Just Do IT

I recently read and reviewed Stephen King's 11/22/63, in which the novel's time-traveling narrator spends an early passage of the book in the town of Derry. King fans know this fictional New England town well--it served as the location for his 1986 novel It, and 11/22/63 even features a cameo by teenaged versions of two of the earlier book's protagonists, Beverly Marsh and Richie Tozier (their appearance is set a few years after their initial defeat of Pennywise). I hadn't read It, or watched the four-hour 1990 ABC miniseries adaptation, in probably two decades, but this brief taste of Derry and its strangely haunted inhabitants was enough to inspire me to check out both interpretations. And, much like the grown-up heroes of King's magnum opus, my memories had grown hazy, but they came flooding back with frightening speed and intensity.

It, the novel, was every bit as creepy and heartbreaking as I remembered it to be. Just as the Losers had to defeat the shapeshifting, child-murdering clown known as Pennywise as kids only to reunite as adults and return to Derry to really, truly put an end to It, I first read King's massive tome in junior high but returned to It as a reasonable hand-drawn facsimile of a grown-up. I found that I had a new appreciation for the way King's parallel narrative--one in 1958, the other in 1985--highlights the differences in the kid versions and the adult versions of the book's seven protagonists. I love how some of the characters escape the confines of their youth (fat kid Ben Hanscom loses his weight after a run-in with a nasty high school gym coach, motormouthed class clown Richie Tozier is able to parlay his obnoxious nature into a successful gig as a syndicated radio disc jockey), while others aren't able to fully shake their past (Beverly Marsh marries a simulacrum of her abusive father, while Eddie Kaspbrak weds a dead ringer for his worry-wart, hypochondriac mother). But of course, the thousand faces of Pennywise are the real show-stopper here; It knows what scares these kids, and feeds on that fear by transforming into, among other things, a mummy, a rotting leper, a witch, a vampire, a giant bird, Frankenstein's monster, and the Creature From The Black Lagoon. None of this would mean much besides mere name-dropping without King's wonderfully gruesome descriptions of these horrors, rendered vividly in the author's blackly humorous and inimitable voice. At the time, King said It was his last horror hurrah, and he definitely pulls out all the stops, even veering into crazily Lovecraftian territory for the beast's cosmic origins.

And then there's the time that John Boy, Venus Flytrap, Jack Tripper, Lana Lang, and Judge Harold T. Stone got together to fight a big rubber spider with googly eyes. All right, that might not be the fairest assessment of the TV adaptation of It, but the two-part miniseries is pretty rough going. A cast of TV mainstays that includes Richard Thomas (The Waltons), Tim Reid (WKRP In Cincinatti), John Ritter (Three's Company), Harry Anderson (Night Court), and Annette O'Toole (Lana Lang in Superman III, but somehow also Ma Kent on Smallville!) provides the star power as the grown-up monster killers (The Thing's Richard Masur and Dennis Christopher, who I only know from this miniseries, round out the cast). Also on board is Black Christmas's Olivia Hussey and, of course, Tim Curry (in a "Special Appearance") as Pennywise, in a role that apparently made a whole generation of kids terrified of clowns forever after.

To be fair, there wasn't much chance that It was ever going to work on a television budget. The makeup budget for Pennywise's various transformations alone would have been cost-prohibitive, not to mention the price tag for half of the story being a period piece. Then there's also the little matter of all those gruesome child murders--ABC's Standards & Practices Department wouldn't have been too amused. Unfortunately, the solutions arrived at by screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen and director Tommy Lee Wallace don't really cut the mustard. Instead of his run-in with the Leper--a symbol for his paralyzing fear of disease and decay--young Eddie Kaspbrak is menaced by...living, snakelike shower faucets? Rather than being killed by the Frankenstein Monster in the sewers beneath Derry, bullies Victor Criss and Belch Huggins are dispatched instead by a glowy light that pulls them into sewer pipes. And instead of a monster bird nesting in the Derry Ironworks, Mike Hanlon sees...nothing. Not until he joins up with the Losers, anyway (here bafflingly referred to as the "Lucky Seven"). At times, the miniseries is hilariously literal in its interpretation of King's text--Belch Huggins really does deliver approximately 80% of his dialogue in belch form. That must have been a fun audition process.

Tim Curry really gets into the spirit of Pennywise, cackling, capering, and hissing with evil glee. John Ritter, Tim Reid, and Dennis Christopher all do quite well as the adult versions of Ben, Mike, and Eddie. The young cast, which includes Seth Green and Jonathan Brandis as Richie and Bill, respectively, is solid, and some of the monster makeups--like the Teenage Werewolf and an acid-scarred incarnation of Pennywise--are actually pretty good. But then there are those aforementioned compromises of budget and the censors, which serve to de-fang King's monster menagerie. The climax is spectacularly goofy. The nightmarish spider that serves as It's ultimate form in the novel, a black-furred monstrosity with red eyes and ooze-dripping mandibles, is represented here by a rubbery, lobsterlike, animatronic beastie with hypnotic plates in its underbelly. King himself said it best in a Fangoria interview, where he called the creature a "Tonka Toy". There's been talk recently of Warner Brothers adapting It once again, this time as two feature films directed by Cary Fukunaga (2011's Jane Eyre). In this new adaptation, the flashbacks would be set in the early 1980s, which makes sense but begs the question--will the children of Derry now be terrorized by Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers instead of the Mummy and the Creature? Time will tell if the new version works, assuming it ever reaches the screen...but it's safe to say that as far as the exploits of Pennywise the Dancing Clown are concerned, nobody does It better than Stephen King himself.

11/22/63

There was a short-lived TV show called Journeyman a few years back that dealt often with the impracticality of time travel. The show's hero, played by Rome's Kevin McKidd (my girlfriend Hillary still had a crush on him from his tenure as Lucius Vorenus, which is the chief reason we watched this new show) fell victim to a seemingly random, and decidedly inconvenient, form of temporal displacement--he was always being whisked away into another time zone at the most inopportune moment, and as such was always finding himself without the proper currency of said zone, or the proper clothing, or the proper knowledge of the area's geography, or what have you. There was more to the show, of course--a larger conspiracy involving the mysterious forces that kept sending this poor guy bouncing around through time--but it did spend a lot of each episode showing McKidd's character having to adapt by doing things like accumulating big wads of money from years past in the event that he was suddenly sucked back to 1969 or something. Stephen King's 2011 novel 11/22/63 deals with time travel in a similar way. The book's protagonist can't just hop into a souped-up DeLorean and zoom back to Dealey Plaza just in time to save President Kennedy from Lee Harvey Oswald--he's at the mercy of time travel itself. This means he has to play by the phenomenon's peculiar rules, which include the notion that he can only travel to one particular point in time, then wait around to accomplish his chosen mission to save JFK. Depending on your temperament as a reader, this approach to time travel may be either tedious or fascinating, but that's the game King is playing here. Recently-divorced English teacher Jake Epping is stunned to discover that the owner & proprietor of his favourite diner, who only yesterday was perfectly healthy, is now suddenly in the final stages of lung cancer. Jake learns that Al, the diner owner, discovered an unusual naturally-occurring phenomenon in his pantry years ago: a portal that leads always to the same sunny morning in 1958. For the longest time, Al used this portal--which always returns the user to a mere two minutes after they left their own time--to buy deli meats at 1958 prices (leading to lots of local speculation that the only way he could charge so little for his food was to serve roadkill sandwiches). However, after awhile, Al decided to use the portal for a much nobler purpose: he would make his home in the past for the five years required to locate and kill Lee Harvey Oswald before he could assassinate John F. Kennedy. After all, once the deed was done, he could return to 2011 as though only two minutes had passed, and see the (hopefully positive) changes his heroic act had wrought. Unfortunately, while he was waiting around for that fateful November afternoon, Al contracted lung cancer, and no choice but to return to 2011 and pass his mission on to someone else. Which is where Jake Epping comes in. After a few test runs, where we learn some other rules of time travel (for example, each new trip through the portal is a hard reset, undoing the work of any previous jaunts), Jake is ready. Armed with a nest egg of 1958 money and a sports almanacs with which he can place winning bets on any number of World Series and Superbowls to accumulate further funds (shades of Back To The Future II here), Jake kisses 2011 goodbye and sets up shop in the past. Along the way, he undertakes a few other altruistic missions of personal significance, which brings him to the town of Derry only a few years after the in-flashback events of King's 1986 novel It (and allows for a welcome cameo by the now-teenaged Beverly Marsh and Richie Tozier). As he closes in on Oswald, trying to determine if he really was the lone gunman in Dallas that day, Jake resumes teaching, falls in love with a school librarian, and draws the ire of a vengeful bookie who can't help wondering why this mysterious stranger always bets so successfully on such long shots. 11/22/63 isn't a horror novel, as you may have guessed by now. It falls into a more unique category of suspense ringed with science fiction. The SF angle merely provides the What If? scenario, while the suspense comes from wondering how Jake will actually survive long enough in the past to achieve his objective (since he narrates in his own tale, the odds are pretty good). The past, it seems, doesn't want to be changed, and keeps throwing obstacles in Jake's way. There's also the possibility that if Jake does succeed, the world of the future may actually be changed for the worse by his actions. And there's the larger question of what effect all this tinkering is having on the fragile tissue of the space-time continuum. At nearly 900 pages, readers will have lots of chances to discover for themselves if King's approach to time travel is their cup of tea--like Jake, the reader may start to feel like years really are going by. Jake is problematic as well. He's little more than a cipher for the reader in this particular "what would YOU do?" type of problem, and as such, he's not particularly interesting. But his predicament is, and as November 22, 1963 got closer, I found myself turning the pages faster and faster. Time flies when you're having fun, I suppose.