Boo!

Rainy, dark skies, leaves falling; it is time for a Halloween read, and I wanted a scary one, so I picked Stephen King’s It.  I have seen the movie and so a lot of the plot isn’t a surprise to me, but the thing about It that makes it so scary isn’t really what you read, it is what it makes you think.

 

The brilliant thing about It is that for each kid in the story It is something else. It is each child’s worst nightmare; their most base fear and so it is impossible to read without conjuring up your own It.  And what it was when you were eleven.

At eleven, I remember turning off the light in the basement and running up the stairs, not just running, but running with all my might and almost feeling something closing in behind me. It was vaguely vampiric as I recall. I still get a shiver going up those stairs; especially at night.  I wonder how my brothers felt since they slept down there?   

My It now is much more basic and much less confined to the dark, and that is what rises my heckles, and enters my dreams, about this book and makes it a pretty great Halloween read so far.