It seems everyone in the world is afraid of clowns on some level. And rightfully so! From The Joker to Killer Clowns from Outer Space, pop culture is full of evil clowns, reflecting society's fear and distrust of them. There is something uncanny about their painted faces, their false and distended smiles, their dreamlike features, and the way they move. They are otherworldly tricksters whose intentions are unclear and unknowable. The most widely known and perhaps most effective use of the evil clown in literature has to be Pennywise the Dancing Clown, one of the many forms that the antagonist of Stephen King's It takes on. And while this creature is horrific, It is far from the most harrowing part of this horror classic. I re-read It at the end of December 2025/beginning of January 2026. The last time I read this book was more than 15 years ago, and the emotions that I felt this time through were very different.
It is more than a story about a killer, shape shifting, child-eating clown. The novel takes place in two timelines, 1957-1958 when the main characters are children of about 11 years of age, and 1984-1985, with our characters as adults around 40 years old. A significant portion of the novel delves the loss of innocence that comes with growing older, and the way adulthood sneaks up on you. When you're a kid, it's common and natural to spend time daydreaming about what things may be like when you grow up. Maybe you're excited about leaving your hometown and seeing the world, or looking for a change of pace in some other way. There is some measure of time compression that happens, where time simultaneously moves more slowly than you can stand and faster than you ever thought possible. Then, one day you set off on your much anticipated journey, still failing to realize that the friends you thought would be with you for the rest of your life aren't there anymore. The things you used to do for fun as a child might be forgotten, or now and then bring you nostalgia for that time and place that you can never return to. To me, this inexorable march of time and the fading memories that come along with it were the most horrific parts of It this time around. The feeling is best captured by Richie Tozier in the novel, while he reflects on the energy of childhood.
The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself—that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller, something as bogus as a coke high: purpose, maybe, or goals, or whatever rah-rah Junior Chamber of Commerce word you wanted to use. It was no big deal; it didn’t go all at once, with a bang. And maybe, Richie thought, that’s the scary part. How you don’t stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown’s trick balloons with the Burma-Shave slogans on the sides. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air out of a tire. And one day you looked in the mirror and there was a grownup looking back at you. You could go on wearing bluejeans, you could keep going to Springsteen and Seger concerts, you could dye your hair, but that was a grownup’s face in the mirror just the same. It all happened while you were asleep, maybe, like a visit from the Tooth Fairy.
No, he thinks. Not the Tooth Fairy. The Age Fairy.
But a quote from Ben Hanscom's discussion with a librarian as an adult after returning to his hometown of Derry also encapsulates that feeling.
“You wouldn’t by any chance know what happened to Mrs. Starrett, would you? Barbara Starrett? She used to be the head of the Children’s Library.”
“She died,” Carole Danner said. “Three years ago. It was a stroke, I understand. It was a great shame. She was relatively young ... fifty-eight or -nine, I think. Mr. Hanlon closed the library for the day.”
“Oh,” Ben said, and felt a hollow place open in his heart. That’s what happened when you got back to your used-to-be, as the song put it. The frosting on the cake was sweet, but the stuff underneath was bitter. People forgot you, or died on you, or lost their hair and teeth. In some cases you found that they had lost their minds. Oh it was great to be alive. Boy howdy.
The enduring power of friendship is one of the core themes of It. Without their friendship, the Losers Club would never have defeated It as children, would never have sworn to return and finish the job if It ever resurfaced, and would never have survived the onslaught of It as adults. Eddie Kaspbrack offers this meditation on friends after he is attacked and hospitalized by the group of bullies that antagonizes our heroes throughout the novel.
These were his friends, and his mother was wrong: they weren’t bad friends. Maybe, he thought, there aren’t any such things as good friends or bad friends—maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you’re hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they’re always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that’s what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.
One of the characters begins to remember the energy of his youth during a conversation with a kid on a skateboard. Bill Denbrough asks the kid if he can try to ride the skateboard, to which the kid agrees. Bill considers attempting it. And then...
He bent, picked the skateboard back up, and handed it back to the kid. “I guess not,” he said.
“Chicken,” the kid said, not unkindly.
Bill hooked his thumbs into his armpits and flapped his elbows. “Buck-buck-buck,” he said.
The kid laughed. “Listen, I got to get home.”
“Be careful on that,” Bill said.
“You can’t be careful on a skateboard,” the kid replied, looking at Bill as if he might be the one with toys in the attic.
Bill Denbrough had forgotten the one key to riding to beat the devil - you can't be careful on a skateboard. The essence of childhood, the fearless and reckless energy bestowed upon children, that is often difficult to access for those in their adulthood, except during times of great need.
Later, Bill and Mike Hanlon are discussing the events they have been through, realizing that they are forgetting what has happened just as they did when they were children. They know they will forget one another again. In this sadness, Mike comes to terms with the loss of his friends once again.
My heart’s with you, Bill, no matter how it turns out. My heart is with all of them, and I think that, even if we forget each other, we’ll remember in our dreams.
I’m almost done with this diary now—and I suppose a diary is all that it will ever be, and that the story of Derry’s old scandals and eccentricities has no place outside these pages. That’s fine with me; I think that, when they let me out of here tomorrow, it might finally be time to start thinking about some sort of new life ... although just what that might be is unclear to me.
I loved you guys, you know.
I loved you so much.
The love we had for our childhood friends is real. And that's what makes the ending of It so bittersweet. The characters are fated to help one another overcome the trauma represented by It and their hometown of Derry, and they are also fated to forget that it happened. In one way, this might be part of their collective healing process. They returned to face their fears and their childhood tormentor, and now they can move on with their lives. But the cost of this is the loss of what allowed them to succeed in their endeavors in the first place - one another.
To close out this blog post, I offer one of my favorite little snippets of writing from It, and one of my favorite bits of writing overall. I'm not sure from whose perspective we're seeing here, but perhaps that's part of what makes it so universal.
So you leave, and there is an urge to look back, to look back just once as the sunset fades, to see that severe New England skyline one final time-the spires, the Standpipe, Paul with his axe slung over his shoulder. But it is perhaps not such a good idea to look back—allthe stories say so. Look what happened to Lot’s wife. Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around—andso there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question.
You leave and you leave quick when the sun starts to go down, he thinks in this dream. That’s what you do. And if you spare a last thought, maybe it’s ghosts you wonder about ... the ghosts of children standing in the water at sunset, standing in a circle, standing with their hands joined together, their faces young, sure, but tough ... tough enough, anyway, to give birth to the people they will become, tough enough to understand, maybe, that the people they will become must necessarily birth the people they were before they can get on with trying to understand simple mortality. The circle closes, the wheel rolls, and that’s all there is.
You don’t have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever, live with them forever, love with them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become.
Children I love you. I love you so much.
So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away, drive away from Derry, from memory ... but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night.
Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.
All the rest is darkness.
We've all left home at some point, not knowing if we were leaving home for the last time. That's the thing, isn't it? There will come a time, and perhaps there already has for many things, when each of us will do that thing for the last time. We leave home for the last time. We wave goodbye for the last time. We pick up a baby for the last time. The months and years weave their spell and move forward, slowly during some parts of our lives, heartbreakingly fast during other parts. But these things will always be a part of us, they make us who we are, moments built upon other moments, and friendships built during these moments, like people building their houses in our hearts.
No comments:
Post a Comment