I can remember walking downtown Bangor at around age 16 with a friend who liked to wear a jean jacket with a Madonna patch on the back and little silver studs. In my experience, life in Bangor, Maine, wasn’t quite that sweet. Though there may be attempts at a kind of grayness in the book’s morality, to my mind, good and evil ultimately come across as a bit black and white with the gang of “good” kids who ride bicycles and like movies and clubhouses, versus the “bad” kids who play with their parents’ guns and act like bullies. The problem is that the aforementioned “Rockwell factor” is quite strong in this novel, and the nostalgia, however one feels about it, serves to obscure the true power of the supernatural imagery. After consideration, however, I decided it isn’t the right candidate, and may even be the opposite. Because of this setting, I thought this might be the best book to represent King’s use of supernatural realism. Pennywise is a vestige of a nastier ancient creature that lives in the sewers, something few in the town have dared to confront until a ragtag band of friends, the “Losers Club,” comes along and gets up the nerve to hunt it down. In King’s It, Pennywise the clown becomes the symbol of all that is violent and cruel, and his image ‘photo bombs’ every scene where dirty deeds are going down. This is one of the violent incidents touched on in King’s novel as part of fleshing out the evil underbelly of the small American town (though for a more in-depth treatment of the incident of the murder of Charles Howard, I would suggest reading Dwight Cathcart’s Ceremonies). I don’t recall ever looking into Kenduskeag Stream and seeing a fanged clown poking out of a drainpipe, but I do remember as a young teenager occasionally running into a guy accused of throwing someone off a bridge.

The barrens, the bridges, and the library were all familiar places. I thought It a good candidate because I grew up in Bangor, Maine, the locale on which much of fictional town in King’s novel is based.

This invited comparisons to Stephen King’s portrayals of Maine, and how I thought King wrote about “small town” Maine, as opposed to Ketchum’s portrait of a certain kind of “wilderness.” It led to calling King’s descriptions “Norman Rockwell paintings with vampires.” Since then, I’ve wanted to write about a King novel and go into more detail about what I think really gives his books their power, namely his ability to present that which is not real in a way the feels like it is real, a kind of supernatural realism.Īt first, I considered writing about the novel It. Some years back I wrote an essay on Jack Ketchum’s Off Season, in which I shared some thoughts on his descriptions of coastal Maine. Warning: this review contains spoilers and should be read after having read the novel it discusses.įor more about why I don’t just review brand new books, see Is that an Old Book?

Stephen king the outsider book