The Failure of Beverly Marsh: A Rant

How Stephen King Failed His IT Heroine While on Heroin*

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Fall is upon us, which means it’s time to heat up those pumpkin spice lattes, bust out the beanies, and curl up with some of your spookiest tales. But while others may have an eerie ghost story in their back pocket to give them chills, the only thing that I’m haunted by is the fact that I actually read Stephen King’s IT.

IT, the infamous story of a shape-shifting killer clown who terrorizes the cursed town of Derry, Maine, has been a staple of this ghoulish time for decades. While it has been successfully adapted into a 90s miniseries and two modern day blockbuster movies, it began as a 1,138 page novel — and a problematic one at that.

Now, I could comment on how Stephen King’s writing is so inconsistent and thematically nonsensical that it makes you feel like you’re being dragged on a bad acid trip. I could comment on how this meandering fever dream throws in more arbitrary shock-value supernatural phenomena than a Jessica Lange-less season of American Horror Story. But I’m going to start and end with the moment that is so controversial that it has been omitted from every film iteration.

Let me set the scene: It’s the summer of 1958 and life is far from Rockwellian. The Losers’ Club — our ragtag group of…