Reading the story, the “gangbang” part wasn’t like a huge orchestrated planned event. The kids were lost in the dark, loosing hope, and knew that IT wanted them to feel down and weak as alone they could be defeated by IT.
In an effort to make them feel close, Beverly took it up her self to make them all Eskimo Brothers. This brought the Losers Club back into solidarity.
I’m a big fan of Stephen Kings work. He’s deserving of respect as a writer and story teller. Your explanation is reasonable and true in the context of the story.
There is just no way to talk about, write about, discuss, etc, stuff like that, without the air in the room not going still as fuck. All of what you say is true, it’s still… off.
And that book was just a bit too long, but again, great book, great writer, questionable AS FUCK portion.
There is just no way to talk about, write about, discuss, etc, stuff like that, without the air in the room not going still as fuck.
I don’t think that’s true at all. I think there are a lot of people out there who could discuss it, but that requires a significant degree of emotional maturity and there are too many people who can’t step back and be open to discussing topics which make them uncomfortable.
Mate, where are you going with this? Aldous Huxely erotic play for children? I think you’re missing the point. It’s not a discussion because the fallacy purported by the writer was to give 12 year olds emotions, desires, and mental processes that they simply have not yet developed. Beverly, the twelve year old girl, wouldn’t think to have sex with her friends to comfort them. Full stop. That’s the writer putting these emotions where they simply wouldn’t exist. And. Creepy.
It’s not maturity. Maturity is knowing that twelve year olds don’t reason that way.
There are plenty of people who are abused at a young age that come to associate sex with giving comfort or thinking its the only way they can help others.
Sure.
There’s also choosing to put that into a book. Choosing to put that in a story. Thinking about the psychology of a sexually abused child and thinking “this would go well into my book.”
i definitely knew about sex by 12
Same? Like does no one remember being 12, or did they just block it out?
Ummm was your childhood stunted or something? 12yos absolutely can be capable of complex emotional intelligence and reasoning. Hell, for most of humanity “childhood” wasn’t even a concept and an adult was anyone over 13.
And don’t get me wrong, that we can gift our young the idea of “childhood” is simply one of the greatest achievements of the modern world, so I’m not out here trying to say kids should be considered adults again, but I think you are vastly underestimating the capability of children. Especially children who are trauma survivors and haven’t had the benefit of the slow progress of childhood gifted to them.
Sure. People can have a mature discussion about real life events. But when you make fantasy stories about children having sex that’s a fantasy.
You’re making a fantasy. You’re writing characters In a fantasy world and having them do this very inappropriate thing. And what makes it weirder is that the writer isn’t a child, he’s an old man. It’s creepy.
And isn’t that supposed to be the not creepy part of the book?
That sounds very much like a pedophile fantasy.
That’s like saying that a lot of people get murdered in Stephen King’s stories, so he must have homicidal fantasies.
Horror writers look for ways to shock and shake up their readers, and judging from the comments here, he succeeded.
Jonathan Swift must have really wanted to cannibalize poor children!
I’ll never forget bringing that up in a classroom and realizing adults had no idea it was satire.
Yep when your job is to shock, gross out and give people very specifically a moral and ethical panic attack
You tend to do some fucked up stuff.
I assumed that there was a reason that he agrees with trump on not releasing the Epstein files.
Thank God for the Beverly’s of the world, keeping it all together
Wasn’t it because the clown only went after innocent children?
So in order to lose their innocence they had a gang bang.
They were lost in the dark sewer trying to find their way out/in from Pennywise’s layer. I forget the exact scenario. They are lost and beginning to lose hope and have fear take over. As they wander around the dark further, after their last match has burned out, unsure where the exit is.
The deed brings them together and gives gives hope they are not alone and together they can win.
To be fair, he was drowning in cocaine when writing that book, so he managed to keep the lid on it to the best of his abilities.
Ah. This is why everyone posting cocaine.
I was trying to figure out how a bunch of tweens stuck in the sewer got a hold of enough cocaine to think an orgy would help their cause.
According to King, at the height of his cocaine use he wrote the entire novel Cujo and doesn’t remember writing it at all.
You could also make a strong case that the director credit for the movie Maximum Overdrive should go to cocaine rather than King lol.
Yeah, King went through a rough patch that only got worse before it got better.
Stephen King is not a good writer. He has great story ideas; but, his actual writing is poor and he does weird things that are unsupported by the narrative - like writing sewer gangbang scenes with children so that they can defeat the bad guy with the power of underage eskimo brotherhood.
You can explain that in a less derisive way that sounds a bit more reasonable, but it doesn’t make it a good narrative choice.
Another example is 11/22/63. People on reddit cream their pants over the book, but it’s literally just King self-inserting as the main character so he can (totally uncritically) reminisce over how great small town America was in the 50s/60s and have a fantasy relationship with this incredibly weak/badly-written female character and repeatedly “make poundcake” with her and drink rootbeer floats in diners or whatever. It’s an 800+ page book (paperback is 1049 pages) supposedly about time traveling to stop the Kennedy assassination (which is a cool story idea), but like 700+ pages are filled with asinine garbage and the actual plot is thin and pretty bad.
This is pretty much my experience with King. I highly appreciate his ability to consistently create great story ideas, but his actual writing is just kind of bad. Since he has so many books, there might be some good ones in there, but from what I’ve read I’m not impressed. Not that he needs to impress me, he’s done fine for himself.
I read so many of his book thinking “at some point I’ll land on one that’ll make me understand what all the fuss is about”. Never happened. As you said, the guy has great concept ideas, but he doesn’t know how to build on them. So many endings are so stupid and far fetched it would be comical if it were a Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure episode…
King isn’t a “writer” as much as he’s “some rando that took up horror lit as a paid hobby in college in order to fund the completion of his ‘opus’ The Dark Tower series …some numerous decades later” 🤢 Prolific =/= professional, etc.
Disclaimer: I enjoyed the Tower books and many of his other books.
Often his man characters are reparative, always writers. I had many hits with him but also misses. Like maybe because I was too young and have no children of my own I found Pet sematary not very good. But what he does he gets me into a flow of reading. He makes it easy for me to enjoy the book no matter how thin the plot is.
But there a couple of plot points I admit I find now weird and not well played out. Like in The Stand why is everybody understanding English? There is no real communication barrier apart from not being able to talk at all. So I miss language barriers. So his books have a place in my heart but I also grew up with Goosebumps so it was a natural progression to King.
I completely agree. A couple of his books are okay, but most are long-winded, self-indulgent tosh that would have been far better if written by practically anyone else. Half the time, you can skip entire chapters and miss nothing, because he seems to think describing every minute aspect of every minor character’s life equals character development. Five pages cataloguing all the canned goods in Jimmy’s grandmother’s pantry, all the steps of her apple pie recipe, where she learnt it, how she decides which milk to buy, why the grocer moved the milk from aisle 5 to aisle 2, etc, etc, etc – none of it matters and it’s a slog to read.
It’s like he thinks more words equals a better novel. He is a better writer than a director, though.
People always praise his characters, but they always come across as flat caricatures to me. And he seems to have maybe 10 of them that he just repeats over and over again.
At least people will admit that the horror books often are terrible. The dark tower books suffer from so much of the same, but are lauded and people will flip out if you say they’re not good. The entire first book was like reading a history timeline rather than a story, and was boring history to boot. The second book was better, but still just felt like a really dull friend relaying a story.
“Buy why”
Drugs.
Don’t blame the drugs, man. Drugs only enhance what’s already there. Just like Ambian didn’t make Roseanne racist.
Wasn’t IT about the loss of innocence? Also drugs were a factor
I always thought the part with Patrick and the refrigerator was far, far worse than the adolescent sex scene.
Also, Beverly having her period is a pretty big plot point. Not exactly prepubescent. The boys maybe.
This scene haunts me to this day. The barrens is for me the most unholy place in fictional existence. Shouldn’t have read it as a teenager. Nobody stopped me cause “look she is reading such a huge book.” …
When I was 12, my mum told my teacher that I found the books we were reading for class childish. Teacher then gave me IT to read instead. No idea what he was thinking. Being the same age as the characters, the sex scene was the most traumatizing by far.
Wow. Thankfully my teacher had better sense (or maybe not); when he asked why I wasn’t doing silent reading of our course textbook, I told him I read the whole text the night before or on the weekend. He was pissed at first…and was yelling about it. Not sure why. But next day he must of realized he overreacted and brought in the Battlefield Earth tome for me. It was the thickest book I’d ever seen, and kept me busy. Something like 900 pages maybe. Lol.
Lmao what’s up with teachers getting mad at little kids reading faster than they should?! I have similar experience where the whole class was supposed to read one book together, like a chapter per week at home. At that point I was a major fantasy nerd and could read several books per week, so imagine the agony when the book was actually good! I gave up pretty quickly and just read it, and the teacher was so angry. I didn’t get in any more trouble than that either, though. I guess you’d have to be a really bad teacher to actually punish a kid for reading, even if you get mad at your plans getting ruined
Yeah it’s weird. Like you have the lesson plans, just give the kids that are ahead the next section.
Luckily we had a cool music teacher, she saw that I lacked music capabilities so just let me bring a book to read in class. After a while there was two of us reading at a desk while rest of the class played three blind mice for the 100th time LOL.
Snortin’ Whiskey, Drinkin’ Cocaine.
Well, Coca Cola…
This scene is such a stain on his legacy I wish he’d put out a version without it.
I think that we all have really fucked up thoughts every now and again, and behaving like we never have is a great way to delude ourselves into believing a false reality.
Better to own them and grow than bury them and act like you’re some golden god on high.
In interviews he’s said how we are the messed up ones for finding it gross. Something along the lines of “everyone is fine with the child murders but somehow the sex scene is wrong”.
I’ve reread it a couple times but skip over that scene.
What was acceptable in the past is no longer acceptable. There are people that can’t accept that.
Paedophilia?
Cocaine?
Maybe a fleeting dream or memory he had as a teen where he was part of a gangbang?
there are people being murdered in this story as well, so he must want to murder someone too right?
Is this from the fable?
I will admit I’ve had my suspicions about him for a long time. He’s also written a short story of a child being raped outside a library and in another he went into great descriptive detail about the genitalia of a young girl who is lost in the woods. This is after she drank water from a stream resulting in exposure to Cholera.
Really tells us all we need to know about Stephen King.
I read his crap as an older teen, and frankly it sucked.
lol
Stephen King is an objectively good writer, especially when it comes to portraying realistic characters, even if his stories aren’t always great. Just because you don’t enjoy something doesn’t mean that it’s not good.
I like King, but I still have to admit that a lot of his characters sound like what a space alien would come up with after studying humans for a few months.
“Hello, fellow human! I also enjoy eating Big Macs from McDonald’s, drinking Coca-Cola, and listening to Bruce Springsteen music!”
