Existential Angst & Creepy Clowns
There are a lot of reasons why It, by Steven King, is one of my favorite books. The story captures a lot of nuance in its sprawling, roughly 1100 pages, and, above all, it gets its human dynamics almost entirely right. It's a story of friendship, of that awkward moment when you realize adulthood has stopped being a novelty, and of the ties that bind us all to the people and places that formed us as children. It raises questions about how much of our childhood we can ever outgrow, even if we want to, and works only because it so expertly captures the lengths that grown-ups will go to just to deny what is right in front of our eyes. Like so many of King's books, it gets the dynamics of small-town life just right, and I'm drawn to the experience of small-town kids who were very nearly the same age at the same time as my parents. Eventually, the story goes utterly off the rails of reality, placing Derry and its haunted past squarely in the context of a timeless, cosmological evil force that makes the reader wonder if maybe--just maybe--there might be larger forces at work behind the mundane pain, frustration, and loss that we all face every day. In fact, with the exception of an unfortunate incident involving 11-year-old kids exercising bad judgment in the sewers, it's almost a perfect book, and all these other reasons are ultimately just the sprinkles on top of an otherwise delicious and towering strawberry sundae, because, at its heart, It succeeds in scaring the crap out of me.
Books rarely frighten me. It's too hard to let myself get sufficiently lost in their pages, and the horror on the pages has to compete with the stiffness in my neck, my dog who really needs a walk, and the clock reminding me that my bedtime fades farther into the past with each additional word. Some books will give me the tingly-shoulder feeling of unease, some are good for a startle or two, and some even raise uncomfortable ideas that percolate around my brain for a while. It so thoroughly outdid all of its competition in every one of these categories, that it doesn't even compute.
I've read it twice now, and I'm looking forward--although with a bit of trepidation--to seeing the movie soon, so I've had some time to think about why It works so exceptionally well as a piece of horror fiction and storytelling of any genre. All the factors above matter, but I think the key is in It's malleability and the freedom that allows It to infiltrate those things that should be the safest. Without giving too much away, at this point no one should be surprised to hear that the villain in It is Pennywise, the very image of the creepy clown trope. For all I know, Pennywise may have started the trope. What you probably don't know if you haven't read the book, however, is that Pennywise is just one face that It wears, and that It can take the form of your greatest fear. When the book's main characters are kids, It wears the guise of childhood fears: the Werewolf, an abusive parent, a reclusive hobo, and--most entertainingly--an enormous Paul Bunyan statue. But when the kids grow up, It grows up alongside them and creeps into their lives as threats to (or from) their loved ones, the looming possibility of irrelevance, or the nagging concern that maybe their adult selves are frauds that the world will eventually discover. At its core, It is an embodiment of evil that has preyed on the fears of a peaceful small logging town by stoking those very fears since the moment that the town existed.
If that's all It is (and, trust me, that's enough), I don't think it's too reductionist to wonder if It--this great cosmic chameleon--is not so much an embodiment of evil, but an embodiment of fear. Dozens of religions, self-help gurus, and philosophies of life all seem to agree that fear and evil might be interchangeable. JFK probably would concur. When we're kids, our fears are mostly about our physical safety and the threat posed by the unknown; when we're adults, our fears include threats posed by the imagined to our emotional safety, along with our physical safety. All of those threats may not be real, but the damage they could cause if they were real is completely plausible, so we decide not to take the risk. Maybe the inaction and apathy that fear lulls us into are points scored for evil on the cosmic scoreboard of existence, as they keep us from exploring horizons and improving the lives of ourselves and others. Maybe it's a mistake to attribute human motivations and agency to fear and evil at all, and inaction is just an annoying side effect of fear with no greater significance. Either way, it paralyzes us like the squirrel facing a car and undecided about which side of the road is safest, rendering us unable to seek our higher purpose or improve the world for our friends, family, neighbors, and children.
It scares me because psychotic clowns are legitimately terrifying but also because if I were faced with an obvious opportunity to combat evil, I'm not sure that I wouldn't tell myself I imagined it and then turn on my DVR for a while. I'm not sure that I have a club of friends who would honestly risk their lives for me, and I'm not sure I would do it for them. My unresolved childhood fears, the ones that I walled off in a part of my brain that keeps them mostly quiet, are not quite as easy to quantify and locate as It's subterranean lair, but that only makes them harder to define, not any less life altering. I can read and watch It and fight my fears vicariously through these kids' courageous battle. The challenge is to keep mulling over their struggle when the story is done and find ways for me to be that brave in my own life, and also to thank God that my fight (presumably) won't involve wading knee-deep through sewage in a pitch-dark tunnel.
