The Birds and The Bees Float Down Here, Too.

For once, I was not perusing the community library, scanning for something interesting, something that would pop out and scream at me. This time, I had subscribed to a service: Audible (This is not a paid advertisement by Audible and I was not compensated in anyway.) Audible is a monthly subscription service that, for the price of like 15$ a month, allows you to buy 1 free audiobook and unlimited reduced-price audiobooks per month. My first audiobook was free, but I decided that I really wanted to get my money's worth, so I looked for the longest book I could find. Stephen King's novel, IT clocked in at just under 45 hours, so I figured it would be PERFECT! Little did I know, this would be one of the craziest rides ever.

Let me start by saying that this book can be fairly hard to follow. It's long, some of it is fairly useless, but it is all thrilling, exciting, and incredibly well-written. This story follows the life of six kids that attempt to defeat the very embodiment of fear itself.

Honestly, I'm not going to try to explain this book to y'all. It's so long and involved that I'd have to take about 45 hours to explain it, and in the end I'd just play the damn audiobook for you. In short, this story is about six kids who fight the embodiment of fear when they were young, forget about it, return to their hometown as adults, and then fight (and ultimately destroy) the same embodiment of fear. It's a horror book, but in so many ways it wasn't about terror, it was about courage and human resilience. It was about eternal love and hope and fear. Most of all, it was about faith. Seriously, this is a damn fine book.

This will be a shorter post because there is just SO MUCH to focus on, and I have SO LITTLE time, so I'm only really going to focus on one big aspect of the book: sex. Through the novel, each character struggles with sexual desire. The schoolyard bullies would regularly strip down with each other and play, childhood crushes developed, and (most interesting of all,) Beverly's father was terrified of the idea of Beverly losing her virginity and becoming "impure". However, when Beverly does have sex, King portrays it in a very interesting light. It is not the same kind of fling that is found in modern society, it is an everlasting and eternal love. It is used to bind the six kids together for all eternity, making Beverly's father's fear so strange.

In many ways, Beverly's father was not afraid of Beverly having sex, so much as he was terrified of losing Beverly to someone else. He had this unrealistic attachment, he viewed her as his object, not his child, so he abused her and lived in fear that someday, Beverly would fall in love and leave him. He was afraid that Beverly would engage in sex because sex is not just a quick fling, it is not just a short little blip in someone's life, it is an act that binds people together for eternity.

This act also casts the bullies' actions in a strange light. While they never actually had sex, they had a strange phallic obsession while hanging around each other, leading the reader to believe (much like Freud would argue) that these boys had very difficult home lives. These kids were tormented in a way they should not have been, and this is later revealed to the reader as King begins to describe the home life of Henry Bowers. It also resembles their own strange way of bonding. These boys engage in sexual play (reminiscent of that found in Brave New World) and it is through this that they being to bond, not in the usual way children bond through imaginary play. By placing this in his novel, King effectively created a Twilight Zone-esque aura to the friendship of these boys. Something felt amiss, something felt odd, but you couldn't quite place your finger on what exactly was so off about this relationship (besides the fact that these boys were horrible people).

Okay, that's my sermon for today. I think I ought to list off pros and cons now, before I begin to launch into a whole other ordeal.

Pros:
Jeezum Crow this book was good. The characters were amazing, the plot was enthralling, and it had its literary side without sacrificing for entertainment (though I wouldn't mind to see King use a touch more literary influence. I know that he is capable of it!).

Cons:
My real issues with this book are highly technically. I loved his writing style and everything about it, I just had a difficult time managing all these different characters, their backgrounds, their futures, distinguishing between past and present, AND reading all 20 billion pages of this book without forgetting a single detail. If you were to ask me what happened in the first chapter, I would honestly not be able to tell you because there was just so much information crammed into such a little book. Also, at one point, Beverly's husband is supposed to come down to Derry to get her and beat her up, but he never really shows. Maybe I missed something, but that felt like a HUGE plot hole to me.

My Rating:



3 Delicious slices of pizza! It almost got four, but I just couldn't get past the length and confusion! Alright, I'll see y'all next Wednesday at Noon! Be sure to follow me on Twitter, subscribe, and comment below!