by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
Let’s go back to the beginning of Stephen King for me with It …
This was the first Stephen King book I ever read. I saw the much maligned 90’s mini series and then a girl I was dated only for that Christmas break got it for me for Christmas because I mentioned I wanted to read it.
I got the book a couple weeks before Christmas and read it through that emotionally wild relationship. It was sort of secret and sort of not. She didn’t want to talk about it or hold hands at school, but then she would turn around and take me to a party with her cool friends and we’d be making out the whole time. It turned into one of those weird moments where the cool kids started wondering what I had going on, so I was accepted among them as this mysterious guy who landed a girl way too hot for him … unless there was something about me they didn’t know. That all wore off after we broke up.
She had broken up with her boyfriend who was much taller and more popular than me, but also a real screw-up. If he had it together more and she had not broken up with me as soon as she did, I probably would have gotten beaten to within an inch of my life. He was oddly absent during the time she and I were together. I was always afraid of him though. Can’t remember his name at all. I remember hers, but I’m going to leave it out of this story.
She broke up with me before New Years and was back with her old boyfriend like nothing happened. If he recognized me passing in the halls, he didn’t act like it and that was fine. She still stayed nice to me in classes like we were the same friends we were before she let me grab her breasts and she pawed all over me.
I spent New Years with my family down at another relative’s house. I was sad to be with them instead of friends. I was sad not to be with her, but not in the prolonged way that I was devastated after other breakups. All my relationships were short back then. I said I didn’t feel good and went to bed as my family counted down the New Year in the other room.
Part of the reason I wasn’t upset about the break up was that the whole relationship occurred in that strange space over the holidays where everything feels different. You’re not at school, it’s not on the day of the holiday, and you’re just kind of in this temporal limbo of other reality. Once that was over and school started again, it was like reality had returned where I was not dating a super hot girl who was just beginning her downward spiral of worse and worse guys.
All that to say, this was the emotional whirlwind in which I was introduced to Stephen King and to horror as a genre through the book It. Maybe that’s the kind of emotional psycho-sexual imprint that sticks with you for life and maybe sets you on a destiny to read, imagine, and write in this genre as your life’s purpose. Who knows?
So, let’s revisit It. My next post will be After It which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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