A promise made twenty-eight years ago calls seven adults to reunite in Derry, Maine, where as teenagers they battled an evil creature that preyed on the city’s children. Unsure that their Losers Club had vanquished the creature all those years ago, the seven had vowed to return to Derry if IT should ever reappear. Now, children are being murdered again and their repressed memories of that summer return as they prepare to do battle with the monster lurking in Derry’s sewers once more.
Авторы: King Stephen Edwin
years that’s been enough.’
‘I know.’ He smiled at her — the smile was sweet, tired, and scared.
‘Please. Please tell me what this is about.’
She looked at him with her lovely gray eyes, sitting there in a tatty leased-house chair with her feet curled beneath the hem of her nightgown, a woman he had loved, married, and still loved. He tried to see through her eyes, to see what she knew. He tried to see it as a story. He could, but he knew it would never sell.
Here is a poor boy from the state of Maine who goes to the University on a scholarship. All his life he has wanted to be a writer, but when he enrolls in the writing courses he finds himself lost without a compass in a strange and frightening land. There’s one guy who wants to be Updike. There’s another one who wants to be a New England version of Faulkner — only he wants to write novels about the grim lives of the poor in blank verse. There’s a girl who admires Joyce Carol Gates but feels that because Oates was nurtured in a sexist society she is ‘radioactive in a literary sense.’ Oates is unable to be clean, this girl says. She will be cleaner. There’s the short fat grad student who can’t or won’t speak above a mutter. This guy has written a play in which there ar e nine characters. Each of them says only a single word. Little by little the playgoers realize that when you put the single words together you come out with ‘War is the tool of the sexist death merchants.’ This fellow’s play receives an A from the man who teaches Eh-141 (Creative Writing Honors Seminar). This instructor has published four books of poetry and his master’s thesis, all with the University Press. He smokes pot and wears a peace medallion. The fat mutterer’s play is produced by a guerrilla theater group during the strike to end the war which shuts down the campus in May of 1970. The instructor plays one of the characters.
Bill Denbrough, meanwhile, has written one locked-room mystery tale, three science-fiction stories, and several horror tales which owe a great deal to Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Richard Matheson — in later years he will say those stories resembled a mid-1800s funeral hack equipped with a supercharger and painted Day-Glo red.
One of the sf tales earns him a B.
‘This is better,’ the instructor writes on the title page. ‘In the alien counterstrike we see the vicious circle in which violence begets violence; I particularly liked the «needle-nosed» spacecraft as a symbol of socio-sexual incursion. While this remains a slightly confused undertone throughout, it is interesting.’
All the others do no better than a C.
Finally he stands up in class one day, after the discussion of a sallow young woman’s vignette about a cow’s examination of a discarded engine block in a deserted field (this may or may not be after a nuclear war) has gone on for seventy minutes or so. The sallow girl, who smokes one Winston after another and picks occasionally at the pimples which nestle in the hollows of her temples, insists that the vignette is a socio-political statement in the manner of the early Orwell. Most of the class — and the instructor — agree, but still the discussion drones on.
When Bill stands up, the class looks at him. He is tail, and has a certain presence.
Speaking carefully, not stuttering (he has not stuttered in better than five years), he says: ‘I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio –anything? Politics . . . culture . . . history . . . aren’t those natural ingredients in any story, if it’s told well? I mean . . . ‘ He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. ‘I mean . . . can’t you guys just let a story be a story?
No one replies. Silence spins out. He stands there looking from one cool set of eyes to the next. The sallow girl chuffs out smoke and snubs her cigarette in an ashtray she has brought along in her backpack.
Finally the instructor says softly, as if to a child having an inexplicable tantrum, ‘Do you believe William Faulkner was just telling stories’? Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in making a buck? Come now, Bill. Tell us what you think.’
‘I think that’s pretty close to the truth,’ Bill says after a long moment in which he honestly considers the question, and in their eyes he reads a kind of damnation.
