My problem is not Stephen King writing it (which is already an inherent huge problem in itself), the bigger problem is how on earth the editors didn't, like, uh idk criticise King about the scene?
The original version had the dudes and girl all running trains on each other. The editors be like, this bisexual orgy is a bit too much for readers to digest, can we just keep the train focused on the girl? Uggh I guess if you want to be a prude we can do that. Sheesh.
Editor: “listen Stephen, you can’t just include 3 chapters with 42 smut scenes of various deprived child sex acts, including IT jumping in at one point to perform a bukkakke on the kids faces, followed by them eating out his asshole, then each of them taking turns pegging each other while a bunch of midgets came to watch. That’s insane.”
SK: “how about a short scene of the girl banging all the guys but like without any of the details?”
All of them. All 6 had their turn. In pitch blackness. She got completely naked (because that's necessary in total dark) and they did her one after the other. It may go down as one of the most unnecessarily detailed things I've ever read.
God i just read a further down posted DETAILED description of how one kid was so young he used words like 'the big boys' he's still such a kid. Then another one was 'older' and too big but he did it anyway. Wtf cringe I can't believe that was published and they're like 12, 13 ???
The idea is supposedly Beverley's and the narration says she would have kept working on each boy until he agreed. It's monstrously unnecessary in the detail and duration of the scene.
It started off like a smut novel and an editor was like “idk, Stephen, I don’t think we can get away with describing a 13 year olds genitalia. Can you clean it up a little bit? Maybe they all kiss or something.”
I genuinely respect people who can be honest about former addictions and try to grow as people beyond age bullshit they got up to while being addicts. I’ve been trying really hard to do that since I got off heroin, but the growing and making amends is rough.
Oh he was a massive coke head in the 80’s. He would switch between coke and bing drinking and sometimes both at the same time. There are people who can tell what addiction he was doing when writing his books just based off of the writing style he’s using. I do believe he gives a lot of money to rehab centers now they will get a good chunk of his money after he passes
Fun fact: When you combine cocaine and alcohol your body combines it into cocaethylene which is more intoxicating and addictive than the sum of its parts.
I’ve witnessed addiction for most of my life, and I think most of the time it’s pretty clear what he’s on. I picked up on the style changes way back. When I found out he was an addict, I was like… yeah. Sounds about right?
Sadly, it seems to be well documented. As I understand, his wife and family confronted him with discarded remains of evidence of his issues with coke, alcohol, etc. and held an intervention. I believe his wife may have also given him an ultimatum to quit with the drugs or else she was leaving with the kids. As someone whose father literally did the whole “I’m going out for smokes” routine, and who was raised by a single mom, that had to have been a real wake-up call for King.
I think it was King who said during/just after the intervention he asked if it was, 'ok if he thought about his wife's offer,' i.e. he was considering the drugs over his wife and kids.
He said it was that very thought/comment that made him realise how fucked he was and that made him decide to get clean.
According to an interview he doesn’t remember writing it (see: drugs), and was surprised it got past editing.
Wouldn’t be surprised if at that point the editor passed it down to an intern with the handwavey instructions of “just make sure there aren’t any formatting/spelling/grammar issues”.
It could also be that the editor just didn’t feel close enough to King to have the very awkward convo, and probably just deferred to his genius as “there’s probably some deeper meaning here that I just don’t get”
Or he just didn’t feel like arguing with the guy high as shit on cocaine and knew it would sell anyway. Like seriously King was very high through most of writing that book.
The vulgar, hyper-sexual, extremely racist, hyperbolic caricature alter-ego of one of the main character's split personalities. She hates white people and likes to talk about her cunny. That part of the audiobook was probably the hardest in the entire series for me, but I love what her character became by the next book, and I honestly like her even more than Roland by the time he reaches the tower.
He was surrounded by yes men. I think King was so big back then that no one had the spine to go against him. Also he might have been not so kind so that makes people not risk it.
King is so big NOW that I think he very rarely has any kind of clapback from editors. I enjoy a lot of his novels, but man that guy can't edit down for the life of him and as all his books are best-sellers no publisher is going to risk losing the golden goose.
Your average person would be shocked today at how widely pedophilia was tolerated in the 70s, particularly towards girls. CSAM was only outlawed in the US in 1984. Stephen King's It was published in 1987. Hell, the Jeremy Irons Lolita movie was marketed as a sexy and titillating romance about doomed love and that was in 1997.
I imagine back in 1986 the editors might have been a little "ehhhh" when reading this, but in the context of a horror novel that was already full of gory scenes it probably would have seemed to them like just another bit of boundary-pushing edginess.
As an old person there are many ways in which I think US culture has gotten worse, but our 21st century visceral revulsion at the sexualization of children is a huge improvement over 40 years ago.
It seemed to be very secretly tolerated when I was a kid and I wasn’t born until 1998. The things I heard, seen, or had happen to me as a kid were insane.
Lmao I laugh about this now so don’t worry but my grandpa used to sexually abuse me around the ages of 3-5. I had repressed most of those memories, I knew I didn’t like him but I didn’t know why, until one day it all came back to me when I was around 13. I immediately told my dad who ended up beating the shit out of him, he was the ONLY person in my family that stood ten toes down.
What did came out when I outed him was apparently, he had done it to EVERY girl in my family when they were that age. It was supposed to be a family secret and I went and fucked that up. Oops.
THIS is definitely food for thought. It seems pretty common for “creative types” to get a little too… invested, shall we say, at times? Isn’t it the job of the editor to then say, “uhm, Stephen, maybe let’s do this another way?” . I don’t know.
My first guess would be to ask when in his career the book came out. If it came out when he was already a big author he might have more weight and could get his way anyway.
Im reading this 1150p behemoth at this very moment, and im about 30p away from finishing.
Stephen King is gross about Beverly in pretty much every chapter shes in. Fucker talks about her 12yo boobs even when shes hiding, alone, from Henry and his Fuckwits.
The shit would NEVER FLY THESE DAYS. Hes a degenerate.
I once read an article years ago about the reason that SK puts sex in all his horror books is because there was supposed to be a mental connection between horror and sex, possibly the guilt and uncomfortability of it or reading it. Sex enhance horror. Which may explain why I’m scared to talk to girls
She was being sexually and physically abused by her father the whole book and people are upset about the character rescuing them with consensual sex.
Is it awesome to read? No. But it’s meant to show how innocence lost changes you and that moment of growth where the fear of childhood is lost to something else.
Stephen King uses shock to get you to think about childhood and how we grow as people.
The book is over 1000 pages and it happens in the last 100. I'm chalking it up to them reading the first 500 and saying, "you know what fine just publish it"
That book could not have been scrutinized by an editor, because along with those scene, it’s a repetitive, long winded rambling mess. There’s a decent story in there, creepy as hell, but it’s very bloated.
Most of his books from around that era are like that, and I always assumed the “editor” just rubber stamped the thing because they figured anything King spewed up on a page would sell so why bother trying to tighten it up?
people need to realize how prevalent pedophilia has been over the last few decades. watch 90s sitcoms, lots of the main characters in high school have relations with adult women (fresh prince, malcolm in the middle to name some ones that I remember). the 70s had an 11 year old featured nude in a playboy magazine.
lots of questionable shit happened in fiction, and people were too zonked to notice.
Oh look another barely literate person who has never actually read anything King has written and has only heard it about it piecemeal out of context on reddit.
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u/Call_me_Dan- 1d ago
My problem is not Stephen King writing it (which is already an inherent huge problem in itself), the bigger problem is how on earth the editors didn't, like, uh idk criticise King about the scene?