|
Home
Books
Richard Bachman
Movies
Television
Quotes
Biography
Posters
Links
About This Site
|
|
Youths
have to defeat a demonic creature who dresses like a clown.
Synopsis
This ambitious novel is a tale of
the fundamental struggle between good and evil, dealing primarily with
events between June 1958 and June 1985. A gory war takes place in a Maine
community of 30,000 that is rotten to the core. Almost the only good
people in town are seven children, each 11 or 12 years old, and all sort
of misfits. Drawn more as types than individuals, they might appeal to
readers who feel that they were themselves outsiders in elementary school
for one reason or another. The group consists of a fat boy, a poor girl
whose vile father lusts after and sometimes beats her, a compulsively
wisecracking lad who excels at funny voices, a boy who stutters a lot and
reads more and dreams of writing, the son of a black farmer, a Jewish boy
who is the most feebly and stereotypically sketched of the lot and a
fatherless child whose hysterically possessive mother has fooled him into
believing that he's asthmatic.
Nothing stops It, a giant spider
from space, until 1958, when the virtuous outsiders discover It and how to
fight it. The war is basically mental. If the good children believe in
nice birds, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and such, they can resist the
entity. If they tell it jokes or speak in funny voices doing parodies,
that spider will be hurt. It has to be feared. When these kids figure out
that their belief, humor and courage are their best weapons, Old Creepy is
in deep trouble.
With the exception of the black boy, who goes to
work in the Derry library, the other ''losers'' scatter and prosper. Then
It telepathically calls them back 27 years later to try to destroy them.
If that belief routine shows that Mr. King has read ''Peter Pan,'' the
rest of the novel reveals a familiarity with ''Animal Farm.'' All seven
kids are equal, and all have prospered, but one is more equal than the
others.
Now here's the imaginative part. Mr. King has given us a
semi-autobiographical horror novel. The stuttering boy grew up to attend
the University of Maine, where his nonintellectual and straight-ahead
stories were derided as junk. So he wrote a novel to defy the snide
faculty scoffers and sent it off to a New York publishing company because
he liked the firm's logotype. It was Viking. Mr. King grew up in a Maine
city of 30,000, went to that state's university and has had all his novels
published by Viking. The leader of the children turns out to be the now
rich and famous writer. -- Walter Wager, New York Times
Quotes from the
Book
"Maybe
that's why God made us kids first and built us close to the ground,
because He knows you got to fall down a lot and bleed a lot before you
learn that one simple lesson. You pay for what you get, you own what you
pay for... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to
you."
"You
don't fuck around with the infinite."
"You
can't be careful on a skateboard, man."
"All
living things must abide by the laws of the shape thay
inhabit."
"Everything's a lot tougher when it's for real. That's when you
choke. When it's for real."
"The
love is what matters...maybe that's all we get to take with us when we go
out of the blue and into the black." |
