do you remember. . .

my own memory must be going out the window.  i read stephen king's humongous novel it over 30 years ago when i was a screaming punk rock horror loving teenager.  i still am all those things, except the teen part, so when i woke up this morning & turned on the TV the 1990 miniseries adaptation of it starring richard thomas, john ritter & annette o'toole among others was on the Sy Fy Channel i, of course, watched a good hour of the miniseries.  what can i say but i love it.  sure it's flawed but this was the standard set for the novel.

i remember the novel i thought, fairly well.  i was a huge stephen king fan -- i still am.  i devoured his fiction & his non-fiction [king's study of the horror genre, danse macabre (1981) is a tour de force] when i learned to read at 16 [i mean read for pleasure & for life.  i was 16 when i picked up a book to read that wasn't assigned for a school project].

because of the miniseries re-broadcast i thought why not reread the novel.  nick has a copy that was published as a tie-in for the newest movie version of it.  i've not read king in a great many years.  part of the reason was reverse snobbery.  as in, i'm a literary person, i am a poet, literature is my life & i can't be bothered with popular fiction.  what a load of crap.  i'm at an age where i say that there are no such things as high art and low art.  there is only our lives in art.

king is beautiful writer who gets in the heads of ordinary people.  he does so with a relaxed prose style that sounds like the way people talk.  a movie version cannot get into a person's head like writing can.

but how now what about my memory?  sure there are moments of finer details that i didn't recall when i read the novel in 1986.  but what about the prologue?

i might be stitching together some of my memories but i remember a brief prologue at the start of the novel it.  these few pages show the origin of pennywise the dancing clown.  that malignant force on derry, maine.

again, i might have this quite wrong but i recall the edition i read in 1986 started with a few pages that had a craft landing on earth a few billion years ago when our planet was a muddy ball.  that craft deposited the entity later knows as pennywise who would not rise up until the town of derry was established.

but my son's later edition had no such prologue.  a quick search on the interwebs did not reveal that kind of prologue.  was that all in my head?

well, it's been 30+ years since i read the novel.  & i was reading lots of horror fiction at the time.  one of my favorites was the books of blood series of short stories by clive barker.  so perhaps i conflated another story or stories with it.  

i dunno.  it seems like that prologue belongs with pennywise the dancing clown.

but even if no, the novel is a great read.  but a committed read as it is well over a 1000 pages.  i don't remember how long it took me to read the book in 1986.  i'm sure it was well over a month of dedicated reading.  i do recall several late nights when i couldn't put the book down.

i may not finish the book this time around.  i know the story pretty well.  i know what pennywise the dancing clown is.

& yet, king is better than those moments of horror.  he knows how to get inside the heads of his characters & his prose style is a winning example of colloquial voices.  but that's the beauty of literature, & king is literary to the nth degree, literature gets to the heart of where we live.