I finally finished reading Stephen King’s “It” for the second time over the weekend. It took way longer than I had intended. It supposed to be a Halloween thing.
Oh, well.
Like all of King’s books, this one is not great literature. He’ll be the first one to tell you that.
But, like most of King’s books, it’s a really great story.
There is a lot of gore in the story. But, that’s part of early King.
There is suspense and horror. Again, King’s early M.O.
And, I enjoyed the telling immensely. In fact, as I began the book I saw in my mind’s eye a group of people sitting around a campfire listening as King begins to tell his tale. All of the images of my youth as we sat at night trying to scare each other with whatever “ghost” story we had recently learned.
Remember the one about the escaped psychopathic murderer? Yeah, the one where the kids drove away with a hook dangling from the door of their car? (Click here.)
In rereading this story, I was cast back into the world of youth where you can find a hook hanging from the door. Or, where werewolves and walking mummies truly exist.
That land of Faerie where tales of gingerbread cottages and wolves that have big eyes that are better to see you with, my dear.
But, we’ve all grown out of that. Right?
In the “real world” monsters and faeries and old crones who cook little children don’t really exist.
There is no magic.
Only harsh reality exists for us.
And, that is the theme that I gleaned from this reading of “It.”
That world where the imagination can turn water in an aspirator into battery acid washes away as we “grow up” and “mature.”
Playing cards attached to our bicycles so that they click-clack on the spokes and turn the bike into a motorcycle are, in fact, only paper cards.
Yet, at the end of King’s story, all of the characters, now grown up, find that it is only in becoming like children could they overcome and finally destroy It.
It was the power of imagination and innocence, of memory and childlike friendship, that gave them the ability to see the evil as it was and overcome it once and for all.
I think that we loose that ability at our peril.
I think that when we become too old and ‘grown up’ to believe in the unbelievable part of our core humanity is lost.
I think we need to write and hear tales of Faerie that just might come true.
Because, there are monsters in this world that only child-like belief and faith can overcome.
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