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Books Acquired

• Invincible, Volume Eight: My Favorite Martian, by Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Bill Crabtree
• Fell, Volume 1: Feral City, by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith
• Global Frequency: Detonation Radio, by Warren Ellis et al
• The Hardy Boys: The House on the Cliff, by Franklin W. Dixon
• Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, by Douglas Wolk

Books Read

• It, by Stephen King
• Perfect From Now On, by John Sellers
• The Winter of Our Discontent, by John Steinbeck
• Head of the Class, Susan Beth Pfeffer
• Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

At this point, it would be impossible for me to view Stephen King’s It with any sort of objectivity. I’m not sure I’d even want to, if I could. Between the ages of thirteen and thirty-two, I’ve read It twelve times – that works out to a little over 13,000 pages, all told, spent with just one book alone. That’s not counting the snippets, either. Whenever I fly anywhere, I bundle along It, my travel-time talisman. During takeoff, I pull the novel out and open to a random page, letting myself get lost in the words. Takeoffs terrify me, but It makes things seem all right.

Which is odd to say, I suppose, when discussing a book that can quite rightly be called King’s horror magnum opus. It’s a monster book, at least on the surface, calling up old terrors like Dracula, the werewolf, the mummy, zombies, even giants and witches. Dig just a little bit deeper and there are the other, more mundane (but maybe even scarier) horrors: disease, child abuse, spousal abuse, racism, homophobia, loneliness, childhood bullies, insanity, and the sudden, shocking death of a loved one. These two realms of fear – the real and the purportedly imaginary – coexist easily in It, each feeding off one another in a sort of supreme act of mutual parasitism. It should, by all rights, be terrifying. Maybe it was, once, for me. But now, every time I pick up It, I feel a comforting sense of coming home.

There’s a new MasterCard ad on the trains around Boston now, featuring two different placards. One says, “The day you became a Red Sox fan: birth.” And it shows a nice new Red Sox cap. The other says: “The day you became more than a fan: priceless.” And now the hat’s all beaten up and tattered and falling apart. It looks, to my mind, a lot like my original hardcover of It, handed down from my Uncle Doug when he went off to college and left me all his old stuff. See, It isn’t where I started the Stephen King thing. That started back when I was nine, reading my friend Christian’s copy of Cycle of the Werewolf at sleepover camp, and, later, his Creepshow when he stayed over my Grandparents’ house for the night. After I got Doug’s books when I was twelve, first I read some stories in Night Shift. Then I read Rage. Only then did I heft this gargantuan book off my shelf and, with a nervous sigh, flip the cover open and start reading. That’s the day I became more than a fan. Priceless.

See, I came for the monsters advertised on the flap. That’s why, I think, most people come to King. What I didn’t expect, and what none of the previous Stephen King books I’d read had prepared me for, was that the book wasn’t about monsters. Beyond anything, It is a book about friendship, and the bonds between people who love each other. When I was twelve, that concept fired my imagination more than anything else I’d ever read. Young me, bookish and strange, didn’t really have much in the way of friends myself. My buddies were books, and mostly that suited me all right. But inside this book, there were seven people, roughly my age who were a lot like me: kids who were picked on, punched on, outcast, Losers. Kids I could identify with. And it all starts (maybe, just maybe, in more ways than one), with a scared fat kid running from some bullies, and literally falling into some friends along the way.

It takes time to build an indelible bond between seven well-drawn, believable characters, time and pages. It’s that bond that makes up the core of the book: it’s that bond that brings them together to try to kill It for the first time, and it’s that bond that brings them back nearly thirty years later, to finish what they started. That’s King’s main thrust: getting you to fall in love with these people, both in the past and in the present, and understand their ties to each other so deeply that you feel a part of them yourself. But King has another agenda, as well: while building history between the members of the Losers’ Club, he’s also building the history of a town. As Mike Hanlon – the only member of the Losers to have stayed and grown up in Derry, Maine – asks, “Can a whole town be haunted?” Throughout a series of five “Interlude” segments, Hanlon – in the first person – sketches for us a brutal history of Derry. The cycle – a period of intense violence for Derry, coinciding with It’s waking (and feeding) periods, occurring roughly once every twenty-seven years – stretches back through Derry’s long and tortured past. How far back is a revelation in the book I wouldn’t dream of spoiling for the uninitiated; suffice it to say that Mike is there to find that out, too.

I’ve gone into such detail about the Interlude segments – which are really somewhat minor sketches on the edgings of the giant canvas of It – to reveal something about myself. The first two times reading It, I skipped the Interludes almost entirely. They just didn’t seem important to me, so I passed right over them to get back into “the real story,” as some people will (wrongly) pass over the historical chapters in The Grapes of Wrath. On my third read, I’d grown enough as a reader (and as a King fan) to finally delve into the past of Derry a little bit more, and my experience was enriched for it. I think good books – the best books – grow with readers, meaning different things to them at different stages in their lives. I find a little bit frightening that I was roughly the age of the young members of the Losers’ Club when I first read It, and that now, after my twelfth read, I’m closing in on the age of the Losers as adults. It’s a little bit frightening that my experience with this book – published two years before I read it – nearly equals the span of the main narrative itself. Frightening, but a little comforting, as well. As I said before, coming to Derry has always been a little like coming home for me. There will come a time when I will understand the grownups as well as I understand the children, and that’s going to be an interesting day indeed.

So, for all my love of this book, do I have anything bad to say about it? Well, with any long relationship, you’re bound to have some quibbles. For example, I’ve frequently had a problem with King’s endings. When he first destroyed a town in Carrie, the concept was fresh. When destruction came at the end of The Shining, it was the pinnacle of this type of finale. By the time the massive destruction comes near the end of It – no matter how symbolically important – the concept seems a little careworn. I also don’t understand King’s occasional but distracting use of full names. It seems to come at random: “Bill said, Beverly said, Mike said, Ben Hanscom said…” It doesn’t make much sense, and I’d love to know what King’s reason for it was.

Man, I’m not even scratching the surface here. I could throw words at this book all day and all night and still not come up with anything close to a sufficient review or summary. Maybe the fact that I’ve read a book this long this often speaks for itself. I have never read another book I’ve loved as much as It, and I don’t suspect I ever will. Which is why I’m glad it’s always right there, always in my reach.

The back of John Sellers’ book Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life features a quote from Chuck Klosterman: “Perfect From Now On is clever and interesting and sincere, and I completely disagree with everything the author says.” In essence, that’s my entire review of the book. If you really think about it, there’s no reason at all for me to like this book: Sellers hates almost anything that could be construed as “pop music” (despite early chapters dedicated to embarrassing – yet awkwardly fond – memories of being obsessed with Duran Duran), whereas my favorite singer, Bruce Springsteen, remains one of the most popular singers ever. Sellers is the type of music lover who straddles that interesting line between wanting more people to understand his musical obsessions, but also doesn’t ever want them to be too popular (and the concept of too popular is malleable.) He’s a music obsessive of the stripe that almost always likes “their early stuff more.”

But there’s something in each of those examples that both of us can agree with: John Sellers loves music. Loves it. And it’s that, more than anything, that makes Perfect From Now On compelling – if not exactly easy – reading.

Much of the book concerns Sellers’ favorite band, Guided By Voices. I’ve never heard Guided By Voices. After reading all about them in this book, I never want to hear them. Much of what Sellers ebulliently describes as seminal, transcendent experiences is exactly what turns me off of them. But never once did I doubt his commitment or his sincerity, and even though his experiences with his favorite band (and, by extrapolation, with music itself) are nearly incomprehensible to me, the fact that he loves them this much always seems to cut through his bullshit.

It might be easier, though, if I didn’t have to cut through his bullshit. He has more rules about why and how you should like music than Rob Fleming, the main character in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity … and he’s a lot less likable than Fleming. If, to borrow a scene from that book, Sellers was faced with otherwise terrific people who happened to own a Billy Joel album, instead of conceding, Sellers would likely shatter the album to the pavement and never speak to those people again.

My mind keeps drawing comparisons to another book about music I read earlier this year, the far more sublime Love Is a Mix Tape. In that book, Rob Sheffield uses music as a way to talk about his short and tragic relationship with a woman he loved. Having something to talk about in relation to music seemed to give that book a little more structure than Perfect From Now On has. Also, Sheffield seems to keep wanting to be elitist and snobby about music, and never seems to quite get around to it. I’m not saying you need a likable narrator to tell an interesting story. It’s just that Love is a Mix Tape absorbs, while Perfect From Now On challenges.

All that said, it’s not a bad book; maybe if I liked his music more, the book would have opened up secrets I’m not getting. As it stands, I understood John Sellers’ passion; I just wish I understood him a little better.

Steinbeck, on the other hand: Steinbeck, I thought I got. He’s written three masterpieces: East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, and Travels With Charley. All compelling, all well-written, all with a narrative drive that hooks you and characters who immediately imprint themselves on your heart and your brain. Big-time literary triumphs. The fact that Of Mice and Men, which would be a standard-bearer for a lesser author, isn’t in this elite list says something about how much I revere Steinbeck’s work.

But, man, did I dislike Winter of Our Discontent.

Maybe it’s the inaction. Much of the novel involves a man named Ethan Hawley stuck in a dead-end job and a dead-end life, figuring out whether he has the proper lack of morality to do something about it. The first two-thirds of the novel meander through Ethan’s mind, building slowly toward the weight of his moral decision. Once he is committed to his decision, fate intervenes and changes everything. End of Part One.

Things seem more promising at the beginning of Part Two. Freed from the claustrophobic confines of Ethan’s tortured yet lazy mind, we begin to see inside the motivations of the people in Ethan’s town. One in particular, a cipher named Margie Young-Hunt, suddenly bursts open across the page, like a ray of sunlight in a cave. I’d been reading about her for over a hundred and eighty pages, and still had no more of a handle on her than I did about any of the other characters. And suddenly, she starts making sense, and it became clear that Steinbeck was grooming her to be an older and less blatantly evil version of East of Eden’s Cathy. Then, abruptly, we cut off of the third-person narrative and dive right back into Ethan’s brain, where he comes to another moral crossroads. Once again fate lends a hand, and at the last minute, Ethan is again saved. End of book.

That’s … well, that’s it. Ethan Hawley doesn’t seem particularly invested in the events around him, and so doesn’t make the reader invested. His observations stew for pages and pages, so that when he finally commits to what is inevitably the wrong decision, it’s a total surprise. Steinbeck seems to want to be saying good moral choices will be rewarded, and bad ones – like the ones his son makes near the end of the novel – will be punished … but that’s not entirely the case. Sometimes good deeds end in death and sometimes bad ones end up pretty well. The concepts of fate and religion seem to want to be important, but in the end, it seems to boil down to a series of coincidences that don’t add up to a moral or a message or even a story.

Oh, and a word on Steinbeck’s prose: the man has never been precisely Hemingway, but overwriting of this sort is simply appalling. Adjectives proliferate, creating a jungle of words you have to machete through. It’s not only frustrating to read, it’s actually hard to read, having to go over the same sentence four times to figure out what the point of it was.

There’s at least one exception, though, and I point this out because it comes early and gave me boundless hope for this novel. Maybe it’s me, but in this difficult, maybe pointless novel, Steinbeck unfurls one of his very best segments:

The books stored [in the attic] are not waiting to be thrown out or given to the Seamen’s Institute. They sit comfortably on their shelves waiting to be discovered. And the chairs, some unfashionable for a time, some rump-sprung, are large and soft. It is not a dusty place, either. Housecleaning is attic-cleaning also, and since it is mostly closed away, dust does not enter. I remember as a child scrambling among the brilliants of books or, battered with agonies, or in the spectral half-life that requires loneliness, retiring to the attic, to lie curled in a great body-molded chair in the violent-lavender light from the window.

I read this part over and over again, because it is in love with its words in the best possible way. And it carries you, like the best fiction can, to a place in yourself you barely remember and never want to forget. I wanted all of this book to be like this small segment, and it wasn’t. That actually makes me a little sad.

You know what also makes me sad? That I read the entirety of the Head of the Class “novelization,” by Susan Beth Pfeffer. I read it on the train, where other people could see me. I finished it at the library, where folks looked on. Even though we’re only halfway through the year, I feel pretty confident that this will be my most embarrassing moment in fiction-reading of 2007.

It’s funny: the first two “adult” novels I read – beyond Roald Dahl and Judy Blume – were novelizations of movies. Can you guess what they were? If you guessed Annie and Predator, you are correct! My Dad bought them both for me at local convenience stores; they had their covers torn off and were already falling apart when I got them, but I loved them … but then again, I was ten at the time. My main complaint was that they were, for some reason, pretending Annie wasn’t a musical in the book. And who knows, maybe I would have really loved the novelization (and it’s not even that; it’s pretty much a transcript of five early episodes of the show that are barely – barely¬ – tied together thematically) of Head of the Class at ten. But I don’t think so.

Midway through my read, I looked up and literally thought this: These characters have no internal lives! They have no motivations for anything and they seem to be just doing stuff at random! I don’t understand! Which is why, as my friend John Perich might say, the Head of the Class fanfiction I tried to write failed utterly. Because I love this show – love it beyond the boundaries of itself, likely – I constantly try to impose my own sensibilities into it. I imagine what happens to the characters when they’re not on screen, what kind of home lives they have, what other relationships they’ve formed. You know that tired 80s sitcom device of bringing in a guest character for one episode that everyone supposedly loves and cherishes, but whom we’ve never seen or heard of before? Head of the Class did that with Ms. Russell, who appeared once, got Alzheimer’s, affected everyone, and left, and was never discussed again. In my head, the IHP students have had a long and storied history with her, leading up to that one episode. This is because I’m crazy.

No, I suppose I wasn’t expecting much from my Head of the Class novelization, but I kind of hoped it would surprise me. Which is maybe the saddest part of the whole thing.

Rounding out the month, I picked up Lord of the Flies for the third time in my life and devoured it in a week. I have an interesting history with Lord of the Flies. In sophomore year of high school, my teacher assigned us this book to read, and I hated it. This was the same teacher who tried desperately to get me to love what may well be the worst novel ever written, The Old Man and the Sea. I’m not going to say that I wasn’t at least partially to blame for my lack of interest in her passions: I was heavily and nearly exclusively into Stephen King at the time, and anything else was seen as lesser. (In my school journal, I actually wrote: I guess it’s okay, but I’d rather be reading The Stand. Oh, teachers loved me.)

Flash-forward a few years and my friend Tracey was complaining that she had to read the book for anthropology class in college. Curious, I picked the book up again … and fell in love with it (thus continuing a long-standing tradition of liking things because Tracey hates them. Yin and yang, we are.)

Recently, my boss at the office was quoting something entirely random from the book: “Sucks to your ass-mar!” For some reason it struck her funny, and the more she repeated it, the more it stuck in my head. I didn’t really even remember that part. Maybe it was time for another re-read.

On this side of thirty, the book is a lot different. I think I was twenty when I read it last, and things have changed since then. I think my second read was that of a boy’s adventure story gone bad. This time, reading as a real adult, I thought, They’re just kids. Kids playing games. Even though I knew what was going to happen with both Simon and Piggy, I started out thinking of it as just a bunch of kids on an island, doing kid stuff. Weird.

I also noticed how casual Golding is with the beginning of the book. He’s building a society in the first half of the book, a whole caste system, and it’s done almost lazily, so that you don’t notice it. Plus, the book is very much in love with its words. The prose isn’t impenetrable, but at times, especially after big reveals or big character changes, the words themselves slow you down so that you’re forced to pay attention instead of just racing along. Half of my brain admires the restraint; the other half just wanted him to get on with it.

When the book marches furiously into its second half, though, slowing down isn’t an option. The pages fly as anarchy asserts itself; I liked how Golding stops referring to them as boys and starts calling them savages. The most terrifying moment in the book comes in an implication rather than an act: when Samaneric haltingly tell Ralph that Jack has sharpened a stick at both ends. The savagery that tore Simon apart and the deliberate murder of Piggy don’t hold a candle to that one moment: that’s moving beyond games and beyond even murder, and into something far more chilling. Savage.

Tune in next month when I return to graphic novels with a vengeance. September’s going to be awesome.

Kev