#95 Mulengro by Charles de Lint

Mulengro (1985) is the fourth novel by Canadian author Charles de Lint (1951-    ).  De Lint is a frequent World Fantasy and BFA nominee, and won the former in 2000 for his collection Sweetgrass & City Streets.

Cover art by Fletcher Sibthorp

As the cover notes, this is "a Romany tale," which is to say that the novel is largely based on gypsy lore and culture (which the author admits to not being an expert on, and, my own expertise being less than his, I really don't know enough to evaluate for accuracy).  The main character is Janfri, a gypsy who lives among the gaje (i.e., non-gypsies) in Ottowa, whose house is burnt down by an unknown enemy.  Meanwhile, another gyspy from Janfri's kumpania is murdered in a bizarre fashion, and the death is investigated by two policemen, Briggs and Sandler who don't have time for any of this magic nonsense.  Neither of them actually say, "I'm getting to old for this shit," but I always felt that that would be the next line whenever they showed up.  Anyway, many of the gypsies believe that the killer is a dark magician, bent on purifying the gypsies, who he feels have been tainted by modern society. Janfri is sent to find Ola, a young gypsy woman with great power who's the key to stopping the killer.  And while Janfri is searching for Ola, the police and the killer are searching for him.

On the one hand, it's neat to see an urban crime mystery set in Canada, which we don't get much of.  While the forays into Romany culture were often interesting, I was underwhelmed.  As I said before, I don't know enough about gypsy culture to call anything out as wrong, but I couldn't help shake the feeling that the gypsy kumpania in Mulengro was very carefully crafted to be a template of gypsy social groups, kind of like the difference between a model house and a house people actually live in.  

In the end, Mulengro is an entertaining horror/urban fantasy/mystery novel, but I don't really see anything to set it apart from other books of the same type.

Just the stats:

Published: Oct 1985 (Ace Books paperback edition), Canada

Pages: 357

Awards:

Placed 12th for 1986 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel
Nominated for the 1986 Prix Aurora Award for Prix Casper - English

Scary Movie 2 (2001) - David Cross #14

Director: Keenen Wayans

Runtime: 83 minutes        

As a teenager I watched the first four Scary Movie installments, and I remember thinking that Scary Movie 2 was the worst of the lot.  Rottentomatoes suggests I'm not alone in this judgment. (The first four films are rated 53%, 15%, 36%, and 37%, respectively.)  The first Scary Movie (2000) brought the genre spoof back into the limelight.  While of course genre spoofs existed before (and perhaps hit their zenith with Airplane! (1980)) the modern terrible genre spoofs, from Not Another Date Movie (2001) to Meet the Spartans (2008) owe their existence to the massive financial success of the first installment of the Scary Movie franchise.  

The sequel has some of the characters reprising their roles from the first film, which mostly parodied I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream (1996).  Anna Faris plays Cindy, Regina Hall plays Brenda, Marlon Wayans is Shorty and Shawn Wayans is Ray.  This film is largely based on 1999's The Haunting, which was a remake of the 1963 film, which was itself based on Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House.  Anyway, the aforementioned characters, along with a few newcomers (Kathleen Robertson, Tori Spelling, and Malcolm in the Middle's Christopher Masterson), are college students tricked into helping summon the spirits at a haunted house by the pervy Professor (Tim Curry) and his assistant Dwight (David Cross).  Obviously, shit gets out of hand.  

What makes this installment so much worse than the others?  Well, most of the jokes aren't jokes.  There are a couple scenes with an obscene parrot that don't work at all, because what the parrot is saying isn't funny.  Jokes about weed can be funny, but instead we're expected to laugh because weed is being mentioned.  The creepy butler's gross deformed hand is good for a joke or two, but not for gags that last several minutes.  

I have no problem with dumb humor, but there needs to actually be humor in it.

If you want a fun movie that you don't have to take seriously, some of the movies in this franchise are good for that.  But not this one.

Rating:★☆☆☆☆

The Cross Section:

Character:★★★★☆

David Cross plays Dwight, the Professor's assistant.  While the professor is concerned about making sure there are enough cameras in the sexy co-eds' bedrooms, Dwight is pretty serious about proving the existence of the supernatural.  He's wheelchair bound, but determined not to let that slow him down. Whether it's passing out papers or being fellated, he always refuses offers of help by declaring "I can do it myself!"  The character is surprisingly fun, and Cross delivers a good character performance.

Screentime:★★★☆☆

Cross gets a good amount of screentime as part of the ensemble cast.

Another post about post-apocalyptic fiction

Last week, I wrote a post about the Guardian's article on the modern popularity of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic literature.  I recently read this article by NPR (titled "Does Post-Apocalyptic Literature Have a Non-Dystopian Future?"), which is worth a read, as it has some good info on the genre at the moment.  NPR's article is better than the Guardian's, because NPR at least realizes that Cormac McCarthy didn't invent post-apocalyptic fiction.  However, as good it managed to be throughout, NPR failed to stick the landing.  Their conclusion reads:

Post-apocalyptic books are thriving for a simple reason: The world feels more precariously perched on the lip of the abyss than ever, and facing those fears through fiction helps us deal with it.

Really?  More "precariously perched...than ever?"  More so than, oh, let's say the Cuban Missile Crisis and the height of the Cold War?   Which was pretty close to the publication date of Shute's On the Beach (1957), Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (1963), Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Jackson's The Sundial (1958), Ballard's The Wind from Nowhere (1961) and The Drowned World (1962), Boulle's Planet of the Apes (1963) or Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964). Quick question: besides the Kubrick movie, what do all of these have in common? Answer: They were SF/Horror novels. Hey, you know what wasn't mainstream in the 1950s and 1960s but is now? SF/Horror novels. There are more apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels now because authors aren't worried about no one being willing to buy them, or of being pigeonholed in a marginalized genre. 

What McCarthy did was prove that there was a market for post-apocalyptic fiction that wasn't firmly nested within the market for science fiction and horror.  The NPR article, and much criticism in general, thinks that popularity of a genre must be due primarily to the culture surrounding it, and to that culture only.  There's a lot to be said about why we like post-apocalyptic literature, and there's plenty to be said about what types of post-apocalyptic literature we read now, as opposed to 50 years ago.  The problem that NPR and the Guardian both have is that they look at the rise in popularity of post-apocalyptic fiction, and start with the assumption that there is something about this generation's experience that makes them more prone to writing/reading about the end of the world than were the generations before us.  It ignores that popularity is in no small part dependent upon availability, which is itself dependent on popularity.  

But even with all these caveats, it seems odd to give McCarthy sole credit for sparking this trend.  In the same year The Road was published, we also had Max Brooks' World War Z, Stephen King's Cell, Will Self's The Book of Dave, the TV show Jericho and the movie Children of Men.  And that's coming on the tail of Spielberg's The War of the Worlds, The Dawn of the Dead remake, Atwood's Oryx and Crake, part of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Vaughan's Y: The Last Man, 28 Days Later, The Matrix trilogy... and this is only going back to the beginning of this century and ignoring the countless genre potboiler post-apocalyptic novels.

On the Popularity of Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

An article from the Guardian's blog has been making the rounds recently, being shared by message boards and The Paris Review alike.  The article is titled Has US literature awoken from the American dream? and discusses the modern popularity of post-apocalyptic novels. First, let me point out that even within the context of the article, this title makes no sense.  The article points out that American literature has always been critical of the American dream, pointing out examples as far back as Huckleberry Finn.  But my main complaint is when the article comes to the conclusion that 

"Perhaps an exhaustion with national myths explains the recent advent of post-apocalyptic literature: from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. When the dream has been blown to bits for more than a century, all that’s left is to tell bleak stories of human survival set in the wreckage of a junkyard."

I'm going to do two things here.  First, I'm going to refute the claim that the advent of post-apocalyptic literature is 'recent,' and provide an alternate hypothesis as to the cause behind what is actually recent: it's surge in popularity.  Secondly, I want to examine why people like post-apocalyptic literature.   

First, let's acknowledge that there is a long history of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic literature.  Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), Jack London's The Scarlet Plague (1912)  Aldous Huxley's Ape & Essence (1948), Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), Shirley Jackson's The Sundial (1958), Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog (1969).   This is, of course, only a tiny piece of the a much longer tradition.  What you may notice about all these titles, is that they fall into a genre.  Most are Science Fiction or Horror and were marketed as such.  

Until the last few decades (and even now to a lesser extent), Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and genre fiction in general have been considered marginal literature.  They were looked down on by the literary establishment and the reading populace at large.  And apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic literature was a trope of these genres.  If World War Z had been published in the 1960s, it would never have been nearly as popular as it became, because it would have been relegated to the horror rack in the back of the store, and no self-respecting reader would be caught dead back there.  With growing acceptance of these genres came a growing acceptance of their constituent parts.  By the late 1990s, even John Updike was writing post-apocalyptic fiction.  

So one simple explanation is that we're seeing more apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction because Science Fiction and Horror, the genres into which most post-apocalyptic works fall,  have become popular genres.  And authors who don't normally write in these genres are no longer worried about being pigeon-holed or discredited for doing so. Despite what the Guardian writer claims, we've been telling these stories for over a century.  People just haven't been listening.

As to my second subject, why people enjoy this type of narrative, it's first necessary to make some distinctions. To my way of thinking, there are two primary forms of apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic literature: issue-driven and societal.  Let's talk about issue-driven first.  

Despite the Guardian's bizarre attempt to portray post-apocalyptic fiction as a product of the US, the fact is it is an international genre.  While it dates back to the early 19th century, it started reaching critical mass in the 1950s.  This was a) the 'Golden Age' of Science Fiction and b) soon after the advent of the atomic bomb.  Huxley's Ape & Essence, Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), and Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (1963) are all post-apocalyptic novels dealing with the results of atomic warfare (although Vonnegut handles Mutually Assured Destruction with the fictitious Ice-9, the message is still the same).  I keep making reference to apocalyptic literature as opposed to post-apocalyptic, so I should give an example of what I mean.  Dr. Strangelove is a good example, as it deals with the end of the world, rather than life after the end of the world.  The 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still is also, I feel, largely apocalyptic.  An alien species comes to Earth to deliver a message: If you don't get your crap together, you're going to kill us all.  So get your crap together or we'll kill you first.

More recently, issue-driven works have been focused on the environment. In film, we can find The Day After Tomorrow (2004) or The Happening (2008). (I didn't say they were good films.)  The appeal of these is simple.  It's our way of saying, to steal a quote, "You maniacs!  You blew it up!  Ah, damn you!  Goddamn you all to Hell!"

The other category, which I've vaguely titled "Societal," uses the breakdown of civilization to explore the individual or society.  This can be done in a largely literary way (e.g. McCarthy's The Road (2006), Shelley's The Last Man (1826)) or as fun/exciting SF/Horror (e.g. Brooks' World War Z (2006) or Mad Max (1979)) or anything inbetween (e.g. Matheson's I Am Legend).  Jackson's The Sundial is a good example of societal apocalyptic (as opposed to post-apocalyptic) fiction, as the end of the world is at the end of the novel.  

The appeal of reading The Road is different from the appeal of reading World War Z.   In cases like The Road, the appeal is a desire to understand human nature, and the complete destruction of society, of civilized behavior, of everything but the will and need to survive, allows an individual's humanity (or inhumanity) unfettered control of his/her situation.  While there is certainly some such exploration in novels like World War Z, novels and films like this also have an escapist function.  That job you hate?  Gone.  Those people you can't stand?  Gone.  You can do anything you want, whenever you want.  No responsibility, no constraints.

But both of these types of narratives have corollaries outside of the (Post-)Apocalyptic narrative.  Something like William Golding's The Lord of the Flies (1954) provides many of the same possibilities as The Road.   It is a study of human society, a dissection via disintegration.  On the other hand, something like Zane Grey's The Man of the Forest (1919), or any of the countless novels about pirates or lone rogues or charming crooks who live by their own rules and don't take no guff from no one, these fulfill much of the same need that books like World War Z fulfills.  Post-apocalyptic fiction is a very easy way to do this, because you don't need to write a society that your protagonist is at odds with.

Long story short, post-apocalyptic fiction is not a recent genre, but has a long history as a subgenre in SF and Horror, which have only recently gained mainstream acceptance.  It doesn't address any new psychological need, but rather addresses many existing needs in a very direct way.

1992: Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King

The Author:

Stephen King (1947-    ) was born in Portland, Maine.   His father abandoned the family when King was two, leaving his mother to raise King and his older brother.  King attended the University of Maine, earning a B.A. in English in 1970.  King and Tabitha Spruce had their first child in 1970, and married in 1971.  Their second child, Joseph Hillstrom King, was born in 1972.  (He, like his mother and father, is a writer.  He writes under the name Joe Hill.)  King taught high school and supplemented his wages by selling short stories to magazines. 

In 1973, he published his first novel, Carrie.  The first of his novels to make the annual top ten bestsellers list was The Dead Zone (1979).  Between 1980 and 2012, King appeared on the annual top ten list 34 times, in one case having three books on the same year's list. He has since written multiple non-fiction works, as well as serving as a columnist for entertainment weekly.  At current count, King has published twelve short story collections, two comic series, six books of non-fiction, fifty-six novels, seven novellas, ten screenplays, and a musical libretto.

The Book:

1st Edition Cover

Length: 372 pages
Subject/Genre: Personal revenge/Gothic suspense

Dolores Claiborne is about the eponymous woman, an sixty-five year old maid on Little Tall Island, a small, working class area of the coast of Maine.  The novel begins with her turning herself in to the local sheriff, denying responsibility for the recent death of her long-time employer, Vera Donovan, but finally admitting to murdering her own husband decades prior.  Thus Dolores begins to tell her story, a story of abuse, helplessness, and retaliation, starting in the middle and slowly circling in toward the deaths.

Dolores Claiborne is very unusual for a King novel.  The most immediate difference to his usual style is the narration:  The entire book is one monological confession (in dialect) with a small epilogue tacked on.  Further, there is almost no supernatural element to the story.  The only supernatural element, brief glimpses of a little girl in a far away town, are completely irrelevant to the novel, both in terms of plot and symbolism.  As explained in the brief preface, this little girl is Jessie Burlingame, the main character of Gerald's Game, released the same year as Dolores Claiborne.  Basically, these scenes are saying "If you want to find out what the deal was with this girl, buy Gerald's Game, now available wherever books are sold!"  

That said, Dolores Claiborne is a very strong novel.  It's less horror than it is gothic, in the sense that Flannery O'Connor or Shirely Jackson's works are gothic.  It does have a number of King tropes, the small town Maine setting, the attempt to make everyday objects terrifying, but it doesn't suffer from them as much as some of his other works.  The novel paints a vivid picture of a desperate woman, and sucks you into life on that that small island in Maine.

Dolores Claiborne is possibly the least well-known of the King novels on the list. This despite the fact that it had a film adaptation in 1995 starring Kathy Bates as Dolores, Jennifer Jason Leigh as her daughter Selena, and smaller parts played by John C. Reilly, Christopher Plummer, and playwright Eric Bogosian.

Strangely enough, Dolores Claiborne was adapted into an opera and premiered in San Francisco last year.  It looks kind of bizarre:

The trailer for the movie on the other hand, looks pretty fantastic.   

If you're not a fan of King, looking to get into his work, or if you enjoy the gothic or suspenseful, I'd really recommend Dolores Claiborne.  Most of the negative reviews I've seen have boiled down to not liking the monologue structure or finding it not exciting enough (though, as a suspense novel, tension is everything).  It's definitely worth checking out.

Bestsellers of 1992:

1. Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King

2. The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

3. Gerald's Game by Stephen King

4. Mixed Blessings by Danielle Steel

5. Jewels by Danielle Steel

6. The Stars Shine Down by Sidney Sheldon

7. The Tale of the Body Thief by Anne Rice

8. Mexico by James Michener

9. Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan

10. All Around the Town by Mary Higgins Clark

Also Published in 1992:

Children of Men by P. D. James

Jazz by Toni Morrison

The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald

Sources:

"Dolores Claiborne." IMDB. Amazon

King, Stephen. Dolores Claiborne. 1992. New York: Signet, 1993. Print.

1987: The Tommyknockers by Stephen King

The Author:

Stephen King (1947-    ) was born in Portland, Maine.   His father abandoned the family when King was two, leaving his mother to raise King and his older brother.  King attended the University of Maine, earning a B.A. in English in 1970.  King and Tabitha Spruce had their first child in 1970, and married in 1971.  Their second child, Joseph Hillstrom King, was born in 1972.  (He, like his mother and father, is a writer.  He writes under the name Joe Hill.)  King taught high school and supplemented his wages by selling short stories to magazines. 

In 1973, he published his first novel, Carrie.  The first of his novels to make the annual top ten bestsellers list was The Dead Zone (1979).  Between 1980 and 2012, King appeared on the annual top ten list 34 times, in one case having three books on the same year's list. He has since written multiple non-fiction works, as well as serving as a columnist for entertainment weekly.  At current count, King has published twelve short story collections, two comic series, six books of non-fiction, fifty-six novels, seven novellas, ten screenplays, and a musical libretto.

The Book:

Length: 747 pages
Subject/Genre:  Alien invasion/sci-fi-horror

The Tommyknockers is one of the few books on the list that I'd already read.  Widely regarded as one of King's worst, The Tommykockers takes place in Haven, Maine, where Western novelist Bobbi Anderson discovers an alien spacecraft buried in the woods.  As she begins to excavate the wreck, the people in the town start changing, becoming more and more like the alien species that visited long ago.  They develop an amazing technical ingenuity, but don't necessarily understand the concepts behind their inventions.  As Bobbi says "As I say, we've never been very good understanders. We're not a race of super-Einsteins.  Thomas Edison in space would be closer, I think."  However, the townspeople become increasingly psychotic and dangerous.  Bobbi's friend, poet James Gardener (Gard), is immune to the the effects of the change because of a metal plate in his head, and it's up to him to stop the people of Haven, and the alien technology, from wreaking havoc on the Earth.

While complaining about a Stephen King book being long is like complaining about it being set in Maine, The Tommyknockers has the major problem of spending hundreds of pages shifting around minor characters, which gets very repetitive, very fast.  King's tendency to take common-place items and recontextualize them as terrifying consistently fails here.  For example:

"The Coke machine banked back.  It hung in the air for a moment, its front turning back and forth in small arcs that reminded Leandro of the sweeps of a radar dish.  The sun flashed off its glass door.  Leandro could see bottles of Coke and Fanta inside.

Suddenly it pointed at him -- and accelerated toward him.

Found me, Christ---

He got up and tried to hop to the car on his left foot.  The soda machine bore down on him, coin return hooting dismally."  

'coin return hooting dismally' is probably the least scary description I've ever read in a horror novel. The success of The Tommyknockers is a bit surprising considering it competed against two other King books, including Misery.

King's cocaine addiction and alcoholism throughout the 1980s is frequently brought up in discussions of The Tommyknockers.  King himself admits to barely remembering having written Cujo.  There is much to be said for The Tommyknockers as an allegory for King's addiction (this article from The Guardian is worth a look), but that doesn't make up for the overall shortcomings of the novel.   Nevertheless, The Tommyknockers was adapted into a truly awful two part miniseries starring Jimmy Smits (The West Wing, NYPD Blue) and Marg Helgenberger (CSI):

It's pretty much just three hours of all the worst aspects of a made-for-tv sci-fi B-movie.   

I can't really recommend this book for anybody.  If you're a Stephen King fan or looking to get into his books, this is not a good choice.  It's one of his longest and worst books.  

Bestsellers of 1987:

1. The Tommyknockers by Stephen King

2. Patriot Games by Tom Clancy

3. Kaleidoscope by Danielle Steel

4. Misery by Stephen King

5. Leaving Home by Garrison Keillor

6. Windmills of the Gods by Sidney Sheldon

7. Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow

8. Fine Things by Danielle Steel

9. Heaven and Hell by John Jakes

10. The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King

Also Published in 1987:

The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Sources:

King, Stephen. The Tommyknockers. 1987. New York: Signet, 1988. Print.

1986: It by Stephen King

The Author:

Stephen King (1947-    ) was born in Portland, Maine.   His father abandoned the family when King was two, leaving his mother to raise King and his older brother.  King attended the University of Maine, earning a B.A. in English in 1970.  King and Tabitha Spruce had their first child in 1970, and married in 1971.  Their second child, Joseph Hillstrom King, was born in 1972.  (He, like his mother and father, is a writer.  He writes under the name Joe Hill.)  King taught high school and supplemented his wages by selling short stories to magazines. 

In 1973, he published his first novel, Carrie.  The first of his novels to make the annual top ten bestsellers list was The Dead Zone (1979).  Between 1980 and 2012, King appeared on the annual top ten list 34 times, in one case having three books on the same year's list. He has since written multiple non-fiction works, as well as serving as a columnist for entertainment weekly.  At current count, King has published twelve short story collections, two comic series, six books of non-fiction, fifty-six novels, seven novellas, ten screenplays, and a musical libretto.  But you might know him better for his bit part as 'hoagie man' in George Romero's motocross/sword-fighting classic, Knightriders.

The Book:

1st edition cover

Length: 1090 pages
Subject/Genre: Supernatural horror/Horror

It is easily one of King's most famous novels (along with others like The Shining, The Green Mile, The Stand, Misery, The Dead Zone, and Carrie).  It's probably the only one of the King novels I'm reviewing that an audience who had never read a King novel would know the plot of offhand.  But I'll summarize anyway.

The story takes place in the town of Derry, Maine, switching back and forth between 1958 and 1985.  Seven preteen misfits of the underdog-sports-movie variety, become friends.  Bill has a stutter, Ben is a fat nerd, Richie is a smart-ass with glasses, Eddie is a coddled hypochondriac, Beverly is a girl from the poor side of town, Mike is black, and Stan is Jewish, and they all live in a particularly violent town.   The novel starts when "Stuttering" Bill Denbrough's little brother is murdered, the first in a long chain of child murders/disappearances.  The 1958 discovery of the true nature of It, is split up with long sections from the friends in 1985.  They had made a pact that, should It, ever return, so would they, to kill It once and for all.  

While It takes many shapes, the one it most frequently assumes is that of Pennywise the Dancing Clown.  As Beverly notes near the end of the novel: "[A] small child will sometimes laugh and cry at the same time when a capering circus clown approaches, knowing it is supposed to be funny... but it is also unknown, full of the unknown's eternal power." (ellipses part of the original quotation)  Like the clown, many of the forms It are either bizarre or come from the roster of classic horror movie monsters (e.g. werewolf, mummy, and at one point, Frankenstein's monster itself).  The effectiveness of this is largely dependent on your absorption in the novel.  If you're reading it as a horror novel, with the intent of enjoying the scares and identifying with the characters, it's effective.  If you're taking a step back, and analyzing everything, it's less so.    

But for all of It's horrors, a lot of the story is not about It so much as it is about these characters coming-of-age in the 1958 frame, and coming to terms with traumatic pasts in the 1985 frame.  It is one of King's strongest novels, and the characters' growth is one of, if not the, largest factors in this.  After all, King did write The Body, which is better known for its film adaptation, Stand By Me. Which leads to its own issues.  Too often the childhood segments get drowned in sentimentality, and take on the feel of a heart-warming period piece.  Not that this is inherently bad, it just doesn't really work in the context of the rest of the book.  Likewise, with certain plot aspects (e.g. the value of belief as a weapon against It or the introduction of the turtle) that, although logically consistent with the story, sometimes come across as too goofy or bizarre in a silly way. But then, in a book as long as It, something like that's bound to happen occasionally.

One reason It is the best-known of the King books I'm reviewing is it's popular film adaptation.  The 1990 two-part made-for-tv movie with Tim Curry as Pennywise has remained popular (or at least has maintained a cult following) since its release.

In a lot of ways, the book is darker than the film.   A lot of things that the film necessarily leaves off-screen (e.g. abuse, sex, etc) are explicit in the novel.  It's a solid horror novel.  It's also a good place to start for those looking to get into King's work, because it contains a number of tropes that appear often across his body of work (e.g., set in a mid-size town to mid-size city in Maine; child protagonists; a transcendent reality; a fascination with 1950's and earlier horror and sci-fi, etc).  That said, if you don't like horror novels, you won't like It.

Bestsellers of 1986:

1. It by Stephen King

2. Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy

3. Whirlwind by James Clavell

4. The Bourne Supremacy by Robert Ludlum

5. Hollywood Husbands by Jackie Collins

6. Wanderlust by Danielle Steel

7. I'll Take Manhattan by Judith Krantz

8. The Last of the Breed by Louis L'Amour

9. The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy

10. A Perfect Spy by John le Carré

Also Published in 1986:

The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

Sources:

King, Stephen. It. 1986. New York: Signet, 1987. Print.

1984: The Talisman by Peter Straub and Stephen King

The Authors:

Peter Straub (1943-     ) was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  He attended the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where he received a B.A., in 1965, then Columbia University where he received an M.A.  In 1966, Straub married Susan Bitker, with whom he now has two children.  After a short period teaching High School English in Wisconsin, Straub moved to Ireland, planning to get his doctorate from University College, Dublin.  He dropped the doctorate path to focus on writing.  

His first novel, Marriages, a mainstream story about an American businessman in Europe, was published in 1973.  Unable to find a publisher for a second mainstream novel, Straub began to write horror at the suggestion of his agent.  His first horror novel, Julia, was published in 1975.  His first major success came with the publication of Ghost Story (1979), and was followed by other well-received horror novels, winning multiple World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Awards.    

After the publication of Ghost Story, Straub moved back to the United States.  He had been friends with Stephen King, and the two of them decided to collaborate on a novel, The Talisman.  Since 1984, Straub has published eleven novels and four short story collections, as well as editorial work on the Library of America's Lovecraft anthology.  

Stephen King (1947-    ) was born in Portland, Maine.   His father abandoned the family when King was two, leaving his mother to raise King and his older brother.  King attended the University of Maine, earning a B.A. in English in 1970.  King and Tabitha Spruce had their first child in 1970, and married in 1971.  Their second child, Joseph Hillstrom King, was born in 1972.  (He, like his mother and father, is a writer.  He writes under the name Joe Hill.)  King taught high school and supplemented his wages by selling short stories to magazines.

In 1973, he published his first novel, Carrie.  The first of his novels to make the annual top ten bestsellers list was The Dead Zone (1979).  Between 1980 and 2012, King appeared on the annual top ten list 34 times, in one case having three books on the same year's list.


The Book:   

Subject/Genre: Heroic Journey/Dark Fantasy


The Talisman begins with twelve year old Jack Sawyer and his mother, a retired B-movie actress, heading to a New Hampshire sea-side tourist town off-season.  Sawyer's father has been dead some years, and his business partner, Morgan Sloat, is trying to get control of Jack's father's share of the company (cliche 1: Evil businessman).  Jack suspects his mother is sick and has come to this town to die.  Here, he meets Speedy Parker, an wise old black man (cliche 2).  Parker gives Jack some information, that he (Parker), Jack's father, Sloat, and nameless others, can traverse between worlds: ours and a fantasy realm known only as "The Territories."  Not only that, but many people have 'Twinners', versions of themselves that exist in the other world.  There's no twinner of Jack, but his mother's twinner is the queen.  Jack must retrieve a special object known only as the talisman and save his mother and the queen (cliche 3).  He'll need to travel across the U.S. and The Territories, from New Hampshire to California, flipping back and forth to avoid danger.  Jack, Parker tells us, is special and has a great destiny (cliche 4).  Why?  Well, we'll find out in the last 100 pages.  

Despite it's reliance on standard fantasy plot devices, The Talisman is a fun read.  It tends to jump around a lot in terms of tone, going from almost cutesy to grotesque to heart-warming with little warning.  One of my big problems is with a couple aspects that are common in fantasy novels but are so over-used and, in some ways, just bad writing.  One is the 'mysterious artifact.'  Parker (and other characters) give Jack seemingly benign or mysterious objects.  They won't tell him what they're for, only that he'll know it when he sees it.  The problem here is that it's more often than not a mixture of Chekhov's gun and deus ex machina.  All seems lost, but this innocuous item that has been sitting in Jack's backpack for a few hundred pages is suddenly able to fix everything.  The other trope is needlessly withheld information.  This is particularly bad in The Talisman, because people who are on Jack's side refuse to tell him information that would help him.  In some cases, characters even make it clear that they can't say more, but why they can't is never explained or even hinted at.  Too much of the story relies on revelations that were inexplicably withheld from our hero.  

That said, there are parts of the journey that, on their own, buoy up the work (The Sunlight Home is a pretty strong piece of horror writing in and of itself).  Jack is a reasonably complex character who the reader can really get behind.  His sidekicks get a bit infuriating before eventually developing beyond a couple grating character traits.  


The Talisman has a sequel, 2001's Black House, co-written by Straub and King.  The two have said that they are interested in writing a third, but nothing has been officially determined.  

If you're a fan of dark fantasy, The Talisman is a good choice.  I read a lot of Stephen King books in high school, and if I were to rank The Talisman on a scale of 10 (10 being The Stand or Dark Tower I-IV, and 1 being The Regulators or Dark Tower VI) I'd give it a strong 6.


Bestsellers of 1984:

1. The Talisman by Peter Straub and Stephen King
2. The Aquataine Progression by Robert Ludlum
3. The Sicilian by Mario Puzo
4. Love and War by John Jakes
5. The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss
6.  ...And the Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer
7. The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth
8. Full Circle by Danielle Steel
9. The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abromowitz by Joan Rivers
10. Lincoln by Gore Vidal

Also Published in 1984:

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

Sources:

King, Stephen and Straub, Peter. The Talisman. 1984. New York: Berkley, 1985. Print.

"Peter Straub." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 Aug. 2014.