When I was around 11 years old, my family decided to drive from southwest Florida to northern Ohio. I wasn’t that great at videogames so, figuring my Gameboy wouldn’t keep me entertained for long, I decided to buy a book; one that would be long enough to last me through the trip there and back. I finally decided on Stephen King’s It; a book that would stay with me long after that trip. I had already been pretty obsessed with horror art as a kid; gravitating toward the Ravenloft campaign setting in Dungeons & Dragons and drawing any monster that my imagination could conjure (or in many cases regurgitate) but It knocked me on my ass. I’d never read anything so raw, so perversely vicious…I felt like the book was radiating illness into me, yet I still couldn’t put it down. I’d seen new depths of terror by the time I finished the over 1,000 page vacation in hell; a sickening depression taking hold of me as I constantly thought of the sadism and brutality that the endless creature emanated while leaving a void where childish innocence had once resided. To this day, no reading experience has come close to matching the hopeless low of It with the exception of The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers which left me despondent for nearly 2 weeks.

Floating in the Deadlights

With It, King immerses us in cinnamon childhood nostalgia with brownish bloodstained edges, the intense terror of psychotic afterschool bullies, and a transdimensional cosmic nightmare too immense and horrific for our minds to properly process. In this reality, no amount of purity and innocence can shield you from the fates that stories typically reserve for only the most horrid of villains. Our very flesh becomes just another weakness, another vulnerability to be exploited by an insatiable creature with no reason. The ones we love turn to dust in our arms and the ones we once feared are slowly digested before our eyes. And then there’s this whole other level that It refers to on a number of occasions; the deadlights, an orange glowing radiance that actually sucks away light and beauty, a foul error in cosmic balance that slowly consumes the sacred.