PARTING SHOT

Resolved, that reading junk is a far, far better thing than reading nothing at all. Junk can be the springboard to more serious fare, and besides, while the great books are great, they’re also hard; nobody ever “curled up” with Heidegger. Proust, or Henry James. Drop your guard while perusing such masters, and meaty concepts and arcane symbols that shimmer with meaning slide past your uncomprehending eyes.

So give me junk, on those days when the mind’s muscles are tired; on winter Sundays when the Cowboys have been eliminated and bowlers dominate the tube, when it seems that baseball will never come again. At such times it’s nice to reach for something a little higher than television but considerably easier than The Critique of Pure Reason, of which I only recall that page four was even more impenetrable than page three. God only knows (or does He?) about page five.

I normally prefer short junk, some livre de garbage to be bolted down in about the time it would take to watch “Who’s the Boss?” and “Dynasty.” Nevertheless, I finally broke down and read a Stephen King novel, and I have learned two things: a little Stephen King goes a long way, and there is no such thing as a little Stephen King.

Big deal, you say? You’re darned right, big. It, King’s latest chiller, makes some of James Michener’s hemiating tomes look like Reader’s Digest excerpts. Have the Guinness people seen It? At 1,138 pages, this behemoth is the longest book ever written about a tiny word. (Sorry, I already checked Z, Vassilis Vassilikos’s gripping novel of politics and paranoia in Greece: a mere 406 pages, a minnow beside this literary lunker.) Do not say that It runs 1,138 pages; nothing that big could run.

Novels such as The Stand (touted by some King cultists as his masterpiece), Cujo, and The Dead Zone, aided by the movies made from his work, have made King a pop culture icon too big to ignore. He’s one of those extremely rare writers known even to those who don’t read him. During the World Series, the cameras doted on King, an avid Red Sox fan, munching hot dogs in the stands. He has done an American Express “Do you know me?” commercial, and Time recently devoted a cover to him.

With such success, how can any editor say enough already? King loyalists will disagree-not violently, I hope-but at least 400 pages of this monster monster book should have been pruned away. Edgar Allan Poe says somewhere that a work of horror should be short, preferably short enough to read in a single sitting, The reason is obvious. Most of us like to be scared occasionally, but few readers can sustain the shivers for the week it would take to read this book even at 150 pages per night, a good clip. When King is not writing truly hair-raising horror scenes, the sort that remain etched in acid on the mind, he must fall back on straight expository prose and dialogue, not his strong suit. At those too-frequent moments, reading It becomes sheer torture, as King chatters on like an insane parrot.

The plot of It reunites six old friends, now in their late thirties, to combat a mysterious force they call It-the essence of all that is evil in the world. They return to their old home town of Derry, Maine (King’s home state and a frequent site for his fictions). The being’s hungers are cyclical; every twenty-five years. It has preyed on Derry, and the feedings coincide with increased violence and hatred in the town, culminating in an orgy of killing. It came the last time in 1958, when the Losers, a group of unpopular kids (tat slob, stutterer, black, Jew, etc.) fought It to a draw in the storm sewers beneath Derry. They pledged that if It ever returned, they would come back. Now Mike Hanlon, the only one of the gang to stay in Derry, calls to tell them the terror has begun again.

So the trouble starts-for characters and readers. One of the Losers, now a successful accountant, tared worse than the others at the hands of the monster the first time around: the thought of a return match drives him to a gruesome suicide. Given the book’s omniscient point of view, King could have stayed with Stan Uris’s final thoughts. Instead, he plants us in the mind of Stan’s wife. Blithely unaware of trouble, she is sewing. We are told about her sewing. She needs a black button. For a blue shirt. And she is watching “Family Feud.” The Ryan family just scored 280 points! The reader may be wondering about the ominous phone call from Derry and Stan’s strange expression, but King insists on telling us just how the Ryans scored those points. A haunted man is dying, but where is that black button? The book is marbled with such fatty passages. King seems constitutionally incapable of zipping us through an unimportant transition scene or summarizing rather than quoting a tedious conversation. At one point, several pages are spent on a leisurely chat with a cab driver who regales us with the joys of spitting. Forests died for this?

Still, for all its annoying length and often gelatinous pace. King does give us about 600 pages of crackerjack writing. (Sadly, it’s up to the reader to find them.) The scene in the bathroom of the old house is just one of many that should be read on a sunny afternoon with some friends nearby.

If It is a representative King novel, one reason for his immense popularity is clear: he tells us that what we hope is true about human beings is true. No romantic poet ever believed more strongly in the innate goodness of children (some children, that is). Finally, the incorruptible Losers, who have mysteriously retained the pure hearts of childhood-well, you’ll have to read it yourself.

But like the Shadow, King knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, and he is even better at plumbing the cankered souls of wife-beaters, sadists, sociopaths, gay-baiters, and others who are ripe to be used by the evil lurking beneath Derry. King’s bad guys are loathsome long before they fall under It’s sway. And it’s a credit to his power-blunted by his own excesses-that when King leads these lost souls to their unspeakable deaths, we almost feel sorry for them. Nobody, we think, deserves such a fete. But in this book, there’s always more, and more, and more where that came from.