It

I have a confession to make.

For the past week or so, I've been reading Stephen King's It. I'm kind of a slow reader, so I'm only a little more than 300 pages into it so far. 700 still to go.

That's not my confession.

This is my confession:

I think Stephen King's It is a fantastic book.

And I mean more than that. I mean this:

Most of what I read is non-fiction. Philosophy, theology, politics, eco stuff, vegan stuff. Lots of non-fiction, serious, grown up, smart stuff.

When I do read fiction-- and I do read fiction, quite a bit of it-- it's pretty much split into two camps, two wide genres: great literature, and dumb fun.

The great literature is the stuff I take seriously, the stuff I really, truly, thoroughly get into. The stuff I feel smarter and more sophisticated for reading. Hemingway, Kerouac, Camus, Dostoevsky, Burgess, Vonnegut, Hesse, Pirsig, Kingsolver, Orwell. That stuff. I love that stuff.

But sometimes I want just dumb fun. Sometimes I want to pick up a book that isn't "bad" by any means, but also isn't meant to twist the brain or leave you breathless or change your life.

Fred Saberhagen's Books of Swords. Anything from the Bunnicula series (I don't care that they were written for pre-teens, those books rock!). Robert Aspirin's MYTH books. Robert Jordan.

And Stephen King.

Firestarter. I read Firestarter last year. I loved it. It was just fun to read. The end.

So, when my wife finished up the copy of It that I'd picked up at a sale for 50 cents or so, I quickly moved it to my side of the headboard bookshelf, figured it would be my next read.

I'd just read a couple of serious John Joseph books (one was really, really serious), a couple of books on Buddhism, some health and fitness stuff, etc, etc, so on, so forth, so I figured I wanted something that was dumb fun.

But It isn't dumb fun.

It's a damn good book.

I mean, yes, it's about a monster clown that pulls kids into the sewer and eats them. And sure, that sounds like dumb fun on the surface.

But at 300 or so pages, it isn't really about that at all. Or, rather, it's about that just a little bit.

What it's much more about is a bunch of kids that grew into adults without ever fully facing and dealing with the pain in their lives. Kids who were the victims of vicious school yard bullies. Kids with obsessively overprotective mothers who convinced them they were frail and weak. Kids with abusive parents. Kids who'd lost siblings, or a parent. Kids who'd been picked on in school. Who were fat. Or stuttered. Kids who faced all kinds of pain, great and small, and moved on, left it behind, and didn't think about it ever again. Kids who found themselves forced to face it as adults, who found themselves with empty places, dark shadows in the midst of their otherwise very successful lives, who found themselves repeating those childhood patterns again and again, running from those unresolved fears.

In the book, they have to go back and kill that monster clown.

But they also go back into those memories and that pain.

This is beautiful stuff.

King writes in a way that makes you care about each and every one of these kids, that makes you far more terrified of the drunken father or the schoolyard bully than you could ever be of the jagged toothed clown. He makes you want to save each child.

Beautiful stuff. Less dumb fun, more psychological profile, moral story.

I can't wait to get through the next 700 pages (fully aware of King's tendency to blow the ending with a campy monster... but who cares?).