I just finished it. What really irritated me was why the heck did he write the part where seven 11-year olds had an orgy in order to find the way back from the sewers. What. The. Fuck. Stephen. WTF.
And IT was definitely female. The discovered it was pregnant when they fought it as Kids. By the time they came back to finish the job 27y later, IT already laid some juicy spider eggs.
It was a train. But yeah I love his books and I’ve tried everything under the sun to justify this but just couldn’t wrap my head around it being a “having to lose the innocence and transition to being an adult by everyone losing their virginity and somehow connect via love?”
I haven’t read IT specifically, but I’ve read a lot of SK, and lot of stories in his shared universe(s) (not sure how many people have connected IT to Dark Tower, but wouldn’t surprise me), but knowing him I’d imagine IT isn’t male or female. It just is. Or, at the very least, it’s not something that really falls into human concepts of gender.
Tbh the orgy ruined the book for me. I just don’t see the point of it. I understand what he did narratively, but it is so completely out of the left field and unnecessary that it just shatters the enjoyment. And I know what SK would say: it’s about the journey, not the destination. But that is such a load of horse crap! Imagine LOTR until the battle of the black gate and they decide to defeat Sauron by having a hobbit bukkake. Wouldn’t have the same place in history, I imagine.
Stephen King was terrifyingly high for astoundingly long stretches of time. He can’t even remember writing some of his books. IT is the manifestation of fear, and a metaphor for King’s own experiences; he conquered fear through understanding, companionship, and anxiety-obliterating levels of cocaine and xanax.
If you can’t handle me at my child sewer orgy, you don’t deserve me at my interdimensional time spider fight.
This is one of the reasons I just love Stephen King’s mind. Dude is fucking insane. We’re lucky to have him.
It was my understanding that Stephen King is just cocaine’s most prolific nom de plume
Only for one period of his life, and the stuff he’s written after he got clean is some of the best stuff he’s ever written…
King may have been on tons of coke (and drinking bottles of Scope mouth wash) while writing some books, it was in spite of it, not because. Those books don’t necessarily reflect the characteristics of cocaine.
It’s not like what speed is to On The Road, as that book actually reads like someone tweaking out.
What he meant by that was “holy shitballs I gotta stop drinking”
Dude had serious issues. Try reading his Dark Tower series - you can pinpoint at which book he got sober, because the story starts to make sense.