In one of my finer moments of inspiration, I called Mari, from mynameismarines, "BookTube Jesus"
when she read "The Handbook for Mortals," because she suffered so that we, as a community, as a collective,
might not have to. And today, I guess I'm here to take my turn as BookTube Jesus.
Bibliophiles of the internet, my name's Adriana. I have been through so much to bring you this video.
Today I will finally be getting into why I'm not here for It.
It," being the novel, if you can call it that, by Stephen King.
I would personally call it a 1200 page torture device that lures you in with a promising concept
and then just eventually stamps out your will to live by piling garbage on top of garbage on top of garbage.
Disclaimer: I do not purposefully pick up books, especially 1200 page books, just to hate-read them.
I don't choose books that are problematic just so I can speak out against them.
And I don't believe any reader is obligated to read anything that is gross or problematic
just so that they can "form their own opinion on it."
It just so happens that I saw potential in this story, and by the time I started to truly hate it,
I was too invested and committed, which is why I'm here today to spill all the tea.
Because I am nothing if not a fair reviewer, I'm gonna start with the positives, because, believe it or not,
if you cut out roughly 80% of this book, which was just pure nonsense—like just skim that right off the top—
there were actually some good things worth mentioning. So I guess I'll start there.
For those of you who don't know, "It" takes place in a small town in Maine called Derry,
which has been haunted, collectively, by a vicious, mysterious entity lurking in the sewers
for hundreds upon hundreds of years.
It is a shapeshifter, and it can appear as whatever fear is preoccupying your mind at the moment,
but because It preys on children, primarily, it often appears as a clown called Pennywise.
Every 27 years, it goes on a massive killing spree, and these grisly, gruesome murders stack up
and eventually end in some kind of huge tragedy, and only then, after its hunger has been sated,
will it go to "rest" for another 27 years.
The main cast of characters in this story, The Losers Club, are called to action when one of their younger brothers
is killed by It, and they have sworn as a group to get to the bottom of Derry's bloody history
and, ultimately, to destroy It, at whatever cost.
One thing I will give this story is that is does an exceptionally good job of exploring the psychology
of fear and how fear is connected to power.
Very early on, we're introduced to this instantaneous phenomenon of forgetting.
Forgetting is the mind's way of protecting itself; when something inexplicable or horrifying happens,
the mind tries to forget. It rejects that which it cannot accept.
That idea is shown very literally and the phenomenon of willfully forgetting is really played up
throughout the book. It's so precise and complete that it begins to feel like a kind of magic—
—like as soon as you physically leave Derry, you start to forget.
Its power comes from its ability to divide and isolate, which are side effects of fear.
Looking silly or sounding crazy are more powerful motivators than fear itself,
which is what persuades Its victims to keep these incidents secret of their own free will.
In that way, the victims do half the job of keeping Its existence a secret.
And when you don't know what exactly you're dealing with, you're more likely to be victimized.
You see this urge to rationalize away any bizarre or frightening incidents throughout the book,
and that's often why It gets the best of its victims.
There's also a great discussion about the nature of power. What is power? Who has power? How do you get power?
And there's a conversation about how power itself is a shape-shifter. It comes in different forms
depending on who you are and what you need. And these characters need to find a way
to harness it in their own way.
And lastly, in regard to power, the whole time I was reading this book,
I kept wondering to myself: Why this group of kids? What makes them so special and different?
I mean, this thing has been haunting Derry for as long as Derry's been around,
and surely Bill isn't the first person who's been enraged at the loss of a loved one.
If these kids can put their heads together and concoct a plan to exact revenge,
surely anyone else could have at any point.
But then it slowly came to me that what sets this group of kids apart is the fact that they TOLD.
They opened up about the things that had happened to them, the ways It had horrified and hurt them,
and they listened to each other and supported each other without fear of ridicule.
They literally broke the cycle of suffering and silence.
They told. They took what they went through and put it into words—
—and willingly offering up that information has power all its own.
So, overall, those were the moments and revelations that kept me going.
Those details showed me that the part of my intuition that told me there had to be *something* in this book
that had merit was actually on the mark.
Now if everything I just talked about had been the main focus of this story, if we had just left it there,
this would be a very different review!
There were those really well-written moments and those high-quality scares and creepy passages
that completely unhinge your sense of well-being. But the fact that those moments existed
eventually only made me *more* angry in the face of all this nonsense,
because what could have been a really impactful story was instead overrun by vitriolic garbage.
I think the best way to illustrate my frustration is to talk about the prologue, which is masterfully written
and does a great job of setting up the stakes and the atmosphere of the story with little to no nonsense.
There's a bit of potty humor and some basic-ass "boys-will-be-boys" type crap, but overall nothing too offensive.
It was the perfect start to the story.
And then the book began.
So one minute you see a glimpse of the potential, you see how it *could* be written,
but then the author just chooses NOT to go that route, like a majority of the time.
I feel like I just need to list all the unnecessary, internalized, unchallenged garbage in this book,
which is a HUGE task.
Let's see. There's racism, bigotry, homophobia. Subsequently, there's an astronomical usage of
racial and homophobic slurs.There's religious slurs, sexism, misogyny, graphic scenes of violence
and assault against women, oversexualization of children—namely in a child gangbang scene,
which I feel like you should know about upfront if you're gonna go into this.
There's fatphobia, fatphobic language, there is an unbelievable amount of bastardization
and fundamental disrespect when it comes to Native people, their beliefs, and their practices.
There is graphic detailing of animal cruelty, which was a pleasant surprise for me amongst all these joys.
The text also fails miserably in addressing mental illness in a way that's not gross.
It's so much, and it's so gratuitous. There's no better word. It is excessive, it is disgusting,
it adds absolutely nothing to the story, and it's just plain gratuitous.
And it also makes me mad because I know there so many apologists out there ready to jump in
and defend the story, because "It took place in the 50's and the 80's!" "It was written in a less progressive time."
"Stephen King was on cocaine when he wrote that!"
There even feels like there's an excuse built in to the worldbuilding, because people are gonna say
that since Pennywise is occupying Derry, he's spreading his influence with the power of suggestion.
His presence leeches out the "ugly, disturbing parts of people and brings out their worst,"
and somehow that's supposed to make it okay.
And in this 1200 page farce, King attempts to build in all these little moments
that alleviate him of all responsibility, which is fun.
There's the Pennywise excuse, and there's also a moment in the beginning where some random dude is commiserating
about that fact that the Derry Museum curators aren't on board with him displaying a tramp chair,
which is basically an old torture device used by police officers, primarily on Black citizens,
then this character comments on how *silly* it is when people
"willingly turn away from the negative things in the world."
It's this little pointed jab where you can see King convincing himself that, like, he's doing the Lord's work
and bravely showing people the ugly parts of the world they can't face on their own,
that he's willing to "go there" and be brutally honest even if means making people uncomfortable,
when A) no one asked him to in the first place,
and, more importantly, B) so many other writers can do that same thing brilliantly *without* being offensive
or producing trash.
He just puts disgusting shit out there without commenting on it or providing any kind of nuance.
And if you think back on the list I just went through,
pretty much all of it is shit that would never affect him in any way.
It's easy to use, and also defend the usage of, offensive language and moments,
especially when those words and moments will never, in any way, affect you or your ability to live your life.
King also has this other chapter, which is what one of my old professors would refer to as "mastubatory,"
which is not a word I wanted to use, but there is literally no better way to describe writing that benefits no one
but the author. It's something they write for their own pleasure, for themself.
Anyway, he goes through this whole section where Bill is in college and he's studying to be a writer,
he wants to write horror books. Everyone else in his cohort is super literary and uppity, and they're obsessed
with hidden meaning, and every time they read one of his horror stories and try to tell him how to build in more depth,
he just sort of laughs at them and declares that a story doesn't have to mean anything,
it doesn't to be taken so seriously, cuz it's just a story, bro!
It's this super pointless moment King sneaks in before the ball really gets rolling, where he kind of
throws up his hands and implies that a story is just an interesting plot, it's just things happening. Nothing more,
no implications or consequences or take-aways.
And I'm like "COOL STORY, BRO. Doesn't change the fact that you're using 1200 pages to spew disgusting nonsense."
Just because you or your readers won't hold you accountable
doesn't mean there's nothing to account for in the first place.
Y'all can come up with all the excuses and "reasoning" you want, but it doesn't change anything.
All you have to do is look at the 2017 film adaptation, one of the most successful, most highly rated
horror films in recent history, and if you think there's no correlation between its success and the fact
that it cut out, like, 99% of the garbage source material and cleverly avoided offensive or problematic language
and moments, then you're kidding yourself.
There's a reason why that production team stopped themselves and decided against subjecting audiences
to two hours of the N-word or the F-slur, and if you understand the part of yourself that stops you
from saying those words, for example, in full, then you KNOW what the problem is.
It's irresponsible. Plain and simple. Those words and those moments just sit on the page, and they're normalized
for 1200 pages—which, trust me, quickly begins to feel like a lifetime—and it's just exhausting.
It adds nothing. It doesn't progress the plot. It doesn't develop the characters. It's just useless nonsense
a basic, privileged white man knew he could get away with.
And, fine, you want to try and excuse the usage of slurs and all the innumerable gross moments in this book
—spoiler alert: you can't—but that's just barely the surface.
It's the way you're reading this story, just trying to take in what's happening,
and then without warning some bullshit creeps up and just ruins the entire moment.
It's the way the first person graphically killed on the page after the prologue is a queer character.
It's the way the only other potential queer character in the story is a raging psychopath who murdered a family member,
collects dead flies in a pencil case to show other kids, and slowly kills small animals for fun.
It's the way one of the main characters, Ben, is described as grotesquely fat with hideous, dehumanizing imagery,
and then it's later revealed in the story that when he at his heaviest, he was *less* than 200 pounds.
It's the way Eddie's mother is flippantly described as having a "schizophrenic" face.
What does that even MEAN?
It's the way Richie sees Bev after she's been beaten by her father, and *that's* the moment when he realizes
how beautiful she is and how gorgeous she looks with all the bruising and scars.
*That's* the first time he sees her as a person "worth looking at."
It's the way that before Bev is initiated into the group, all the boys feel a sense of ownership over her.
Before they even get to know her, they're silently agreeing on which one of them can have her,
and once that's been decided, there's no more discussion to be had. Her own input is not wanted.
It's the way that, as she watches the life drain out of a boy in front of her eyes, the narrative finds that moment
to be the best moment to describe her as "heartbreakingly beautiful," as if that's relevant.
It's the way she finally finds the courage to confide in Bill about how her father abused her and hurt her
and how that made her hate him, and instead of listening to her, all Bill can think about
is FUCKING her. Because he can't even prioritize focusing on her needs for two seconds.
It's the way that, as adults, the Losers Club are in the sewers, about to face It,
when all the boys find it to be the perfect time to verbally shame Bev
for marrying someone abusive like her father.
It's the way I have to read about Bev's nipples hardening every time she gets scared,
but I don't ever have to read about the boys' flaccid penises shriveling up.
It's the way a huge confrontation scene completely shifts tone because Bev's shirt had to rip open
to reveal her "bare, heaving breasts."
It's the way the narrative uses an extended, graphic metaphor to compare historical events in Derry
to raping someone, and how THAT goes on for a few lovely passages.
It's the way the first minor character who's implied to be Mexican is the person who runs the local dump
and who is brother to a "bachelor janitor" who works at the high school, because that's just the way things go!
It's the way the characters are described to be moving as silently as "thieving Indians"
or like "Indians out on a raiding party."
It's the way the first time Native people are mentioned in the story it's in relation to these "old, wise Indian people"
teaching Ben, a white man, some ancient ritual to help him ingest excessive amounts of alcohol without getting drunk,
because of course they'd know all about that.
It's the way the characters don't know how to go about taking down It, so they decide to build their own
bastardized version of a smoke house so that they can receive "a vision" about how to kill It,
because that's what the wise old Indians used to do and it's just "crazy enough" to work.
I'm just going to stop myself there, because I'm angry and I'm exhausted.
And those examples I just mentioned don't even *begin* to cover it. I didn't even get STARTED.
1200 pages of normalized bullshit like that, over and over and over again, with a healthy sprinkling of slurs
and words that are prefaced in the dictionary with "offensive."
All of that just BURIED any promise this book had.
Even if you took all that away—which I mean you CAN'T, and that would also mean just tossing
three quarters of this book in the trash where it belongs—the story was just...okay.
The build-up I appreciated. There was a good sense of sustained suspense throughout.
My curiosity about the history of Derry was definitely sated. In fact, I probably learned more than I actually NEEDED.
The whole coming-back-as-Adults thing was kind of underwhelming and lame, and the ending was a
dumpster fire mess grasping at straws that honeslty made little to no sense.
Honestly, if you belong to a group that's marginalized in any way, just take a hard pass on this one,
because it's not worth it!
are people out there who are gonna shrug and say "Well some people use those words."
"Some people talk like that, think like that, do those things, so just get over it." But again,
it's easy to dismiss that which has no impact on your life.
And the fact of the matter is that these ideas have very real consequences in real life,
and they're still impacting people's ability to live their lives to this day.
Each time I had to read those words and that nonsense, something inside me broke.
As a human, I don't know how you can read garbage like this and make peace with it.
As a reader, I certainly don't know how you make peace with it.
As a reviewer, I'm not going to stand for it.
So yeah, this was a long struggle with very little payoff. I recommend it to no one.
Stick with the film adaptations, which will save you from most of the nonsense.
I mean, looking back on the 2017 adaptation, the only thing taken almost word for word from the book
was the opening scene, the Prologue. Besides the concept itself, everything else was different!
And that's NOT a mistake. That is NOT a coincidence.
It's almost impossible to do a 1200 page book justice in one video,
but hopefully this review shed some light on why NOBODY in my lifetime
is EVER going to convince me to read another Stephen King book ever again.
If you have responses to any of the thoughts I shared here today, please feel free to share them in the comments
below. If you're gonna try to hit me with some apologist/mansplaining/devil's advocate bullcrap,
I think it's cute that *you* think you're gonna get a response.
[whispers] Because you're not!
That's all I got for today. I give up. Thank you so much for watching this video.
I really hope that you enjoyed it, because I mostly did not. And I will catch YOU on the flip-side of the page.
Bye!
[♫ snazzy end screen music ♫]
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