart Tinker is undeniably one of the world’s most knowledgeable persons about Stephen King, his books, and King lore. He’s also a good storyteller, which is important because not everyone who takes the tour is a King reader: an innocent spouse usually comes along for the ride, but always comes away from the tour with an appreciation of Bangor and King.
And unlike the ill-fated three-hour tour on the S.S. Minnow that left tourists stranded on “Gilligan’s Island,” the three-hour SK Tours journey will pick you up from your hotel, take you to all the King-related sites in Bangor and in nearby towns, and safely deposit you back where you started.
If you are a die-hard King fan and reader, a trip to Bangor is a must. But don’t be your own tour guide, because that’s not nearly as fun as seeing the sites in the company of other King fans, who will be regaled with facts, fun, and trivia about Bangor and King.
There’s also another reason why SK Tours of Maine is far preferable to a DIY tour or monstrous tour bus: On occasion, when Stephen King is out in his yard, especially in the spring and summer months, he’ll actually stop what he’s doing to greet the van riders or talk to them from his yard. As one rider put it: It’s to die for.
My only caution is to stay clear of sewer grates because, as little Georgie found out in Derry, it can be a grating experience.
Go to: sk-tours.com for booking information.
Stuart Tinker, from his Web site, on SK Tours
“We have been Stephen King fans since 1974 when Carrie was first published and have remained so ever since. In 1990 we bought Betts Bookstore and always kept a complete catalog of both Stephen and Tabitha’s works in stock in both hardcover and paperback for twenty years. Because of the help that the Kings gave us, we became well known throughout the world as THE place to go for Stephen King items. In the last nine years we owned the store, [our inventory was] 100% King.
“After selling the store, I decided to do Stephen King Tours here in ‘Derry,’ something we had done … originally years ago, and it has become a tremendous hit. I’ve met people from all over the world, all brought together by the love and enjoyment of Steve’s stories. But we also have a lot of spouses, partners, and ‘tag alongs’ that are not fans. That’s where the real fun is. The non-fan is truly amazed when they find out that their favorite movie—usually Shawshank Redemption or The Green Mile—is a Stephen King story!”
54
MISERY
1987
They didn’t see it as a horror novel. They saw it as something that could really happen. Famous people can fall into the clutches of their most psychotic fan. You can have the fatal juxtaposition of somebody like that guy Mark Chapman and John Lennon.
—STEPHEN KING, ON WHY CRITICS LIKED MISERY SO MUCH
(WALDENBOOKS NEWSWEEKLY 145, 1987)
STAYING ALIVE
King, during a period of his life, abused substances, including cocaine. “Cocaine,” according to the Foundation for a Drug-Free World, “is one of the most dangerous drugs known to man. Once a person begins taking the drug, it has proven almost impossible to become free of its grip physically and mentally. Physically it stimulates key receptors … within the brain that, in turn, create a euphoria to which users quickly develop a tolerance. Only higher dosages and more frequent use can bring about the same effect.… Cocaine use can lead to death from respiratory (breathing) failure, stroke, cerebral hemorrhage (bleeding in the brain) or heart attack.”
King, who freely admits he was once hooked on cocaine, is lucky to be alive. Getting hit by a reckless driver out of control and behind the wheel of a minivan was a matter of being in the wrong place in the wrong time; but he chose to start using cocaine. As he revealed in On Writing, “In the spring and summer of 1986 I wrote The Tommyknockers, often working until midnight with my heart running at a hundred and thirty beats a minute and cotton swabs stuck up my nose to stem the coke-induced bleeding.”
The “fake” fantasy cover of Misery’s Return by Paul Sheldon, inserted in the paperback edition of Misery.
Only an intervention, engineered by his wife, saved him. “The point of this intervention,” he wrote in On Writing, “which was certainly as unpleasant for my wife and kids and friends as it was for me, was that I was dying in front of them.”
King has said that Misery is about cocaine, to which he was addicted until he finally kicked the habit, just as Annie Wilkes, the antagonist in Misery, needed her fix of stories about her favorite heroine, Misery Chastain.
Originally intended to be a Richard Bachman book until King’s cover was blown, Misery can be read on many different levels: biographically, of course, as being about substance abuse, as well as sociologically, as addressing the one-way relationship that exists between celebrities and those who, drawn to them, intrude in a potentially dangerous way. I wouldn’t necessarily call such intruders fans; I would call them celebrity stalkers, disturbed individuals who desperately need help with their mental illnesses. King’s stalkers aren’t his readers or fans but people who only see his celebrity and are, for that reason, drawn to him.
When the Kings bought their prominent Bangor home in 1980, they wanted it to be accessible; they didn’t want to live like Hollywood celebrities imprisoned in their own homes for security. For that reason, the Kings at first had no fence surrounding the property and no electronic surveillance devices on the premises. King may not have even owned a handgun at the time, but he sure as hell does now: three of them.
The Kings felt secure in their Bangor home, until reality shattered that illusion: In 1991 a man came in through the kitchen window when Tabitha King was home alone; Stephen and his two sons were in Boston, at a Red Sox game. Dressed in her nightgown, Tabitha was informed by the intruder that the cigar box in his hand was a bomb. She ran out the front door to a neighbor’s house, who called the police.
After that close encounter, things changed because they had to: the unscalable fence was supplemented with motion detection devices and surveillance, signage, and closed circuit TV cameras. As King told the media, he hated to harden his property, but he had no choice. If he couldn’t stop the celebrity stalkers from coming in, he’d make it more difficult, to buy time as he waited for the police to show up.
“I don’t want to live like Michael Jackson or like Elvis Presley did at Graceland. That’s gross. It was bad enough when we had to put up a fence. It was worse when we had to put up a gate. I hate to think I have to keep that gate locked,” King told the Bangor Daily News.
It’s the reason why King hates being perceived not as a writer but a celebrity, which was forced on him. Even living in a gated community wouldn’t necessarily protect him from intrusions: Because millions of people know King’s name, a handful of the disturbed have sought him out.
In Castle Rock, Tabitha King’s article “Co-miser-a-ting with King” addressed issues raised by fans after reading Misery, who felt the book was a slam against them. “Misery,” she wrote, “is not the first novel to examine the relationship between writer and reader, or between celebrity and fan, but its exploration of the worst aspects of the celebrity-fan connection is obvious and real.”
About Misery, Stephen King said, “It’s pretty accurate in terms of emotional feeling. I sometimes don’t know what people want.… People really like what
I do … but some of them are quite crackers. I have not met Annie Wilkes yet, but I’ve met all sorts of people who call themselves my ‘number-one fan’ and, boy, some of these guys don’t have six cans in a six-pack.”
Until 2013, intruders had always been out-of-towners, but in October of that year a young man from nearby Orono entered the home and was ordered to leave by a caretaker; fortunately, the Kings were not home at the time.
It’s the dark side of fame—the unwanted aspect—and it’s the reason celebrities have to take commonsense measures to protect themselves in public and at home as well.
THE NOVEL
Misery is a novel of psychological suspense set in one room. It is one of King’s most riveting stories because it’s firmly grounded in reality: the world of celebrity stalkers is real, and in Paul Sheldon’s case, he falls into the wrong hands: a disturbed ex-nurse named Annie Wilkes.
Paul Sheldon’s Misery Chastain books have a hold on Annie Wilkes that goes beyond normal. Thus when Sheldon—fearful of being pigeonholed and condemned to write about the same character forever—kills off the fictional character, Annie Wilkes is not a happy camper. She rescues him from a car crash and nurses him back to health, but in exchange she demands that he bring Misery Chastain back to life, which he does involuntarily: He has no other choice. Held prisoner in her remote farmhouse, Sheldon’s growing fear is what will she do to him after he finishes the book.
