It is two days before the release of King’s latest book, Other Worlds Than These, the third book in the trilogy whose first two books, The Talisman (1984) and Black House (2001), he co-wrote with Peter Straub. Straub died in 2022 but had sent King some ideas about the third book (King mentioned as long ago as 2016 that the third Talisman book was in progress).
Two days ago, the New York Times published an interview with King in which he discussed his process of “channeling” Peter Straub, and when the interviewer asked what that meant, King described rereading some of Straub’s old work, noting that he himself is a “literary forger”–a fact that would be well known to King fans. King also mentions something that he had before in previous interviews about their process writing the first two books–that they were deliberately trying to sound like each other so that readers wouldn’t know who wrote which parts.
I could never really tell who wrote what (occasional lines might prompt a guess), and I wouldn’t mind taking a crack at the King archives to look at drafts and start to answer that question, though I suppose that would violate their wishes. But when King mentioned in this interview that the major difference between him and Straub was that King liked rock ‘n’ roll while Straub liked jazz, I thought I might know who wrote a particular section of Black House.
That their taste in music is the one thing they don’t have in common is also funny in light of King referring to having gotten “the band back together” with the two of them.
It is kind of hilarious that he has positioned himself so that three signifiers of the Muschietti IT adaptations are visible, the red balloon on his shirt, the red balloon in the background, and the Bill Skarsgård Pennywise that appears to be a cup. I guess he’s a fan.
For context (and full spoilers!), The Talisman is about twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer going on a cross-country mission to obtain the mystical object of the Talisman in order to heal his mother Lily’s cancer. He is led to this mission by an old magical Black man who shows him how to flip into the parallel universe of “the Territories.” (Can I guess who wrote that part?) Speedy gets introduced in the very first chapter, and according to a 2021 Kingcastepisode on The Talisman, King claimed he and Straub sat down together to write the beginning before going their separate ways and swapping pages back and forth with one writing forward from what the other had sent. (The article here also mentions this process.) So maybe they were sitting together at the same computer (or typewriter) to draft chapter 1, but I can still guess whose idea the magical Black man was as the impetus for the entire plot.
If this process for the most part obscured who wrote what, what’s clear is that two writers, when one of them is Stephen King, are going to write a book that is a lot longer than it needs to be. As Jack crosses from the East Coast to the West Coast, he flips back and forth to the Territories along the way, usually to escape something bad in one place or the other and usually to find the situation in the parallel world just as bad. Jack works for a period at a seedy bar with an abusive owner, and then, once he picks up a friendly werewolf friend, they get stuck at an abusive orphanage run by a sham preacher. The werewolf friend, named Wolf, sacrifices himself to get Jack out of there, at which point Jack goes to the prep school where his friend Richard is a student–Richard is the son of the novel’s villain, Morgan Sloat, Jack’s dead father’s former business partner. Jack is in Illinois by this point–about halfway across the country, though we’re more than halfway through the book. Progress is expedited by them hopping a train through the “Blasted Lands” that will be a lot like a sequence in the third Dark Tower book, The Waste Lands, some years later. King has only written the first Dark Tower book at this point, so when the titular Talisman turns out to be “the nexus of all possible worlds,” one wonders how much of a conception he had that this was what the Dark Tower itself was supposed to be. When they get to the West Coast, Jack has to go through a “black hotel” to retrieve the Talisman, and once he does, has a confrontation with Morgan Sloat (slash Morgan’s “twinner” from the Territories) on the beach outside. Morgan tries to destroy the Talisman with fire from his magic lightning rod but the Talisman spits the fire back and kills him. Jack gets the Talisman back to his mother on the East Coast and heals her. It’s probably also important to note that his mother’s “twinner” is the queen of the Territories and so is also dying, as Jack sees early on when he visits the Territories, so the mission to save his mother is really more significant for saving this queen.
In Black House, Jack, now an adult, is a successful homicide detective in Los Angeles. Because of touching the Talisman, he is extremely successful at everything he does. But he’s repressed his memories of the Territories and his childhood experiences there, and when they’re triggered by a particular image that reminds him of Speedy lying dead on the beach near the end of The Talisman (though it turned out Speedy was not actually dead), he is so shaken he goes into early retirement in a small town in Wisconsin where he had helped bust a serial killer some time before. When a new serial killer starts killing children there, everyone wants Jack to help, but for a long time he refuses and continues to try to repress his trauma, until Speedy returns in his dream and encourages (i.e., yells at) him to. It turns out the killer, aka “the Fisherman,” aka Charles Burnside, has the ability to flip back and forth to the Territories and is abducting children who might serve as “breakers” of the beams of the Dark Tower, and has abducted one who might be the most powerful breaker ever, a boy named Ty. Burnside’s house is the titular “Black House” which is a portal to the Territories. Jack befriends a biker gang of former English majors known as the “Thunder 5” who help him on the case of finding Ty, and when they get close to Black House, they start getting sick and one is bitten by a huge demonic dog. This bite poisons him to death, and on his deathbed he gives Jack a magic word, “d’yamba.” Jack uses this word to summon a bunch of magic bees before they go back and enter Black House, and they are guided by the queen bee through a bunch of weird funhouse rooms. Burnside is about to seemingly rape Ty on the Territories side before handing him over to “Mr. Munshun,” a minion of the Crimson King, but in the process of killing Jack’s friend Henry, Burnside incurred a wound that enables Ty to be able to get the upper hand and kill him. Jack and the others find him and they go to confront Mr. Munshun, aka Lord Malshun. Jack has brought an autographed baseball bat with him that Ty’s father gave him for Ty, and Jack shoots magic light from it to kill Malshun. This happens in view of the big building where the enslaved-child breakers are working to break a beam, and Jack tells Ty to “break it,” i.e., break the breaking structure, which Ty does in short order, and all the children come out of the portal back into Wisconsin, puzzling the world with their inexplicable presence. At a press conference afterward, the wife of the original serial killer Jack busted in Wisconsin shoots him in the throat. The others get him to the Territories side, which is his only hope of survival, and we learn that Jack will survive and will die if he goes back to his original side. Fortunately he’s fallen in love with the new Territories queen, Sophie.
Having summarized the important narrative events of Black House, Jack’s friend Henry is barely mentioned, but he is actually in the novel quite a bit. Which brings me to the part I now think Straub must have written: when Henry, as “Symphonic Stan,” one of the multiple personas that he adopts in his capacity as a radio DJ, is DJing for a party at a nursing home where Burnside is a resident, and playing the type of music that Straub apparently appreciates more than King, like Benny Goodman. When Jack is listening to jazz on the radio in his car with Henry’s nephew Dale, Dale says Jack and Henry should be friends because Henry is “‘like an encyclopedia of weird music,’” and then we get, “Jack did not take up the assumption that jazz was weird. Maybe it was.” Henry and Jack’s relationship is an important emotional core in the novel (their bond feels much more developed than Jack’s with Sophie) but narratively Henry ultimately doesn’t do much. Sure, he deals the Fisherman what ultimately turns out to be a fatal wound, but that he later figures out the Fisherman’s identity specifically because of when he was playing the jazz music at the nursing home party turns out to basically be irrelevant. As soon as he figures it out, the Fisherman is already standing outside his door ready to kill him. Henry manages to record a warning revealing the Fisherman’s identity before he dies, placing him as a resident at the nursing home, but Burnside makes it back to the nursing home and kills more people there before Jack hears the recorded message and cops get there, so it doesn’t seem like this warning accomplishes much.
Despite this narrative issue, reading King’s interview as he’s about to publish the third novel after Straub’s death is making me think that there’s a parallel here in their relationship. King is Jack and Straub is Henry, now dead, but communicating with King from beyond the grave as King “channels” him. I hope that what Straub is communicating turns out to be more narratively relevant than Henry’s beyond-the-grave message. Though now that I think about it, it seems possible Straub wrote the part where Henry records the message and then King wrote the next part where Burnside goes on a rampage anyway and the message stops nothing. I’d be willing to bet King wrote that particular rampage based on its over-the-top creative usage of hedge clippers. Unless that was Straub imitating something he knew King would do…
Reading these books was a fairly standard experience of reading King for me–mostly compulsively readable despite a lot of cringe moments and absurdity. I do think they were a little less compulsively readable for me than usual, especially The Talisman. I listened to the audio, both books read by Frank Muller. Muller is a “superstar” audiobook reader, but honestly I strongly dislike his reading. The voices he did for the Wolf character and for Speedy were so obnoxious to me the first time I read it I wasn’t sure I’d be able to reread it. I’d say some of my dislike of the way he does the voices might stem from the way King wrote them, but Muller read the first half of the Dark Tower series book while George Guidall read the second half, and I vastly prefer Guidall’s reading. The reason Muller didn’t read the second half was because of a terrible motorcycle accident he had in 2001, dying from complications from his injuries a few years later. Being aware of this fact made it fairly tragic to listen to Muller narrate the scene where the bikers get sick near Black House and one falls off his motorcycle. Black House was published in September 2001, just a couple of days after 9/11, and Muller had his motorcycle accident not even two months later in November.
Probably my biggest complaint is a kind of inverse between the two novels: The Talisman is so long with so many seemingly pointless pit stops that by the time the climactic confrontation with Morgan Sloat happens, that too was so long I zoned out for most of it. (That Jack taunts Morgan by calling him “Bloat” instead of Sloat in this confrontation was symbolically fitting.) Black House was also absurdly long, but the climax was so rushed it felt ridiculous, a feeling that was also probably heightened because the book was so long. Maybe the lesson is that if your book is too long people are going to hate the ending no matter how long or short the climax is, which could be a reason King gets so much shit for his endings in general. For Black House, Burnside is the main villain for most of it, even though we know he’s working for other entities, and I was okay with the pacing of his death scene. Probably the problem is this doesn’t constitute the climactic confrontation because Burnside is working for other people, so then we have to have another confrontation after his death with a character we haven’t even actually seen before, Lord Malshun. Jack kills him in two seconds with his magical baseball bat that interestingly recalls Morgan’s use of his lightning rod in The Talisman climax.
But then the part that pisses me off the most happens: when Jack tells Ty to break the breaking structure and Ty does, in all of–again–two seconds. We’ve been told Ty is a super powerful psychic entity a few times, but not once have we actually been shown it. We get a scene of Ty in his “normal” life before he’s abducted early on and nowhere in this scene is his having any kind of psychic power even hinted at. The only thing it sets up is that Ty is a baseball fan and that’s why Ty’s father gives Jack the bat later. So we’ve never seen Ty even cognizant that he has this huge power, but apparently on a dime he’s able to wield it very precisely on a large scale with absolutely no problems (no breaker children killed or threatened in the process). It felt pretty dumb.
The other most annoying part of Black House was Jack’s love story with Sophie. He falls in love with her at first sight despite–or perhaps because–she has no discernible personality. She’s also the queen, which means she should somehow be related to his mother’s twinner, which would make this seemingly incestuous somehow, but that’s never addressed…. The novel ends with him with Sophie since he’s stuck in the Territories now, so presumably she’ll show up in the third book. (I’m taking bets about whether she’s just going to be neatly excised and has died in the interim. … Aaaaand shortly after writing that I got to the part in the interview where King is describing some stuff in the new book and refers to Jack’s “late wife.” I KNEW IT.)
Another annoying element in Black House is the character of the reporter Wendell Green. There are some elements of “copaganda” happening in this novel by virtue of Jack being a superstar police officer. Some of that might be undermined by a lot of the small-town Wisconsin cops being depicted as incompetent, but when you throw Wendell Green into the equation, it becomes problematic. Wendell is a real slimeball–and this, ironically, might be one of the strongest narrative elements of the book; I hated him as a person within the story for being a bad person because he was convincingly written as a bad person, and I hated the character because of the larger implications of this particular character being a bad person. He’s a slimeball because he wants to get a big payday news “scoop” at any cost, like getting a photo of one of the murdered children’s bodies. And he sneaks around police barricades to do this. And he thinks he’s witnessed Jack tampering with evidence and thinks he’s doing some kind of larger justice by trying to report on it (though we can also tell he’s just trying to convince himself of this motivation when his real motivation is always just his own ego and money). We know of course that Jack would never tamper with evidence, so when Jack and cop co. break Wendell’s camera, that’s written as the good and just thing to have done. Which means the narrative is essentially communicating the idea that the media is stupid and should just let cops do their job without any interference or oversight.
On the other hand, there was a scene in The Talisman that did the opposite and villainized a cop who picked up Jack and Wolf when he saw them on the road and took them to the evil orphanage. Not only did the cop act like a dick in the scene and physically abuse Wolf, we learn that he’s getting kickbacks for bringing kids to the evil orphanage.
The New York Times interview reveals that the serial killer Charles Starkweather is a significant element of inspiration for the new book, which makes it sound like it has a pretty big likeness to the narrative of Black House in revolving around a serial killer. I’ll be curious how different it turns out to be, how the Dark Tower elements will play out this time, and if this book will feel as unnecessarily long as the first two.
King tries to downplay, somewhat, any metaphysical meaning to his “channeling” Straub, but even as he describes it seems to undermine it:
When I started to write “Other Worlds Than These,” I said to myself, Peter, help me start this book. Starting a book is sometimes the most difficult part of all. It kind of pulls you along after that. But when you start, where do you put your foot down? It’s kind of like stepping on a conveyor belt. I’m sitting at this desk and saying, How would you start this book, Peter? And he says to me in my mind, and I’m not talking about a ghost here, I’m talking about summoning the idea of Peter Straub, I had an image that I wanted to start with of Jack Sawyer standing on a balustrade looking down at a city on pink terraces going down to an ocean. And I thought to myself, Yes, but how am I going to say that? How am I going to start that? And Peter said, You’re going to say, “Right here and now, as an old friend used to say,” and immediately I said, That’s the way to start. And I did, and everything followed.
I mean, come on, the layers here: Peter said you’re going to say as an old friend used to say… The passage would ostensibly be referring to the character Wolf, who was essentially The Talisman’s emotional parallel to Henry in terms of being Jack’s closest friend, and in terms of having died. Peter told King to start the new book by symbolically invoking Peter himself.
And it must be noted that it’s not “the idea of Peter Straub” printed on the cover of the new book as co-author, which would technically be the co-author as King frames it. The co-author is Peter Straub. From beyond the grave.
We have recently received confirmation that the next four years will be a resurgence of a dystopian nightmare. My last post mentioned Vincenzo Natali’s theory that the Trump Era played a significant role in the King Renaissance, and if that’s the case, then King won’t have to worry about his status degrading anytime soon. Not that he would have. Next year’s forthcoming adaptations include Richard Bachman titles The Long Walk and The Running Man as well as the short story under King’s name, The Monkey, which all seem apropos–the former two because of the Bachman brand’s distinctly dystopian and nihilistic flavor, and the latter because its titular figure can easily be projected onto the man who will once again be running the country.
In the days leading up to an election that would have a not unprecedented outcome, an unprecedented event of sorts took place, the inaugural KingCon in Las Vegas, from October 24-26, 2024. (All of the merch lists the dates as Oct. 24-27, but in reality the event concluded on the 26th.) Las Vegas is a fitting location for such a King-themed event primarily due to its prominence in one of King’s most significant works, The Stand, as the pole to which the evil survivors of the world-ending superflu are drawn under the aegis of Randall Flagg, while the good survivors are drawn to the Magical Black Lady Mother Abagail in Boulder, CO. It was my first time in Vegas, and I was not surprised to find it the epitome of all things wrong with America in terms of consumption and excess. (And of course there’s the Trump Hotel pocking the skyline.) If we were conserving the ungodly amount of electricity this town in the middle of the desert is using in its flashing neon lights, it seems we could power human civilization for at least another thousand years.
King’s deus ex machina of the literal hand of god descending to wipe out the evil population that has rallied around Flagg to resolve the plot of The Stand is one of his often-criticized endings, but it’s nonetheless a fitting commentary that that hand in the form of “crackling blue fire in the air” takes on the unmistakable air of electricity. It’s also fitting that at this point in my chronological reading I’ve just finished the electricity-centric Revival (2014).
Much has happened since my last post, including the Reality Bites house on my block being torn down, King publishing another short story collection, my article “The Disneyization of Stephen King” that was the basis of my talk at this year’s Pop Culture Association conference being published in the Journal of American Culture, the sudden death of Kingcast co-host Scott Wampler, and my being a guest on a bonus episode of the Kingcast to discuss King’s relationship to academia.
This fall semester I made fandom the basis of the elective I’m teaching at the arts high school, officially entitled Fans of Fandom, with the framework that fandom exists on a spectrum of toxic to life-saving that is represented by King’s novels Misery and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, respectively.
In Misery, Paul Sheldon ruminates on the nature of parasocial relationships, which are fundamentally one-sided. Paul thinks about someone who mourns a fictional character’s death, but of course parasocial relationships can exist with real people as well, and the depth of one I had forged was driven home for me when I learned Scott Wampler had passed. This sentiment was expressed on the Kingcast Discord I have access to as a Patreon subscriber. I initially subscribed for access to the directors’ commentaries for the PCA conference adaptation roundtable, which alone was worth the money, as evidenced by the Mike Flanagan commentary’s centrality to my contributions (and Vincenzo Natali’s Trump theory).
Another development since my last post is the announcement that Flanagan is adapting Carrie into an Amazon series, and a recent bonus episode has host Eric Vespe bring his fiancé Kelsey on to discuss Flanagan’s knack for successful King adaptations. Vespe’s thesis: King and Flanagan have a shared emphasis on character development. Kelsey’s thesis: “because he is such a big FAN of the original source material…he knows what fans would want because he is one.” Kelsey recaps their discussion points about Flanagan’s key ingredients: 1) empathy and evoking emotions, 2) the fan side, 3) being a writer-director, 4) creative genius. As much as I love and respect Mike Flanagan and Carrie alike, I am not personally of the opinion that we need yet another Carrie adaptation, but it did highlight a mistaken claim I made in my last post that a King adaptation has never been directed by a woman–the 2013 Carrie was directed by Kimberly Peirce. (I would not say this is a film that vindicates King adaptations by women, but why do I have a feeling men were responsible for the absurd casting of the gorgeous Chloe Grace Moretz in the title role.) The Kingcast in fact did a bonus episode on this subject in 2021.
The Kingcast Patreon has proven valuable in other ways as well–for one, I would not have known about KingCon’s existence without it.
KingCon’s logo centralizes the red balloon that has become a sign of the presence of Pennywise, King’s most iconic villain.
This logo marries King novels and King cinematic adaptations–the novel and the 1990 miniseries associate Pennywise with balloons of all colors; it’s the 2017 adaptation, that critical text of the King Renaissance, that associates exclusively red balloons with Pennywise. Hence, a lot of the KingCon merch is the red of this balloon and logo, including, rather unfortunately, its cap:
There was also a black version of this cap for sale, but when I was buying my merch in something of a frenzy at the Con registration because it was selling out very quickly, I opted for the red one without giving it much thought because it was a better representation of the Con logo. It wasn’t until after I’d bought it that I realized it was a dead ringer for a MAGA hat and that I could never wear it in public unless I wanted to be mistaken for a Trump supporter.
This was ironic in light of a statement the Con felt compelled to post on its website due to the event’s proximity to the election:
King Con Attire
Hello KingCon attendees! We are days away from the epic inaugural event that has been over a year in the making! We could not be more excited to share with you the fruits of all this work! As you know, the U.S. is deep in a very passionate political season with many holding strong opinions in all areas of the topic. To ensure that KingCon remains focused on the passions we all have in common and that bring us all together this weekend, please respect that KingCon is an apolitical space. Please refrain from wearing any attire promoting messages for or against any political candidate or party. KingCon should be a much needed, all-too-brief respite from politics.
I was attending this convention as a bona fide fan, but also as a bona fide King academic scholar interested in its expression of fandom to the extent that I will likely give an academic talk on KingCon and the King fandom at the next PCA conference (which means I am a nerd on two different fronts). And so I found this statement ironic through another lens, that of Michael Blouin’s 2021 study Stephen King and American Politics, which observes that King’s work presents itself as apolitical while in reality being nothing of the sort–not just because it’s generally impossible for anything to be apolitical, but in more of a calculated appeal to the masses. (This argument of Blouin’s proved central to my own Disneyization of King thesis.) Per the pop culture/academia split, Blouin’s title didn’t come up in the post-election bonus episode released on the Kingcast Patreon, “Talking (Scared) Politics with Neil McRobert,” the host of the Talking Scared horror podcast that did an excellent pair of episodes with several different guest writers choosing a King short story to talk about earlier this year. But McRobert did pinpoint Under the Dome (2009) as a political novel of King’s, calling its antagonist Jim Rennie King’s greatest villain. Blouin has a great chapter breaking down Dome as a takedown of Bush-era politics with Rennie representing Dick Cheney. And King selected Dome as one of his picks for the top ten novels of the twenty-first century for the New York Times (I’m pretty sure he’s the only one of the fifty-three writers asked to do so that put a book of his own on their list). He’s also the writer who gets top billing.
Revival is an appropriate title to have been reading at the moment Trump was re-elected; from the Kingcast I’ve long known it has one of his darker endings (as Kingcast host Vespe has noted, their promotion of this underrated title is part of the “DNA of the show”). A dark ending, for a novel especially, is pretty rare for King in his later period. (Spoilers ahead.) Under the Dome has what’s often considered one of King’s bad endings in revealing the party responsible for the titular dome to be bullying aliens essentially treating the domed town’s residents like ants under a magnifying glass, but it’s a happy-ish ending in that the heroes convince the aliens to stop being bullies (happy-ish because most of the town dies beforehand). Revival flips the tone of the ending as it flips the role of the ants, revealing a doomed vision of an afterlife in which “Driving the humans were antlike creatures, most black, some the dark red of venous blood. When humans fell, the ant-things would lunge at them, biting and butting, until they gained their feet again.”
In the politics episode, Vespe genteely observed that we were going to be “eating a shit sandwich every day for the next four years.” This took me back to South Park‘s take on the 2004 election being between a “giant douche” and a “turd sandwich,” which seemed fitting, since South Park and its shitterations was one of this blog’s foundational comparisons to King. It’s also fitting for King’s foundation in general.
opening scene of Carrie (1976)
The day after the election, the student presentation in the fandom class was on the South Park fandom–on Trey Parker and Matt Stone incorporating fan art of a “ship” between characters into the show, but I noted how Matt and Trey had abstained from making their salient biting topical commentary this election season, which strikes me as a bad sign.
And speaking of signs…
And then, King was banned from X for calling Elon Musk “the First Lady.” I’d say free speech doesn’t exist in a corporatocracy, but this turned out to be fake news.
Another class I’m teaching this fall is the upperclassmen advanced fiction workshop, and I made the students read two of King’s stories from his new collection You Like It Darker (and one voluntarily presented on a third!). But first, I tortured them by making them read John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967), mostly to emphasize the white patriarchal foundations of literary fiction and workshopping specifically developed as capitalist tools to fight communism after WWII, as discussed by Matthew Salesses in his 2021 book Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping (as discussed in my Firestarterposts). John Barth was one of the first full-time university teachers of creative writing under this new paradigm.
My last post covered mirror metaphors and the salience of Pennywise embodying individuals’ projections of fear. “Lost in the Funhouse” contains both these ingredients in a plot arc that on its most surface level would be described as a boy in the 1940s visiting Ocean City with his family, culminating with him inviting his crush into the funhouse on the beach fairgrounds.
Stepping from the treacherous passage at last intothe mirror-maze, he saw once again, more clearly than ever, how readily hedeceived himself into supposing he was a person. He even foresaw, wincingat his dreadful self-knowledge, that he would repeat the deception, at ever rarerintervals, all his wretched life, so fearful were the alternatives.
John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967).
But this is a tentpole work of the postmodern movement, which means it’s overflowing with meta-commentary on the nature of fictional constructs:
The beginningshould recount the events between Ambrose’s first sight of the funhouse early in the afternoon and his entering it with Magda and Peter in the evening. The middlewould narrate all relevant events from the time he goes in to the time he loses his way; middles have the double and contradictory function of delaying the climax while at the same time preparing the reader for it and fetching him to it. Then the endingwould tell what Ambrose does while he’s lost, how he finally finds his way out, and what everybody makes of the experience.
John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967).
In the midst of this commentary, the funhouse becomes a metaphor for fictional constructs generally, and the larger plot arc is the boy understanding and accepting that he will become a fiction writer (and that this won’t be fun).
He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator – though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.
John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967).
Coinciding with the story’s opening lines–“For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers.”–this reveals that the surface arc and deeper arc entail a conflation of what the funhouse is “for” that ultimately reinforces the institution of literary fiction as inherently misogynist:
Ambrose understands now, but didn’t then, that his father was wondering whether he knew what the funhouse was for – specially since he didn’t object, as he should have, when Peter decided to come along too.
John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse” (1961).
This is the context in which the funhouse is for hitting on girls, reinforced when they’re inside and see “[t]he sailor’s girl was a string-haired hussy with a loud laugh and light blue drawers…” With so much content directly commented upon, what is not commented on is what Salesses would point out is a “moral choice,” and exactly zero of the racist and misogynist comments are commented upon. If the funhouse is for guys to hit on girls, and the funhouse is the construct of fiction itself, then the construct of fiction itself is for guys to hit on girls. That the story renders fiction an inherently (white) male-centric institution from its conception is reinforced repeatedly:
Can spermatozoa properly be thought of as male animalcules when there are no female spermatozoa? They grope through hot, dark windings, past Love’s Tunnel’s fearsome obstacles. Some perhaps lose their way.
John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967).
The white male adolescent protagonist fantasizes about marrying his crush and her validating and celebrating him as a successful writer along with the rest of the world–i.e., the white male American dream–and we’re supposed to look upon him with sympathy, in spite of, or more likely because of, lip service to an opposing interpretation that can really only be read ironically:
“Is anything more tiresome, in fiction, than the problems of sensitive adolescents?”
John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967).
This would be an example of the “say it” trap King falls into so often where acknowledging the existence of a problem is equated with solving it. Similarly, another passage seems to acknowledge the possibility that Ambrose might be more villain than hero:
A child took things for granted because he had nothing to compare his life to and everybody acted as if things were as they should be. Therefore each saw himself as the hero of the story, when the truth might turn out to be that he’s the villain, or the coward. And there wasn’t one thing you could do about it!
John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967).
Yet there’s no other way to read this than as a classic coming-of-age story for a white male adolescent with a meta gloss. The story treats Ambrose as hero. Teaching this story in 2024, my point is that Ambrose, and the successful white male American writer he’ll become (undeniably a stand-in for Barth himself), actually is a villain.
This hero/villain framework can be applied to the first You Like It Darker King story I assigned, “On Slide Inn Road,” which also offers a potential manifestation of fandom by way of influence: I recognized that the story had significant elements in common with Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1953) before I read King’s acknowledgment of her influence in his blurb “thinking of Flannery O’Connor” placed at the end. I had the students read the O’Connor story first (as I sometimes do anyway because of Robert Boswell using it as a prominent example of his concept of narrative spandrels, which, like “Funhouse,” uses an architectural metaphor for a fiction-related concept). Salesses encourages us to look at the implications and cultural message of the events that occur in a story, and in “A Good Man,” the grandmother’s racist (in fact MAGA-like) nostalgia is directly responsible for the chain of events that leads to the entire family’s death when a car accident puts them in the path of gun-toting criminals. Implication and message: such values are dangerous and destructive. If the criminals with the guns are the explicit villains, the grandmother is an implicit one.
King replaces the grandmother figure with a grandfather, one with a similarly problematic bent toward nostalgia for the old days, expressed initially in a racial slur and then in a love of baseball. The grandfather is, like the grandmother, responsible for the family ending up on a road they should not be on that puts them in the path of gun-toting criminals. Except instead of this leading to the family’s death, the grandfather saves the family from the criminals with a baseball bat. The story thus validates instead of indicts the grandfather’s values not only by making him the hero, but by making the object of his heroism one explicitly associated with his nostalgia (and one that functions, incidentally, as a narrative spandrel). Since King himself is a die-hard baseball fan and around the age of this grandfather figure, it’s hard not to read this character as a King stand-in of sorts. King himself would not be the type of explicit racist hurling racial slurs, but is more the implicit microaggressive kind who doesn’t think that he’s racist. Take, for instance, this story’s version of his “say it” problem, King’s attempt to point out that the grandfather’s values are problematic (with three strikes: misogyny, homophobia, and racism) that the story’s conclusion undermines by way of the grandfather’s heroism and the father’s paralysis and inadequacy: it’s the father who thinks sarcastically about the “good old days” the grandfather loves including, among other things, “the days when gay people went in fear of their lives” to highlight the homophobia, and the use of the n-word to highlight, in theory, the terrible racism of those days. The n-word does not, and in 2024 should not, be used to make this point.
A central aspect of the adolescent and future writer’s conflict in “Funhouse” is that to be a writer figure means to observe from the outside rather than actively experiencing something from the inside:
Strive as he might to be transported, he heard his mind take notes upon the scene: This is what they call passion. I am experiencing it.
John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967).
King’s most postmodern meta-moment is when he inserts himself as a character in the Dark Tower novels that the other characters discover is writing the story they’re in, and when they’re about to meet him (in Song of Susannah) one feels “the gathering power … of Tinkerbell’s magic dust and Dumbo’s magic feather,” a moment central to my “Disneyization of King” thesis that King uses Disney to mediate his own conflict of whether his success derives from external branding (Tinkerbell’s magic dust) or his own internal writerly talent (Dumbo’s magic feather). If the other most significant aspect of my thesis is the “daddy issues” King has with Disney expressed in his frequent “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” references, then the patriarchy is reflected in his Disneyization as well.
If Trump’s successful presidential “campaign will go down as one of the most racist, sexist, and xenophobic in modern history,” then we can look at “Funhouse” as reflecting how the internal logic of fiction reflects the workings of the external world. “Funhouse” comments on the performed distance between fiction and the real world at the instance of the story’s most emblematic intersection of misogyny and racism, which go entirely uncommented upon because a racist and misogynist perspective is simply an accepted norm in the world and in fiction:
The more closely an author identifies with the narrator, literally or metaphorically, the less advisable it is, as a rule, to use the first-person narrative viewpoint. Once three years previously the young people aforementionedplayed Slaves and Masters in the backyard; when it was Ambrose’s turn to be Master and theirs to be Slaves Peter had to go serve his evening papers; Ambrose was afraid to punish Magda alone, but she led him to the whitewashed Torture Chamber between the woodshed and the privy in the Slaves Quarters; there she knelt sweating among bamboo rakes and dusty Mason jars, pleadingly embraced his knees, and while bees droned in the lattice as if on an ordinary summer afternoon, purchased clemency at a surprising price set by herself.
John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967).
“Lost in the Funhouse” might as well describe my location in the King canon at this point. And if there’s something the election has reinforced about the patriarchy, it’s that we cannot escape it.
Which is fitting because…
Escape IT
Another reason that Vegas is a good location for KingCon is a landmark that is a must-see for any diehard King fan, a destination that might well be as necessary as the King tour in Maine (the ultimate pilgrimage I still have yet to undertake)–an IT-themed escape room entitled Escape IT.
Also, the turtle, that emblem of the King cosmos that IT explicates, would seem to be a symbol for Vegas generally as well.
poolside decoration at our Vegas Airbnb, a statue also seen alongside Vegas freeways
Escape IT alone would have made visiting Vegas for the Con worth it. As a fan, I can’t say enough good things about it. As an academic, it does make me think that I cannot escape from the racist and misogynistic intersection of the patriarchy; if Trump is key to the King Renaissance, and IT (2017) is key to the King Renaissance, maybe it’s not a coincidence that this intersection unfortunately resides in both, though in the latter it’s harder to locate. (It’s also hard for me because I love the 2017 movie.) Consider two changes this adaptation made from the book:
Number one: Pennywise kidnaps Beverly right after she stands up to and physically injures her father, which leads to a sequence in which Ben brings her back from the hypnosis of the deadlights with a version of Sleeping Beauty’s true love’s kiss. Bev is completely robbed of agency, and there’s no sequence where she’s the one to take on Pennywise with the slingshot that empowers her in the book (and the 90s miniseries, which doubles her agency by having the adult Bev do this too). Thanks to Kimberly Beal for pointing this out in our adaptation roundtable at the last PCA conference.
Number two: as argued by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. in his chapter “Changing Mike, Changing History: Erasing African-America in It (2017)” in The Many Lives of IT: Essays on the Stephen King Horror Franchise (2020), the 2017 film “re-centers Mike’s story on Ben [Ben takes over Mike’s role as the secret historian], and erases the novel’s and miniseries’ point that people of color often know the real history more than their white counterparts who get to choose ‘what will fade away.’”
Both these ultimately misogynist and racist changes end up giving Ben a lot more agency…also, as a side note, at the Con Vespe mentioned that they’ve only had to pull two Kingcast episodes after recording them (there are 258 episodes on the main feed at this point) and one of them was with the actor James Ransone, who plays the adult Eddie in It Chapter Two (2019), after footage emerged of him making anti-trans remarks.
If this seems like paying attention to too much nitty-gritty detail, I could argue that doing this paid off in the design of Escape IT, in which the attention to detail was impeccable.
The entrance
It contains two different sets of rooms, “The Sewers,” and “The Funhouse,” with the former predominantly correlating to the 2017 movie and the latter the 2019 sequel.
“Sewers” side
“Funhouse” side
The waiting room is the arcade:
The only reservation I could get was during the first night of the Con, so I had to miss that night’s event, Kingcast host Eric Vespe interviewing actor Thomas Jane for an episode in front of a live audience. Since I had gone to the Linq Hotel to register that afternoon and procured (too much) KingCon merch, I was recognized by another attendee who was leaving Escape IT as I arrived. She said she had just done it by herself because nobody else had booked during her window (so, question mark as to why that time was unavailable when I was making my reservation the day before), and it was really hard. She ended up making it to the Kingcast recording, and I ended up doing the escape rooms with a team of other people instead of by myself. For me, missing the recording was worth the trade-off of not having to do the rooms alone–even though it also meant missing Thomas Jane entirely, who was supposed to be there all weekend but had to leave suddenly to go to a film set. For the other person, who said she’d decided to come primarily because the Kingcast was going to be there, doing the rooms alone was probably worth the trade-off of making it to the recording.
I had never done an escape room of any sort before, but had the vague understanding it was a collaborative effort to solve the puzzles to escape. If that’s true for all escape rooms, it would of course be especially thematically appropriate for IT, in which the protagonists can only defeat Pennywise by maintaining a united front–one of multiple reasons I was glad to not do Escape IT alone.
Seven is the magic number of the united front in IT, but Escape IT caps a full group at nine. In my full group was one other KingCon attendee, also recognizable from the merch she was wearing. I thought that the clues for Escape IT would be based on the content of the movies (and possibly book), but while the settings of the rooms (mostly) correlated to the movies, the puzzles involved arbitrary clues, most often to glean the combination to locks to the next room. This is another reason I am glad I was not by myself–my mind does not work this way. As we proceeded from room to room, staff members played roles through which they could nudge us toward the clues if we were having trouble finding them, starting with a Derry Public Works employee. With this staff member we rounded a bend into a sewer tunnel, at the end of which I saw Pennywise disappear past the grate blocking the other end. This did not stop me from screaming when we were standing right by that grate trying to open the door to the next room and Pennywise suddenly reappeared and jammed an arm through at us. The next set of rooms was run by an employee of Hanlon Farms, until they vanished when we entered the room that looks like Bill’s garage where the projector scene takes place…
And in keeping with the horror of Pennywise crossing the threshold from 2-D to 3-D in this scene, the Pennywise actor chased us out of this room (among others). I can’t really describe how terrifying and exhilarating it was to have such an authentic-seeming Pennywise chasing you, to have it feel so real while knowing it’s not real.
Of course we also went into the Niebolt house with the infamous door selections..
The final room in the Sewers replicates Pennywise doing the (minstrel) dance before he jumps out at Bev after he kidnaps her in the movie. Then he chases you into the gift shop.
The “Funhouse” replicates stages of the second movie a little more thoroughly than the Sewers replicates the first one, starting at Jade of the Orient, including the Kersh apartment and Funhouse, and culminating in the cavern with the Spider Pennywise where we had to actually hold hands and stand in a circle shouting “Turn light into dark” like they do at the end of the second movie. (You’re pretty much trauma-bonded with your group by the end, so this didn’t even feel weird.) The funhouse part of the Funhouse rooms is a bit more involved than the funhouse setting that appears in the movie, but the mirror maze sequence is the most intense part, with strobe lighting, an actor screaming to be let out of a glass box they’re locked in, and Pennywise chasing you in circles. I have to commend the staff actors, Pennywise and otherwise. For me, it was an unprecedented immersive experience: it feels like you are in the movies! Of course, fiction itself is an immersive experience in the way it operates on the brain, but the escape room immersive experience was another layer of real v. imagined.
Part of the gift shop includes the “Derry Historical Museum,” which has some actual props from the movies:
In terms of how the brain operates, gleaning the clues in the rooms required an attention to arbitrary detail that I might have thought writing and literary analysis would have facilitated, but I guess at this point I’m more attuned to words than my physical surroundings. Bill Denbrough the writer is the leader of the Losers, but as a writer I was not the leader of our group, just someone carrying out the joint tasks the leader had figured out needed to be done and gave the directives for. (And there were some that none of us figured out; if a certain amount of time had passed and we still hadn’t managed to get to the next room, the door to it would just open–their bookings are in specific time slots so they have to stay on schedule.)
As it happens, the majority of the artifacts in the Derry Historical Museum have writing on them.
Hope Springs Eternal
In the 2021 documentary Pennywise: The Story of IT about the 1990 miniseries, its teleplay writer Lawrence D. Cohen (who also wrote the screenplay for the original Carrie) describes trying to describe what IT is and calling it an “inter-terrestrial being,” prompting me to wonder if that was what the letters “IT” stood for, because that had never occurred to me. Probably not officially, since that term never appears in the novel. This also made me think of IT as an “inter-textual” being, in the sense that it takes on facades from different texts (the mummy, the teenage werewolf, the creature from the black lagoon, jaws). Since a hallmark of King’s work is its intertextual references, this is yet another way that IT is the encompassing allegorical text for all of his work, and so what I find myself returning to as the most significant book in his canon. That its two adaptations have been two of the most successful ones compounds this significance: two good adaptations coming from one King work when usually a single one is hard to come by is like lightning striking twice in the same place.
“Intertextual” would technically mean King referring to his own works, but there’s a channel of influence it also invokes since his works are influenced by others: King’s work reflects that of his predecessors and his descendants’ work reflects his, which makes the mirror maze another apt metaphor for his work. There’s a mirror maze in the funhouse in Joyland (2013), in which the terms “horror house” and “funhouse” are used interchangeably for the same landmark in the titular park: horror = fun. For me, Joyland allegorically encompasses King’s canon in the sense that his work brings me joy. (The park’s ferris wheel is also a significant fixture in this novel, and the ferris wheel by the Linq Hotel hosting the convention made it a distinct fixture on the strip.)
In his KingCon Kingcast interview, the actor Thomas Jane called King a literary master that we’ll be studying in a hundred years, which, as a King scholar, is a sentiment I concur with. I’d say the three King adaptations Jane has been in, Dreamcatcher (2003), The Mist (2007) and 1922 (2017) are spread relatively evenly on the spectrum of bad to good adaptations–though as they discuss in the interview, Dreamcatcher is not necessarily a bad adaptation since it’s actually fairly reflective of the book–it’s the book that’s bad (though personally I don’t mind it).
The Thomas Jane spectrum
The Mist has one of the most changed endings of a King adaptation, to a super dark one–so dark that the producers (in fact, the Weinsteins), offered to double the budget if they dispensed with the dark ending, but they decided to keep the dark ending and do it with less money. That the dark ending was adapted by Frank Darabont is intriguing in light of its stark contrast to his adaptation of The Shawshank Redemption (1994), one of the most celebrated King adaptations and probably the one with one of if not the most hopeful endings. In the interim we have Darabont’s Green Mile adaptation (1999), which is not all that hopeful for the surviving characters who witness the sacrifice of a magical Black man.
The Frank Darabont spectrum
Frank Darabont was a “Dollar Baby,” the program where King optioned rights to his work to emerging filmmakers for a dollar to make a short film. The Dollar Baby films were by design not to be for profit, so access to them is hard to come by, and one of the features of KingCon was to have a theater running Dollar Baby short films continuously. Unfortunately, since this was concurrent with other events, you had to prioritize, so I did not get to watch as many as I would have liked. The handful I did see were hit and miss, and the misses were more from the acting than the writing. Darabont made “The Woman in the Room” for his Dollar Baby film, and according to Wikipedia, he wasn’t happy with how it turned out, but it did lead to him getting the rights to Shawshank.
The question of hope is a pertinent one in the wake of the election. When people have asked me how I’ve felt about it, I tend to say I hadn’t gotten my hopes up in the first place, because we’ve been here before. It’s déjà vu. That happened to be a theme of one of the Dollar Babies I did see, “That Feeling,” from the Everything’s Eventual story “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French,” which the New Yorker Classics newsletter just reposted for Halloween (horrific foreshadowing that Trump would win). Despite the acting in this one falling short, the emotional resonance of the character yelling at herself to get out of the loop of repeating events she finds herself in: “‘Change! Change one thing! Change anything!'” resonated on an individual and collective level. “‘There’s no more exquisite torture than hope,'” a character says in King’s 2023 novel Holly. The ending of Revival leaves less room for hope than Darabont’s The Mist: if the main character had hung on a little longer and not given up hope, it seems things would have turned out better. So maybe it’s not fair to classify it as “not hopeful at all.”
The presence of the three biggest King adapters at the Con also occupied a spectrum: Mick Garris was there in person, Frank Darabont’s presence was through Thomas Jane, and Mike Flanagan could not be there in person but left a video on the Con Facebook page saying he wished he could have made it. Flanagan also made special limited edition posters for Gerald’s Game that he autographed and were given out at a screening of the movie.
Another King adaptation that will make 2025, as Vespe put it, a banner year for King adaptations (in addition to the highly anticipated Welcome to Derry series) is Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of The Life of Chuck, which purportedly contains a message of hope despite its classification as “apocalyptic,” and which I’m pretty sure is the only thing by King that has made me cry. I found myself near tears again when Vespe was being interviewed during KingCon as a replacement for the window Thomas Jane was supposed to have a Q&A, and Vespe was describing his and Scott Wampler’s cameo in Chuck–not only because this is a way Wampler will live on (in addition to the plethora of Kingcast recordings), but because of the parallel that (SPOILER) the title character dies around the same age Scott did. “Historically I have never been a person who fears death,” Scott says in the first Kingcast episode on Revival back in 2021. “You know, I’m just like, well, you know, it’s a part of life, it’s gonna happen, whatever happens is gonna happen and frankly I’m kind of curious to find out what happens. So I’m not exactly scared of it. After reading this book, I remember specifically staying awake at night, like lying in bed and just staring at the ceiling and being like holy fuck dude, like we really don’t know. It could be anything. What if it is giant ants? I don’t want to be around fucking giant ants, dude. They sound like assholes.”
Reading Revival at this specific political moment, it’s hard not to read this novel’s bleak description of the afterlife as America’s afterlife in the wake of Trump’s reelection. Vespe calls Revival a sister book to Pet Sematary due to the likeness of their dark endings, and King has disavowed the nihilism of the latter. So here’s hoping it’s not giant ants.
