Next year, it’ll have been twenty-seven years since the last ‘terror’ in the town of Derry, Maine. An anniversary, of sorts. Because every twenty-seven or twenty-eight years, Derry breathes evil.
Stephen King’s “IT” was a book which hammered itself into my teenage psyche, opened my mind with its vast scope of story, its ability to make the actual pages disappear and suck me in like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. It showed me that books have a place outside of the classroom, that they could come right out from between the covers and live and become as real as the world around me, that they could span space and time, and that imagination had no limits.
That summer, from my bedroom in Dublin City, Ireland, I walked out of Derry Elementary on the last day of school right alongside Ben Hanscomb and I shared that wonderful feeling of an entire summer ahead of us. I helped Richie and Bill and the other members of the ‘Losers Club’ build the dam that flooded out the Barrens. I hid with them from Henry Bowers and Belch Huggins, took the beatings when they caught us, and fought when it came to that.
I helped melt down those silver dollars to make bearings, and I looked over Bev’s shoulder at her dead-steady hand as she aimed that slingshot and let fly to save our lives. I rode with Bill on the back of that hulking Schwinn down Neibolt Street, feeling the hot breath of a monster on the side of my neck while Bill yelled, Hi-yo-Silver. Me and Bill and Ben loved Bev, and she and I heard those voices crying from the bathroom drain together. Richie drove me crazy with his crazy voices, as did Eddie’s mom with her own shrieking caterwaul, and the Barrens was a real place I could go and spend the lazy days of my summer.
“IT” wasn’t just a book, it was a dream on a page that has never left me. Even thinking about it now, I find myself sitting in the Barrens with The Losers Club, and I can feel that hot summer sun on my skinny arms poking from my teeshirt. I still remember digging out an atlas and the sudden pounding of my heart at the sight of the Kenduskeag River winding through Maine...real and true right there on the map! It was really there! It existed...!
...which almost...ALMOST...made everything else there real too.
Many people have similar profound experiences with a specific book, but the experience comes down to more than the book alone. Much of the effect is due to the specific period in my life, my state of mind, the circumstances in my own life which allowed the world inside the book to so successfully merge with mine. Had I picked up that book three months earlier, or three months later, it might not have aligned as well.
I’ve since read many, many great books. I’ve matured enough to realise that Stephen King is not God, nor is he even the greatest writer in the history of literature, and that there have been, and are today, and will be, many writers better than he is. But as a teenager, this notion would have been akin to the worst kind of blasphemy, punishable by death. But no matter how many other books I fall in love with, no matter how many other great writers I discover, no one has affected me the way Stephen King did when I was 16.
In Derry, Maine, the terror struck in 1957, and again in 1985.
With 2012 looming, I won’t fear what the Mayan calendar may or may not suggest. In 2012 I will fear for the town of Derry. Who will step up this time? Will there be another Losers Club? Everything we’ve learned subsequently about that bitter town suggests it can’t produce another group worthy of the task.
In 2003’s “Dreamcatcher”, someone has scrawled on a wall that...Pennywise Lives.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind.
Stephen King’s “IT” was a book which hammered itself into my teenage psyche, opened my mind with its vast scope of story, its ability to make the actual pages disappear and suck me in like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. It showed me that books have a place outside of the classroom, that they could come right out from between the covers and live and become as real as the world around me, that they could span space and time, and that imagination had no limits.
That summer, from my bedroom in Dublin City, Ireland, I walked out of Derry Elementary on the last day of school right alongside Ben Hanscomb and I shared that wonderful feeling of an entire summer ahead of us. I helped Richie and Bill and the other members of the ‘Losers Club’ build the dam that flooded out the Barrens. I hid with them from Henry Bowers and Belch Huggins, took the beatings when they caught us, and fought when it came to that.
I helped melt down those silver dollars to make bearings, and I looked over Bev’s shoulder at her dead-steady hand as she aimed that slingshot and let fly to save our lives. I rode with Bill on the back of that hulking Schwinn down Neibolt Street, feeling the hot breath of a monster on the side of my neck while Bill yelled, Hi-yo-Silver. Me and Bill and Ben loved Bev, and she and I heard those voices crying from the bathroom drain together. Richie drove me crazy with his crazy voices, as did Eddie’s mom with her own shrieking caterwaul, and the Barrens was a real place I could go and spend the lazy days of my summer.
“IT” wasn’t just a book, it was a dream on a page that has never left me. Even thinking about it now, I find myself sitting in the Barrens with The Losers Club, and I can feel that hot summer sun on my skinny arms poking from my teeshirt. I still remember digging out an atlas and the sudden pounding of my heart at the sight of the Kenduskeag River winding through Maine...real and true right there on the map! It was really there! It existed...!
...which almost...ALMOST...made everything else there real too.
Many people have similar profound experiences with a specific book, but the experience comes down to more than the book alone. Much of the effect is due to the specific period in my life, my state of mind, the circumstances in my own life which allowed the world inside the book to so successfully merge with mine. Had I picked up that book three months earlier, or three months later, it might not have aligned as well.
I’ve since read many, many great books. I’ve matured enough to realise that Stephen King is not God, nor is he even the greatest writer in the history of literature, and that there have been, and are today, and will be, many writers better than he is. But as a teenager, this notion would have been akin to the worst kind of blasphemy, punishable by death. But no matter how many other books I fall in love with, no matter how many other great writers I discover, no one has affected me the way Stephen King did when I was 16.
In Derry, Maine, the terror struck in 1957, and again in 1985.
With 2012 looming, I won’t fear what the Mayan calendar may or may not suggest. In 2012 I will fear for the town of Derry. Who will step up this time? Will there be another Losers Club? Everything we’ve learned subsequently about that bitter town suggests it can’t produce another group worthy of the task.
In 2003’s “Dreamcatcher”, someone has scrawled on a wall that...Pennywise Lives.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind.
RSS Feed