Not-So-Mini Review: It

Somewhere in Steven King’s desk, there must be a small, well-thumbed thesaurus in which all the synonyms for “bled” are highlighted. And what, pray tell, do I mean by that? Only this: after reading King’s “It,” I am in awe of how many different ways King can say “so-and-so bled.” Blood flows, it spurts, it spatters, it splashes and gushes and bubbles and bursts forth from an uncountable number of severed limbs.

“It,” as you can guess, is an awfully gory book. King’s thousand-pages-plus epic is more than gory, though; it’s huge, sloppy, incredibly entertaining and compulsively readable. It’s the literary equivalent of a fat sandwich: not good for you, not even good, necessarily, but packed with so much stuff that it’s impossible to resist. Like most King books, “It” also has some highbrow pretensions. There’s some muddled cosmology involving a “macroverse” and “the Turtle,” but in the end, what we’re here for is the dismemberment.

“It” doesn’t disappoint in that regard. For those of you who don’t know, “It” is the story of a group of friends from the small Maine town of Derry. Derry, they discover, is haunted. It’s not your garden-variety haunting; we’re talking serious evil here, personified by a homicidal clown named Pennywise. The friends team up to fight Pennywise—known to his good friends as “It”—as kids in 1958, and as adults a couple decades down the road.

Before they can fight Pennywise, they’ve got to run away from him. A lot. Of those thousand pages, I’d estimate a good eight hundred involved 1) One of the main characters wandering into a dark, deserted locale 2) Said character running into Pennywise 3) Said character getting the hell out of there. These are interspersed with incidents in which minor characters meet Pennywise. Needless to say, they’re a lot less lucky. They die in a number of creatively gruesome ways, including:

1) Getting their head ripped off
2) Getting their face ripped off
3) Getting their arm ripped off
4) Getting their legs ripped off

OK, admittedly Pennywise’s M.O. is pretty straightforward. That’s not for lack of trying, though. Mr. Wise shows up in a whole host of disguises, including a giant bird, a werewolf, a mummy, and—my personal favorite—flying leeches. Not ordinary leeches. Flying leeches.

This is all good fun. King’s a great storyteller, especially when the limbs are flying and the blood’s spurting. So what if things get repetitive? Whether it’s an innocent kid being decapitated by the Creature from the Black Lagoon, or an unsuspecting prison guard getting ripped limb-from-limb by a doberman-human hybrid, King always makes it readable. And very, very bloody.

The only problem is that King tries to divide our attention equally between 1958 and 1985. And while the kid-versions of our protagonists are pretty likeable, as adults they become…boring. I guess that’s the whole idea: the magic of childhood gives way to the ennui of adulthood, so-on-and-so-forth. But they’re still boring.

Speaking of boring, King also insists on splitting time between the six main characters. Again, not all the protagonists are created equal. For every page we spend with an interesting character, we have to spend a corresponding page getting to know one of the dull ones. Take Ben Hanscom, for instance…please. He’s supposed to be noble, but like most noble characters his defining trait is stoicism that borders on blandness.

As a kid, Ben’s two defining traits are 1) He’s fat and 2) He’s good at building things. That’s not enough ingredients to make a decent soup, let alone an engaging character. Even worse, Adult Ben isn’t even fat. So he’s down to ONE defining trait. Why do we have to spend hundreds of pages in his company, when we could be getting acquainted with Richie Tozier or Bill Denbrough or one of the fun characters?

I realize I’ve rambled on for quite a while. But given the length of the book in question, I feel that’s highly appropriate. In short: “It” is a good, good book, well worth reading if you’ve got a few weeks to spare.

Oh, one more thing. “It,” like most King novels, is set in Maine. I ask you: given the way King goes to town on innocent Mainers, what with the slaughter and the hauntings and the murders, how is there anyone left alive in King’s fictional version of the Pine Tree State? More importantly, why don’t they all just get the hell out of there?