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It by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Wonderfully immersive and gorgeously written, IT is a remarkable achievement. I put off reading it for a long time because of its daunting length, but I’m so glad I finally dove in. I absolutely loved it. At the heart of the novel, as well as at the heart of my love for it, sits the Losers Club, seven characters who, thanks to Stephen King’s masterful ability to conjure character from perfect details and authentic emotions, I came to feel as though I knew intimately. I really grew to love them over the course of the novel, especially as children, and found myself slowing down toward the end because I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to them. When I finally turned that last page, it was a bittersweet moment because I was both deeply satisfied with the narrative and a little sad that I wouldn’t get to spend more time with them. I wish I’d had a circle of friends this close when I was growing up!

The monster itself is a stunning creation, wholly original and something well beyond the tropes it imitates in order to frighten its victims, but what lasts for me from this novel are not the scare scenes but the emotions. In so many ways, this novel is about kindness, love, and friendship. The monster could easily be a metaphor for bullying, or violence, or the cosmic unfairness of a child’s death, or a town’s dark history coming to light, or all of those things, but it’s the deep and abiding love these characters have for each other that allows them to defeat the monster in the end. Not without cost, but also not without reward.

I love the novel so much I’m tempted to call it perfect, and I think in some ways it is, such as in characterization and the use of setting, but it stumbles a bit toward the end, in my opinion. I thought the monster was much scarier without the extended mythology King gives it (the macroverse, the Turtle, the Other, etc.), and the handful of times he lets us into its thoughts saps too much of its mystery and ability to terrify. I understand the mythology ties into King’s magnum opus of the Dark Tower, but on a purely standalone level I thought it detracted from the horror by making the unknowable too known. I think I definitely belong to the school of thought that says the less we know about the monster, the better. Additionally, three characters outside of the Losers Club, Henry, Tom, and Audra, also make their way to Derry, but not much comes of their presence. Henry obviously has the biggest connection to the characters, being their childhood bully, but as an adult threat he’s taken care of rather quickly. Tom follows Beverly to the town but is then pretty much instantly dispatched with. Audra’s presence is important to end of the novel, but otherwise she’s just sort of there. (These three characters’ sections also sometimes feel like an unwelcome intrusion on the narrative, although I suppose that works thematically.) Lastly, the sex scene in the sewers feels like a major misstep to me. It’s beautifully written and actually quite sweetly portrayed — these characters are wonderfully, charmingly innocent, not lascivious — but it still feels out of place, both because of the characters’ prepubescent age and because I didn’t fully understand its purpose. I will readily admit I didn’t get how this act achieves what it’s meant to achieve, namely focusing the characters enough that they can then find their way out of the sewers. Symbolically, I think there might have been better ways to signal the end of childhood and the start of adulthood, at least in the context of this novel. I can totally see why this scene sticks in some readers’ craw, and I really do wonder why King thought its inclusion made narrative sense. (Beep beep, Stephen!)

But those missteps did nothing to temper my profound love for this novel. IT now holds a place of honor as my favorite Stephen King novel. Although there are still so many more I have to read, it’s hard to imagine any of them resonating as strongly with me as this one. I can see myself returning to this novel again and again in the future. It would be like revisiting old friends.

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This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author Billy Lyons, whose debut novel is Blood and Needles. Here is the publisher’s description:

The last person 25-year-old junkie, Steven Jameson, expected to meet was Anna Marie, an alluring stranger who turns out to be a fellow junkie . . . and a vampire. Anna Marie senses an inner steel deep inside Steven, and offers him a membership in the seductive world of The Morphia Clan, a group of vampires as devoted to using narcotics as they are to drinking blood. Steven soon falls in love with Anna Marie, whose vampire throne is threatened from outside forces and from within. There are hidden dangers everywhere, and treachery and betrayal lie just around every corner. Soon Steven finds himself not only in a fight to save his own life but also the life of the vampire he loves.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Billy Lyons:

Blood and Needles is the story of Steven Jameson, a junkie who lives on the streets of Orlando and finances his habit by robbing tourists. One Saturday night he’s preparing to do this very thing when he runs into Anna Marie Jennsen. It turns out that Anna Marie isn’t just a fellow addict, but the leader of a family of vampires who love shooting up as much as drinking blood.

Steven joins the ranks of the undead degenerates, and while he’s sleeping away his first day as a vampire, he has a very unsettling dream. It begins pleasantly enough, with him floating languidly along a waterway of blood. As he drifts along, he dips his head into it from time to time and takes a sip, but it isn’t long before things turn ugly. The blood begins to congeal, and its smell changes from savory to sickening. In a matter of minutes, the blood clots completely, and he’s trapped. That’s when things get ugly.

The naked, bloated bodies of his deceased family members emerge from the blood. They point lifeless fingers at Steven, and make accusations that that cut him to the quick.

“Steven, you stole pain medication from me. My cancer hurt so bad.” Grandma.

Before Steven can reply, his relatives are joined by hundreds more of the undead, each one a victim of Steven’s addiction. They rush forward and begin to chew away his flesh.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, Steven’s twin brother Allen (the person he loved most during his human existence) rips off one of Steven’s fingers and throws it high in the air. Buster, the family border collie, catches the finger in his mouth. Allen casts an evil grin at Steven, and with a wink says “Good boy, Buster!” Steven loses it completely, and screams himself awake.

When I first wrote this scene, I had to wonder if I wasn’t more than a little bit disturbed, and the fear it invoked stayed with me longer than anything else I’d written. I’d recently lost my older brother to a sudden heart attack, and my beloved miniature dachshund, Theodore, died around the same time from old age. The similarities between Steven’s grief and my own, combined with the fact that it’s just a scary freaking dream, made the experience of writing it quite terrifying. I did notice, however, that my grief had lessened somewhat afterwards, as crazy as that may sound. Call it catharsis through cannibalism.

Steven’s dream is brutal, frightening, and disturbing, but so is the world of the hardcore addict. As a vampire, Steven might find inner peace, but he must first deal with this little bit of leftover baggage from his human life. As a writer, creating the dream helped me deal with my own.

Blood and Needles: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Billy Lyons: Facebook / Twitter

Billy Lyons is the author of two published short stories. “Cell 334” was featured in the November 2014 edition of Another Realm magazine. “Black-Eyed Children, Blue-Eyed Child” was published in High Strange Horror, a 2015 horror anthology from Muzzleland Press. His latest, “Sheep and Snakes,” will be featured in Two Eyes Open, a horror anthology due to be released in August by MacKenzie Publishing. Blood and Needles is Billy’s debut novel. Follow Billy on Facebook for giveaways, personal appearances, and current writing projects.

Want to get the ebook of my Shirley Jackson Award-nominated and Thriller Award-nominated novel Chasing the Dragon for a mere $1.99? How about the ebook of any ChiZine Publications title? Well now you can, for a limited time only! Here’s how:

1. Click this link to take you to the ChiZine Publications website.
2. Scroll down through the list of ChiZine Publications titles.
3. Send the titles of the book(s) you want in an email to savory@cogeco.ca (any book that has a “Buy the eBook” link at the bottom of its page—which is nearly everything—is fair game!).
4. You’ll receive a PayPal invoice for the total amount.
5. Pay it, and they will send you the book(s).
6. If you’d prefer to pay by eTransfer, they can do that, too. Let them know in your email, and they’ll send you a PDF invoice instead.

This sale will end Wednesday, June 21st at midnight, Eastern Time, so act fast, spread the word, and get any CZP ebook you want (*cough* Chasing the Dragon *cough*) for just $1.99!

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author Raymond Little, whose debut novel is Eyes of Doom. Here is the publisher’s description:

This is going to hurt . . .

Vinnie, Matt, Jack and Georgina’s friendship survived the fire in Hope House when they were eleven, but their memories of that fateful day did not. Neither did Frankie. But that hasn’t stopped Vinnie from seeing the dead boy years later. As they age, their memories start returning. The friends are plagued by glimpses of a strange, hook-nosed man. Visions of a Ouija board. And a sense that something is watching them. Something that is willing to bring chaos and death to everyone they love. The only thing the four can count on is a friendship that has spanned forty years. The past, the present, the future, it’s all the same. And now that the cycle is coming back on itself, it’s finally time for the friends to face the Eyes of Doom.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Raymond Little:

When Nick gave me this great gig of examining what I found to be the scariest part in the writing of Eyes of Doom, I thought, “Great, easy!” What writer doesn’t like talking about his work, after all? Then I sat at my keyboard, the same one I’ve used to pump out hundreds of thousands of words, and looked at my screen. And looked.

Uh, oh. Trouble.

It wasn’t that there were no scary parts to think of, or that I’d suffered a sudden writer’s block. In fact, it was the opposite, as scene after scene from the novel replayed in my mind. Some were concentrated on tense, psychological terror, others on the horror of extreme physical violence, but as I sifted through them a definite pattern emerged, and I was able to give a name to the particular fear that ran like a barbed thread throughout the novel: helplessness.

Most of us have suffered that feeling at some time in our life, and just replaying a particular predicament in our mind’s eye for which there seemed to be no way out at the time can be enough to cause a cold sweat. From financial dead-ends to dead end jobs, ethical mistakes that can never be taken back to being trodden over by someone in an unquestionable position of power. It hurts, and it’s frightening. But those examples are at the mild end of the Feeling-Helpless-Spectrum. Raise the stakes a little and the adrenalin really kicks in; the moment you step off a kerb and hear the rumble of the truck bearing down, the stranger on the doorstep with the maniacal grin and bloodstained hands that you know you should never have opened the door to, the realisation that the fire escape door at the end of the corridor is locked when the blaze is closing in behind. The feeling when nothing else can be done, other than to wait for the inevitable, and hope for good fortune. I had one such experience in my life, a scaffold staircase collapsing beneath my feet, and in the second or so it took for me to drop to ground level along with the broken tonne of steel, I remember the feeling of relinquished control, the knowledge that my immediate future was owned by gravity, and still somehow having time to think: this is going to hurt.

Eyes of Doom follows the lives of four friends — Jack, Vinnie, Georgina and Matt — from age ten in 1965 to present day. It’s no spoiler to reveal they are pursued by a relentless evil, which is the backbone of the story, and that they each find themselves at different times in their lives at the mercy of fate. And I’m not talking small stuff; they are in serious shit. The repeated motif, this is going to hurt, is a sentence nobody wants to hear. It’s a promise of pain, an assertion that your wish for safety depends on the whim of another. The novel is set against a backdrop of fifty years of cultural, social and political change, and when dropping real events into the chapters to give the reader a sense of time and place, I found the most vivid reminders to be frightening ones. War, terrorist attacks, disease and disasters — we all remember where we were, and how we felt, when witnessing such events either first hand or through our TV screens, and I certainly felt an uneasy chill when using them as a mirror to the lives of my characters.

For twentieth century man-and-womankind, helplessness is surely one of the most diabolical fears to suffer from. We have become masters of our environment. The world is mapped with everything in its right place, and we have created control through technology and medicine. Computers are the new God. Travel between continents can be achieved with relative ease and safety in the comfort of aircraft, diseases that have killed for millennia can be kept at bay with a pill or a jab. We have health and safety rules to keep us from harm, police to uphold our laws, and a universe of facts to draw upon with a tap of the thumb on a phone screen. We are intellectual, non-superstitious beings that no longer believe in monsters.

But don’t computers still crash?

Eyes of Doom: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Amazon UK

Raymond Little: Website / Facebook

Raymond Little is a Londoner who now lives in Kent, where he writes dark fiction. His short stories have appeared in anthologies including the resurrected Horror Library series and Blood Bound Book’s DOA II and Night Terrors III. He was included in the Dead End Follies article “10 Brilliant Writers You Probably Don’t Know,” and his story “An Englishman in St. Louis” sat alongside some of his own literary heroes such as Dickens and Poe in the Chilling Ghost Short Stories collection. Eyes of Doom is Ray’s first published novel.