King Country: It

or, the cathedral collapsed; or, thus spake pennywise

More of King Country:

• Salem’s Lot

• The Shining

• Cujo

My new daughter, born on Saturday, rests on my chest as I write this, which feels somewhat fitting for a novel like this. A novel so fixated on the horrors of youth but also the grisly nightmares that plague us all.

And I don’t really know what I expected from this novel. I remember seeing my friend John reading this gargantuan novel when we were in seventh grade and wondering what that could be. Wasn’t curious enough to look into getting the novel or anything like that. I was aware of Stephen King by then, I think, because everyone under the age of forty has probably been aware of his work for most of their lives.

But because I’ve always thought of people reading King as young adults, I really was not prepared for what’s inside this novel. And I’m not easy to shock! I don’t think anyone who’s read American Psycho or seen Gasper Noe’s Irreversible is easy to shock. And I’ve run across transgressive authors and novels famed for their grotesqueries and horrors and gruesomes and kind of shrugged it off because I’ve been desensitized by a life where I saw a man obliterated by a train on my friend’s computer when I was eleven.

If you’re around my age, you’ve probably witnessed horrifying things on the internet at way too young an age—not that there’s really any age where seeing a beheading isn’t going to knock you back—and so my squeamish bone dissolved decades ago, at least when it comes to this sort of thing.

But I think It is a genuinely transgressive novel. The places it goes and the horrors it resides inside are really unexpected. Even my blackheart was a bit shocked!

The novel begins simply enough: the death of a child in 1957 and the apparent murder of a young gay man in 1984. In both, there’s this strange inclusion of a clown. In the death of the child, Georgie, we witness the clown from his perspective and so of course we know that he was brutally killed by this ghastly clown. In the 1984 murder, both the murderers and the lover of the man murdered mention a clown.

A clown, of all things. I suppose fear of clowns has been around for a while but I have wondered if it begins here or if this novel played off an already common experience. I imagine it’s the latter, but, even so, it seems a silly thing here.

And then King takes it deathly serious.

But before we get to all that, there’s just a whole lot of happening. This novel is long. If you read it as a preteen or teenager like my friend John, it was probably the longest book you’d ever read. Might be it still is. By itself, it’s nearly the length of the entire Lord of the Rings. Interestingly, it’s not even King’s longest novel.

Which, I guess, does not entirely surprise me. By this point, four novels in, I can tell that King is not in a hurry to get anywhere. And while some may tell you that’s a weakness or the reason they can’t read King, I believe it’s one of his greatest strengths. And, sure, could this novel have been 1,000 pages instead of nearly 1,200? Could it have been 700?

Yes to both, honestly. Possibly, it would be stronger, at least to some. And, you know, maybe I’ll even agree, just for the sake of it. I’ll say that It would have been better if it was 700 pages long instead. Cut out those 450 pages and toss them away.

But have you ever been inside a cathedral? The light pouring in through windows the size of a house, the long shadows casting vast chasms of darkness, the domes opening wide above you like the eye of God, the sprawling structure branching off into chapel-sized alcoves, the palatial altar so gaudy and glorious and bright that you could chisel away at the marble to furnish suburban homes with new floors.

The immensity of the silence. The strange coldness of those monstrous buildings filling up city blocks. When the organ wails, it shivers your bones, pulverizes your chest, makes you gasp from the scale, from the untold human hands, the unimaginable cost, the weight of human suffering that went into its construction.

And yet, what a thing to behold. What beauty. What extravagance!

Perhaps It could have been the size of a church for those who care only for the meat but what a wonder to hold in your hands a novel that includes the skin and bones, the liver and spleen, the appendix and uterus, a novel that numbers the teeth and labels the layers of flesh as it cuts through each one, that measures the depth of your lungs while you suck in breath, the pace of your heart when you watch a child murdered, when you watch two adults fall in love after a fractured lifetime separating their childlike love from who they are now.

That’s not to say that It is without flaws.

Cathedral it may be, but this is a vast crumbling cathedral. Ancient, collapsing back into the hillside, shafts of light piercing through the cracking mortar.

You may not have the stomach for it, sure. But you also may not have the patience for it. Hell, you’re probably reading this on your phone. You probably can’t remember the last time you read a chapter of a book without looking at your phone. Not so long ago, you brought a book to the toilet every time you had to shit. Now? Well, your phone is all you need anywhere you go, yes?

But this story of love and loss, of horror and brightness, is really unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s sloppy and slapdash at times but then you’ll turn the page and feel your knees buckle even though you’re already sitting down, and a flashgrenade of a memory will crack open your skull to that moment when you were ten or twelve riding your bike as hard as you could, the wind in your hair, tears in your eyes, and you’ll take a breath because you’re no longer in your living room or bed but cast tumbling through time to moments you thought you’d forgotten, to times when life held such unutterable beauty but also marrowdeep fears trembling through your fingers even twenty five years later.

For It is many things and even as it sort of collapses inward like a dying star, there is an extravagant wonder to the way it dims and bleeds and cools rather than supernovas, taking you and all those memories with it.

And I think that’s fitting. I think that’s beautiful. Especially for a novel so tied to memory and brutality.

For, in many ways, this is a novel that you cannot take with you. It overwhelms you and it does it by design.

King doesn’t just write this to scare you—though you may get scared—but to invent a place. And not in the way that we all invent moments and times but the way Tolkien invented Middle Earth.

Down to the very dirt, King is invented and creating and bringing life to Derry, Maine. He wants you to smell the dang flowers, feel the high grass against your ankle, taste that hour before a rainstorm, hear the call of long ago friends, of memories buried alive yet bursting free, see the way the earth fissures and the waters rise.

It’s a brilliant success. It’s a staggering failure.

It’s a one of a kind novel, and I can taste James Joyce in It, can smell Mrs Dalloway’s tea in It. And maybe you’re ready to throw your phone across the room because what does any of this have to do about a bunch of kids trying to kill a luciferian clown? But I don’t think this book exists without James Joyce.

And maybe I’ll write something about all that someday, but, for now, I must go hold my daughter, my wife, my sons, and try to forget this unforgettable crumbling cathedral, knowing it will live inside me perhaps for the rest of my life.

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Many people have recommended other King novels to me while I begin this journey. I’ll probably include most of them, unless I end up abandoning this whole project early due to disinterest or disgust, but the ones listed below are the only ones I’ll promise on writing about.

Here’s the order I’ll be tackling King’s novels. I’d like to give you a reason why this is the order and not some other order or why only these books and not a bunch of other ones, but I’m trusting to Jayson Young as my guide.

1. Salem’s Lot

2. The Shining

3. Cujo

4. It

5. 11/22/63

6. From a Buick 8

7. Revival

8. Firestarter

9. The Eyes of the Dragon

10. Misery

11. Pet Sematary

12. The Long Walk

13. The Stand

14. The Dark Tower I-VII