...my work here is done for the day....Jeebus! Scared crap out a me. .
Thanks for the welcome though!
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...my work here is done for the day....Jeebus! Scared crap out a me. .
Thanks for the welcome though!
THere was the make up guy, Kevyn Aucoin.Damn if you aren't making me want to read this again, for the umpteenth time.
I know I recognize your name and picture...are you in music? Writer? It will come to me, I know.
Part 1 The Shadow Before
Chapter 2 - After the Festival (1984)
Things I didn't like: Eh, you can't tell what the hell this has to do with anything. The entire chapter seems just a random "Pennywise killed this gay guy, possibly by magically influencing the three thugs behavior to a degree". It's hard to see the point of it other than that, what does this chapter mean to the narrative?
THere was the make up guy, Kevyn Aucoin.
Got it. You sell yourself short--you're a good writer. And I'm off topic and I'll hush up nowAnd a hockey player in Canada but that's as close to fame as I ever brushed.
...welcome!.....Rereading IT myself, and wanted to provide my thoughts on this. Chapter 2 illustrates the attitudes of adults towards the strange circumstances surrounding the many deaths and disappearances in the town of Derry. It gives us a look into the inextricable relationship between It/Pennywise and the town of Derry itself -- how much a part of the town and how embedded in the fears and psyche of its folk It has become. The adults refuse to acknowledge It because of how crazy it sounds to do so -- the cops know it will ruin their case when prosecuting the punks who beat up Adrian Mellon and pushed him off the bridge, so they ignore it, and Don Hagarty never testifies to having seen the clown under the bridge. In his talks with the cops, though, Hagarty makes it very clear exactly how he feels about Derry. The town itself is a scary place.
The lines you quoted are great -- the imagery of a "dead strumpet with maggots squirming out of her cooze" is... well, vivid. And it foreshadows some of the elements of sexual perversion that come into play later. But I also really love this exchange, which I think is just as revealing:
"...and the clown looked back. I saw its eyes, and all at once I understood who it was."
"Who was it, Don?" Harold Gardener asked softly.
"It was Derry," Don Hagarty said. "It was this town."
"And what did you do then?" It was Reeves.
"I ran, you dumb ****," Hagarty said, and burst into tears.
I think it's important to know, like I said, how inextricably tied It is to the town of Derry, because in the next chapter, Six Phone Calls, most of our cast has done the same thing as Don. As adults, except Mike, they got the **** out of Derry...
Part 1 - The Shadow Before
Chapter 1 - After the Flood (1957)
Things that were odd: Did anyone else find it odd that the author gives away Georgie's fate so early in the chapter? That he flat out tells us that Georgie is going to die and soon? Isn't that a bit of robbing the entire scene of its tension and suspense? We know what's going to happen (more or less). By the time Pennywise pulls Georgie's arm into the rain gutter and rips the arm off we're not surprised by it or even really shocked. I don't know if I think this was a bad thing or not, it's just something odd that I probably wouldn't have thought to do? I'd have tried to make the scene more traditionally horrifying? Suspenseful? But knowing what was coming for Georgie is its own sort of horror so i guess that's why King is King and I'm not.
On to Chapter 2!
Part 1 The Shadow Before
Chapter 2 - After the Festival (1984)
Things I didn't like: Eh, you can't tell what the hell this has to do with anything. The entire chapter seems just a random "Pennywise killed this gay guy, possibly by magically influencing the three thugs behavior to a degree". It's hard to see the point of it other than that, what does this chapter mean to the narrative?
And it's a bit wordy.
Things found interesting: The aforementioned reminder of what it used to be like for LGB citizens. The idea that maybe Pennywise or IT might affect people's behavior. That's not really so much mentioned as maybe being what we're seeing, so it was an interesting idea that came to me while reading this chapter.
On to chapter 3, the much longer "Six Phone Calls" chapter which introduces us to the real cast of our story...
Part 2 June 1958
Chapter 7 - The Dam in the Barrens
Richie Tozier (of the many Voices) and Stanley Uris show up and help do some work on the dam. So now we’ve got 5 boys hanging out here, all of them sorta outcast types and working collectively on a nice project, this dam. Insta-Summer-Friendship, just add water! But still it bothers me, why was Ben friendless all this time, totally and completely friendless, when there wasn’t anything about him making it so he couldn’t make friends? Here he makes four friends easily and there’s no trouble at all. Does the author expect the reader to just not worry about why Ben was friendless till now since that was pre-story so thus not important? I honestly don’t know.
Part 3 - Grownups
Chapter 10 The Reunion
I was a little disappointed that Mike didn’t ask Bill on the phone before they all arrived in Derry how he wanted to go about their initial meeting. Like, if it’s on Mike’s $11,000/year salary they’ll have to meet for lunch at McDonald’s. There’s no way Mike could afford to take 6 people out to Jade of the Orient with a private room for the dinner. Surely he talked it over with Bill? Made sure the expense would be taken care of? I guess that’s just something that happened off screen but it struck me as something missing, a detail that would make it feel more real to me I guess.
We get one of those awesome digressions, one of those little side stories here. The story of how Ben lost all his weight. It’s a great story and it ends with Bill saying something that didn’t ring quite right to me. Because while I understand why it was written it seems like something far too rude for Bill to actually say. At the end of the story Bill says to Ben,'All of that sounds wonderful, Ben . . . but the writer in me wonders if any kid ever really talked like that.'
He really just called Ben a liar to his face like that? (No one takes it like that, which is also a bit odd?)
he may have been taking as much credit as possible, but it was still under her name, i think most people were fully aware of the real talent. as mike said "the most sought after designer in such and such area" (can't remember the exact words)And that’s a statement about how they were all marked by what happened. They were all far more adult than their peers by the time they all reached 7th grade and likely were more mature and focused than their peers for many years. This likely added to their success in life, where they all seemed to do quite well for themselves (except Bev, who might have made $$ but who let an abusive ass take credit for it and she continued to live in a miserable abusive situation).
Great chapter. Just really loved it!
Part 1 - The Shadow Before
Chapter 3 - Six Phone Calls (1985)
[...]
Things I found interesting: The entire Interlude was great. Loved it. I hope I enjoy all of the interludes this much as I read on. I remember when I read the book at 22 I didn't have any patience for them and found them irritating breaks in the narrative, but my priorities are different at 51 than they were at 22.
I found it interesting remembering my own promises as a child, things said to blood brothers and club mates. Things barely barely remembered, as though victim of my own Forgetting. But unlike the characters in the book I'm not victim of a mystic amnesia, just normal life. The memories we have of our childhoods are thin and ephemeral things, if you stop and really focus on them, delve into them as best you can. It's almost, sometimes, like you're remembering stories told to you about what happened instead of remembering what happened. Which, coincidentally, is how grown Bill Denbrough describes it to his wife in this chapter. That he remembered that he had a brother, that his brother was killed. But he remembered these things as bald facts, not as actual events in his own life.
Creepy, that. These are things and memories I've not examined (or exhumed, perhaps) in many many years.