That Thing About IT

So, I'm in a sort of bookclub organized by a local booktube celebrity... Ok, let me explain this properly. There is this absolutely, drop dead gorgeous girl who loves to read, and has a booktube channel called GoWithKar (it's only in Spanish). She's very charismatic and talented, and her channel rose quite fast.

Source: Twitter, @gowithkar

Dedicated as she is to her content, she decided to create a Patreon account to support her channel, and there, among the different tiers, one includes a book club with monthly meetings. It took me a while to decide to support her, because I didn't quite saw the benefits of the service she basically provides through this platform until another friend of mine told me about it. Then I signed and and so I've got into the bookclub. Truthfully, I'm rather pleased.

When I've got in, they were already reading "It", by Stephen King. Kar, the girl, is a huge King-fan, so the reading of that book was expected. I'm really convinced by his production, so I was more than happy to be spared from the reading. Not like I wouldn't say no if asked, but you know, it was better this way.

The rest of the members of this tier had read the book and liked it very much, so they had decided to do a marathon of "It" movies, staring with the first one, watched at home of one of them, and then doing a group movie trip to go watch "It: Chapter 2". Somehow I was roped into it. No, don't ask me, I was roped in, and so I went.

Though the book and the writer don't really catch my attention, I also wanted to try out the story, see if it had the bones to maybe seduce me enough for me to give the 1500+ page story a try.

Long story short, it didn't.

After giving the movies a time to settle in my head - I was irrationally annoyed by the tendency of the characters of leaving their bikes thrown haphazard on the road - I came to realize that I don't hate the story. The story in itself isn't bad, I just doesn't do anything for me. It doesn't click with me, but I can see that it isn't bad. Now, "not bad" in this case doesn't automatically means that it's good. It simply means that it isn't a waste of time and paper and celluloide.

As I kept thinking and thinking about it, what I realized is that I actually don't like the stories where the plot doesn't solve itself within the original world it creates, or the expectation it creates. An example, for instance, is "The Murders in Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe. [SPOILER ALERT!!] In this story, a series of gruesome murders are commited by an animal, though for the duration of the story you are made believe it's the work of a serial killer. [SPOILER ALERT END] Though it is a story and a way to twist the reader out of the expected outcome I dislike this sort of plot solutions, because it seems to me like the writer was unable to fit the solution into the frame of the world they had created.

Part of the excitement of a suspense novel is precisely being able to guess what is happening and who is behind it, and once you find out, your mind goes back to the story to backtrack the clues. However, when the resolution of the story opens a new line and wrecks the hypothesis you've been creating, gives you  - or at least gives me - a sort of disappointment because the expectation of an explanation that could have been hidden in the prior lines evaporates.

This might be just a pet peeve of mine - and probably is - but then again, this sort of story also poses a social issue.

Though novels are novels and fiction is just fiction, truth is that everything people read permeates their minds and often find a way to their system of values and believes. This doesn't mean that people who read crime novels become criminals, but books do help normalize certain ideas. Romance novels can help normalize and promote the idea that women's greatest goal is to get married and have kids. Some of these can also normalize the idea that codependent, abusive, toxic relationships are the desirable type of relationship people should seek. Just think about how often people idealize and use fictional relationships as ideals for their own.

Pulling from this, suspense novels that end up giving the villain a background or origin outside the world of the heroes (comes from another world, another time, another dimension, another species...), starts putting in people's head the idea of the bad coming from "outside" the group. This idea could be pulled philosophically to safe harbors, but it also plans the seed for division of "us vs them" scenarios, where the us group is blameless, while the them group carries the whole weight of evil.

In It, though there are bullies, the movies at least do leave you with the sense, that this bully is under the control or is being influenced by the outsider, so the root of evil goes back to the "other", and away from the "us". There are no glimpse of other others that might be good, that might help, but all we see from this other is evil and desire to destroy the us.

What does this say to the world? What sort of message drops on a world so deeply divided, scarred by the nationalism and ravenous desire to blame others for the consequences of our own mindlessness and selfishness?

The book was written in another time, when maybe these ideas were harmless, but the idea still remain.

I guess a lot of people read this book and enjoy the miriad of stories crammed into a small town story. I am discouraged for the kick outside of the original frame.