Stephen King — a master of his genre, horror, and prolific writer — imbues his literature with an essence of majesty and awe of what it means to be in the most frightening circumstances. He does so through the discrete exploitation of his readers’ life experiences and unique situational connotations to incorporate empathy for characters, settings, and even antagonists, all to leave the audience with an inescapable sense of captivation. Among King’s slew of critically acclaimed novels, his arguable flagship, IT, champions its keen ability to blend thematic concepts and serves as a paradigm template for the horror variety. King’s palpable writing style, characterized by nostalgic themes, realistic trauma, and a focus on ordinary, flawed, and thus distinctly relatable people facing supernatural threats, creates a renowned sense of terrifying surrealism in his occult literature.

IT’s narrative pivots around varying means of relatable characters. Or, more specifically, IT portrays a wide breadth of protagonists who respectively serve as catalysts for empathy between reader and character; the list of protagonists consists of seven divisively individualistic characters, virtually guaranteeing a personality for readers to relate to and consequently invest in the story. For instance, Bill, the main protagonist, is forced to forgo the pleasantries of a conventional childhood due to his unwavering persistence to avenge his late younger brother, George, under the surveillance of his pessimistically dismissive parents. Readers who have similarly lost their childhood may find themselves rallying behind Bill owing to comparable trauma. Therefore, King successfully created a compelling story via deliberately applied, frequent characteristics or afflictions, allowing for an enthralling reading experience. As Ardjent Mehmeti, an author for the Association-Institute for English Language and American Studies,
states, “King dwells deep inside problematic issues that many families deal with […] we are dealing with serious human conditions which require special attention” (Mehmeti; emphasis added). Audiences find likeness in imperfect, realistic yet mutual traits of certain characters, such
as family issues, causing IT’s widespread immersion of kindred individuals. The basis of King’s authorial toolbelt for projecting self-image onto characters rests on commonality. One such commonality is unsuspectingly familiar speech patterns; “King is singularly adept at capturing the vicissitudes, mores, and speech of pre-teenagers (particularly boys) throughout his writing—most notably in one of his longest novels, IT,” exemplifying King’s evocatively grounded literary nature (Greenberg). Moreover, “After the dead boy’s agonized brother (the stammerer) also sees the clown, each of the kids has a different, traumatic supernatural experience,” which expands the available investment found from Bill or other
characters through the cultivated, rich fields of sympathy readers grow over the course of enjoying IT (Greenberg; emphasis added). Although the average person’s ability to experience a supernatural threat such as Pennywise remains impossible, or to some unlikely, King forges a lingering bond from the ashes of traumatic experiences amid his genuine personas and those that thoroughly relate. In addition to the catalog of common grounds formulated by King, he intermixes the literary theme of naturalism with its near-antithesis, romanticism, in a nostalgic fashion. King
regularly involves Dickensian representations of adolescence to enhance relatability, particularly coming-of-age plotlines, to arouse feelings of romanticized nostalgia. An incisive description of King’s Dickensian approach to childhood sentimentality expresses: “[…] emergence into
adolescence are temporary prisons that appear painful and unjust, but will over time prove transitory; the performativity of gender and the social value placed upon it, however, proves less escapable” (Magistrale). The end of IT’s first chapter utilizes a paper boat as the idealistic
symbology of a farewell following George’s death: “The boat dipped and swayed and sometimes took on water, but it did not sink; the two brothers had waterproofed it well […] All I know is that it was still afloat and still running on the breast of the flood when it passed the incorporated
town limits of Derry, Maine, and there it passes out of this tale forever” (King). The foremost cognizant notion lies within the ship remaining afloat and “it passes out of this tale forever,” as it’s akin to a Nordic ship burial for George and a memorial consisting solely of shared childhood
memories. Furthermore, the toy boat, which was handily crafted by the two adolescent brothers in preparation for its final yet indefinite voyage, embodies a premature lifetime’s work of unbreakable love between Bill and George. Metaphorically implying that George, a child,
despite death, lives on in childish memories through Bill’s retrospection, as it does everyone’s younger self, good or bad. King movingly depicts George’s traumatic demise by coupling the event with a naturalistic, biblical flood that brought a child’s gruesomely described death, with
Bill’s retrospectively hopeful — romantically nostalgic — point of view. Mathias Clasen suggests, “the worldview that emerges from King’s fiction contains an unflinching acknowledgment of pain and suffering and evil in the world, yet tempers that acknowledgment with a romantic, sometimes sentimental, celebration of the human potential for good”; by virtue of fusing thematic concepts, King progresses his plot with extra depth or further dimensionality, evoking Dickensian emotions ranging from melancholy to nostalgia in his audience (Clasen).

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A supportive but equally significant mixture of literary techniques King frequents is combining ordinary descriptors or scenes with profound situations to convey a fascinating sense of unheimlich. Harvey Greenberg reiterates Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, with
a synopsis of unheimlich: “[…] an intimate relationship between the comfortable (heimlich) feelings related to ordinary things and events, and the uncomfortable, even dreadful (unheimlich) sensations the same objects and events generate. These may occur in stressful circumstances, but
sometimes emerge unbidden, ex nihilo,” thereby postulating IT’s terrifyingly realistic undertone. The antagonist’s introduction begins suddenly, in an eerily toned but mundanely described environment. King wrote, “The water made a dank hollow sound as it fell into the darkness. It
was a spooky sound,” as George peered down a regular, neighborly water drain (King); in this case, King’s inclusion of “It was a spooky sound” lacks ostensible substance. Instead, King’s emphasis on the sound being “spooky” within the context of an unremarkable, commonplace
setting induces an uncanny reaction — i.e., being unsettled. As a result, the reader compulsively establishes a sentiment for the impending scene with a newfound sense of foreboding, searing angst into those wondering, “What’s next?” The impending scene crowns the plot with the first
and topically mundane description of Pennywise; the very creature abruptly robs the reader’s false sense of security spawned from an everyday storm drain with the jarringly vivid statements: “George reached. The clown seized his arm. And George saw the clown’s face change […] what
he saw destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke” (King). In the same vein, IT is the birthplace of a famed Stephen King quote, “You’ll float too,” a model example of uncanny fundamentals. Due to “You’ll float too” being a quote murmured from the limits of a sewer-dwelling,
subterrestrial entity, being able to float, especially with the implied others — “too” — seems paradoxical, hence unheimlich.

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In IT, the primary antagonist is a clown, Pennywise, an intentional cliché due to its being a clown and haunting a set of kids; King’s intention is to abuse the inherent benefits of employing an antagonist with archetypically known — and potentially malevolent — connotations. By applying the audience’s preexisting contextual emotions, which, with respect to IT, irrationally accompany clowns in the presence of children, there lies less of a barrier to entry for fear. Regarding the prevalence of coulrophobia, the fear of clowns, “clowning has significant associations and ties to supernatural and paranormal elements, and to the archetype of the trickster […] The psychologists who have addressed this topic usually say that this form of
phobia probably develops out of some traumatic incident in childhood that is in some way associated with a clown,” showcasing why King’s choice of a statistically ubiquitous phobia, an antagonistic clown, encompassing the lives of children was a perceptive, seamless decision (Durwin). Additionally, “It’s been widely observed that a clown’s gaping grin and bumptious behavior are more likely to provoke angst rather than laughter in children,” cementing the cynical impression left on readers — the connotations of a clown and the reciprocal emotions felt
(Greenberg). King ingeniously constructs inevitability for his audience, en masse, to naturally encounter his story, IT, with negative feelings toward his antagonist. In doing so, he lays a snare for a reader’s preconceptions about clowns to ultimately stumble upon and fall victim to,
similarly to the IT protagonists. Subsequently, King leaves less of a need to manually develop disdain toward Pennywise via plot points in trade for invoking an instinctive emotion of anxiety or terror.

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Maturing from traumatic experiences is an insightful, core ingredient in IT’s concoction of prolonged themes — padding the previously recognized coming-of-age plotlines. What’s distinctive about the trauma in IT, however, is its preexistence before each character’s personal confrontation with Pennywise, the antagonist who would, in horror, conventionally be the traumatizer or exclusive cause. Such an idea uncovers the underlying prompt of how human deeds are historically just as evil or more frightening than even the most unimaginably extreme monsters — framing Pennywise and other horrific creatures as unnecessary in light of humanity’s self-inflicted blunders. Contextually, Pennywise is attracted to intense negativity,
including fear or plain evil, and everything in between. For example, a homosexual couple was incessantly insulted, dehumanized, and eventually murdered out of sheer homophobia and ignorance; acts of such vile magnitudes are framed as supremely evil by King, consequently
sufficing as enough to awake Pennywise from its cyclical hibernation. An appreciative account of King’s approach to comparing homophobia to extraordinary evil voiced: “Homophobia, Stephen King seemed to say, is not the natural way of the world. It is a monstrous thing, and
those who practice it are a part of the monster” (London). Likewise, the protagonist Beverly Marsh suffers from her abusive and potentially incestuous father, or Mike Hanlon, a Black American oppressed by relentless racism — both markedly before the acts of Pennywise — thus,
partially explaining why Derry, Maine, is Pennywise’s optimal environment for prey. To the effect that King thematically illustrates how hateful practices, such as racism, homophobia, and child abuse, among which Derry fruitfully contains, are sufficient to spawn and foster entities comparably evil as Pennywise.

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King’s raw command over his melting pot of relatability, literary techniques, themes, and forms of realism contributes heavily toward IT’s outstanding success and, more importantly, his overarching signature: ‘terrifying surrealism.’ King’s trenchant use of an inclusively varied pool
of characters tailor-made to present shoes for anyone to stand in and view Derry, Maine, from a protagonist’s eyes boasts little room left for the faint of heart. In the same way he manifests childhood nostalgia, his knack for unearthing the most constructive methods of attracting the largest swaths of reader investment possible allows Stephen King to live up to his last name — ‘King’ of horror.

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Works Cited

King, Stephen. IT Stephen King. Sevenoaks, 1986.

London, Alex. “When Horror Becomes Strength: Queer Armor in Stephen King's IT.” Tor.com, Tor Publishing, 7 Oct. 2019, https://www.tor.com/2019/10/02/when-horror-becomes-strength-queer-armor-in-stephen-kings-it/.

Mehmeti, Ardjent M.D. “The Horror of Stephen King – Facing Real Monsters or Examining Profound Human Conditions.” Anglisticum, vol. 8, no. 10, Oct. 2019, pp. 38–42. EBSCOhost,search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsdoj&AN=edsdoj.f52b3035d7f5449 c9b4de6052bd4583b&site=eds-live.

Greenberg, Harvey Roy. “Greenberg On The Arts. IT: On the Unheimlich Maneuvers of Stephen King.” Psychiatric Times, vol. 34, no. 11, Nov. 2017, p. 28E–28F. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx direct=true&db=ccm&AN=126676984&site=eds-live. Durwin, Joseph. "Coulrophobia and the Trickster." Trickster's Way 3.1 (2004): 4.

Clasen, Mathias. “Hauntings of Human Nature An Evolutionary Critique of King’s The Shining.” Style, vol. 51, no. 1, Mar. 2017, pp. 76–87. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.plainview.brazosport.edu/10.1353/sty.2017.0005.

Magistrale, Anthony S. Stephen King: America's Storyteller. Praeger, 2010.