Friday, August 18, 2017

The IT Spot: Rereading part 31

The movie's about to come out, I need to step this up.

You think that's real funny, don't you, me?

When we last left off, Bev was almost molested by her father, and Mike was on death's door. We rejoin as Henry and his gang in childhood catch up to Bev, with the switchblade.


A woman in a car sees the violence and tries to stop things. She fails when Henry goes after her car with a knife. Another man sees what's happening, folds his paper and goes back inside. He seems to be under the same sort of trance the loggers were when the ax murderes happened.

Pictured; a night on the town in old Derry.

Bev manages to get away after kicking Henry in the balls. Then the perspective flips to the adult Bill and Bev, who are about to have sex. Yes, Big Bill, the hero of the story, cheats on his wife.


Bill feels bad after the act, and knows that doesn't make it okay, and that he's hurt his marriage, even if Audra was never to know. Hmm, been a while since we saw Tom and Audra at that hotel together. Oh, well, I'm sure that'll end up being nothing.


 The scene ends with Bev realizing she slept with all of them as kids, and Bill realizing them sleeping together now is at least in part due to the cyclical nature of the events around IT and their lives.

Bev is uncomfortable with the realization, as are the readers who have discussed this. Remember, they were all eleven and twelve at the time. Bill tries to justify it in brief, saying that Bev did it, willingly, to help them escape the sewers. There's a lot to be said on a metaphorical level: they transitioned from kids to adults with the act, leaving IT behind. They formed an inner circled, like with the blood sharing.

There are others, but what it boils down to is this: Stephen King was in the depths of his drug and alcohol addiction when writing this. Not at rock bottom, but very far along. And while the reader can understand why the act was written, nobody is really defending it. It exists, in greater detail during a later flashback. It's awful, but so is everything else in IT.

There's more flash forwards and back with Bowers, now after the others with Mike dead (he thinks). He remembers getting the switch blade in the mail, from Robert Gray, and killing his father. He then went out and chased Bev into the barrens, where she hid in the clubhouse with Ben. Pennywise calls to him, telling him to wait and watch.

I think IT may actually be lazy as well as scared. IT hasn't been hurt prior to the losers club. ITs life until now has consisted of coming to earth, waiting until people came, killing, eating, then napping and starting over again. Derry serves IT meals on a platter. IT is complacent. Or was until the Losers fought back and actually hurt IT badly. So IT decides to have some mortals do ITs work for IT.

Henry is crazy, and even being a sort-of tool of IT doesn't make him sympathetic. His father was crazy, and he was targeted by IT, but he's still a racist grudge holding bully. You can feel slightly for him as he thinks about his dead friends and how he just wants the voices to stop, but it's only the slightest of human emotion.

It's a hard section, and things will just keep getting harder from here.

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