Here we have the short, not sweet life of the Cochran brothers. Their aside is left out of the miniseries entirely, so this whole post is a SPOILER.
This isn't a formal aside from Mike's notes: just something King gives us. Eddie Cochran's body was never recovered, as IT ate him as The Creature from the Black Lagoon. And just for a bit of added horror, his little brother Dorsey died by being beaten to death with a hammer. From his stepdad.
This section is horrible, but it sets up a lot of important things. Another kid with a connection to the Universal Monsters that plague the rest of the book is one.
It makes sense that other kids in the town would have pop-culture inspired fears. We'll see more of it later (but that's getting ahead of ourselves).
The other important thing is Eddie's reaction to the Gilman coming after him. Even as he's dying, he thinks it can't be real and searches for the zipper on the creature's back. The only other child that expresses such a strong amount of disbelief in the face of death is our good friend, Stan Uris.
Disbelief isn't a saving grace in Derry. It is death, both literal and metaphorical.
The other, more subtle factor is Dorsey's aforementioned beating death. Bev is also subject to beatings, and at one point IT actually inhabits her father, trying to do something worse than a beating. We don't witness the incident (King is not a monster), but in the aftermath we get the sense that the stepdad may have been pushed into his actions by the malevolence in the town. Oh, in another area he still would have been an abusive POS, but he may not have been so much of a terror, or a murderer.
Every little bit of wrongness in Derry is magnified by IT, whether it's an explosive disaster, or a parent making the wrong choices.
There will be a lot more of that before we're done.
This isn't a formal aside from Mike's notes: just something King gives us. Eddie Cochran's body was never recovered, as IT ate him as The Creature from the Black Lagoon. And just for a bit of added horror, his little brother Dorsey died by being beaten to death with a hammer. From his stepdad.
This section is horrible, but it sets up a lot of important things. Another kid with a connection to the Universal Monsters that plague the rest of the book is one.
It makes sense that other kids in the town would have pop-culture inspired fears. We'll see more of it later (but that's getting ahead of ourselves).
The other important thing is Eddie's reaction to the Gilman coming after him. Even as he's dying, he thinks it can't be real and searches for the zipper on the creature's back. The only other child that expresses such a strong amount of disbelief in the face of death is our good friend, Stan Uris.
Disbelief isn't a saving grace in Derry. It is death, both literal and metaphorical.
The other, more subtle factor is Dorsey's aforementioned beating death. Bev is also subject to beatings, and at one point IT actually inhabits her father, trying to do something worse than a beating. We don't witness the incident (King is not a monster), but in the aftermath we get the sense that the stepdad may have been pushed into his actions by the malevolence in the town. Oh, in another area he still would have been an abusive POS, but he may not have been so much of a terror, or a murderer.
Every little bit of wrongness in Derry is magnified by IT, whether it's an explosive disaster, or a parent making the wrong choices.
There will be a lot more of that before we're done.
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