I suppose this is my Halloween post. I had never read Stephen King’s novel It, I suppose because I saw snippets of the bad mini-series on TV in the 1990s and was turned off by it. But like literally everything I have read by King, I went into it not knowing what to expect and ended up thoroughly enjoying it. Sure, there are a few nasty gross parts. And what’s really disturbing about the novel is that it depicts violence against children. That is going to turn a lot of people off. But violence is never gratuitous in King’s books, there is always some moral order to his universe. And the monster in It is a supremely evil being with no redeeming features, and we know it is supremely evil with no redeeming features because it kills children. But the monster is not really the focus of the book. Like any King novel, and I’m thinking particularly of The Stand, he spends an enormous amount of time developing his characters and their back stories individually so we really get to know what they are thinking and feeling and how they got that way. Then he puts them together in various combinations and in various situations, and then he puts them all together and we get to see what they are thinking and feeling and how they react to each other. Maybe this is why most of the movies and series about his books suck, because movies and TV are not the right medium to tell the types of stories he tells. Anyway, I was a fan of The Stand, and It is even more interesting in some ways because we get to see the same characters, separately and together, as adults and children, and facing similar wacky situations separately and together as adults and children. So factor all this out mathematically and you can see how to get 1000+ pages of Stephen King!
A quick tangent: It has some lengthy passages describing the sewer and drainage systems of the town, which are intertwined and not supposed to be. And they have to be pumped out, which does in fact happen quite a bit in low-lying coastal areas. Since this is relevant to my particular profession, it’s just interesting to me that King had an understanding and interest in this at the time.
Anyway, one thing that surprises me is how different the kids in the story seem from my own kids today, and from my own childhood memories in the 1980s. The story, at least the part where the characters are children, takes place in the 1950s. Some kids in the story are pretty bad, with extremely violent bullying taking place. And some of the adults are pretty bad too. A few of them are brutalizing their own children, but they uniformly blame their own children when they are hurt by the bullies, and their kids are not honest with them as a result. They are also almost uniformly racist and antisemitic. All of which makes for a pretty complex and entertaining story, but was it really like this?
This all made me think a little bit about the idea of “free range kids” and whether I am being over-protective. The kids in the story were definitely free range kids, and they were at risk of death and injury a lot – from bullies, from cars, falling out of trees, drowning, etc. Sure, there is a fictional sewer monster stalking them in the story, but a few kids were going to die violently in this town monster or no monster. So Jonathan Haidt may tell me I am overprotective of my own children, but keeping them safe and healthy is my number one priority as a parent.
I’ve had an interesting experience over the last few years of simultaneously raising two children who are in elementary school and middle school, and also interacting with college students in their early 20s (I just turned 50 if anybody wants to know.) And one thing that strikes me is kids seem a bit kinder and gentler overall than they were even during my own childhood. Perhaps kids have become more “anxious” and lost their edge to survive in the wild as Jonathan Haidt claims (and demonstrates with hard evidence, which I don’t deny), but as a society we seem to have become less tolerant of the bullying in school children and the various forms of sexual coercion and assault that can go on around college age, not to mention outright racist and antisemitic behavior. As Haidt and others are demonstrating, there is some trend of bullying shifting from physical/in-person to online/electronic, and this seems to be disproportionately affecting girls, which I have observed with my own eyes in my children’s classes. Interestingly, I have not observed anything resembling the type of male playground bullying I experienced at times as a kid, although I have observed plenty of rough play leading to bumps and bruises and a little bit of blood here and there. Ironically, the one broken bone our family experienced occurred on one of the padded rubber playground surfaces Jonathan Haidt makes fun of in the interview I link to above. He says kids “can’t get hurt” on these surfaces. Well, they can if they fall just right in sort of a freakish upside-down way. I don’t blame myself or the playground designer, and I certainly won’t stop my kids from going back to that same playground.
The playground bullying I experienced as a kid was nothing on the order of what is depicted in It or Lord of the Flies (which Stephen King cites as an influence). But it must have been real. I am thinking of a few other books – particularly the Great Brain series I enjoyed reading in my own childhood, in which kids attempted to beat up other kids for being Mormons, and at least in the stories the Mormon protagonists learned how to “whip” the other kids soundly enough to be left alone. Charles Bukowksi’s Ham on Rye also comes to mind, in which there is some very disturbing violent assault behavior between school-age boys. And like It, adults are aware of it and choose to do nothing, or even partake in one disturbing case. I tend to think all these authors may have drawn on personal experience.
I’ll close here with a few facts and figures. Along with the rise of teenage depression and suicidal thoughts, particularly in girls, which Haidt and others have pointed out, there is a global rise in mortality specifically among teenagers and young adults, which bucks an overall trend of falling mortality among people of all ages. People at this age don’t die of disease (sure, a few do, but statistically I’m just saying this is a healthy age). They are dying of “injury, violence, suicide, road traffic accidents and substance abuse”. So these are the figurative evil clowns in the sewer stalking our children as they come of age.
Happy Halloween 2025! Watch out for evil sewer clowns, but seriously, watch out for reckless drivers and don’t be one yourself.