Yeah, I'm reading through it for the first time and the Beverly stuff seems a bit overdone. And he really does seem to prop Bill up in a heavyhanded manner.
Still like , I like the description of the yester-years.
Though I'm a little taken back by the scene structure, where he opens a section with what happened and backtracks to it.
I don't remember ever being scared by It, but I do remember that the passage about the drunk watching the water tower collapse as if in slow motion was one of my favorite things I ever read.
I thought Salem's Lot was Kings scariest work that I ever read. And I give TheShining anhonorablemention for making topiarys scary. Not possible on film.
You have to remember King was on a lot of cocaine at the time. I just read Dolores Claiborne. Fun, immersive, but it's told in one long breath, no chapter breaks or anything, and for such a short book it repeats itself a few too many times at the end.
The thing about Bev and It was, the cocaine, and she is the only female in the losers, which is 6 other dudes going through puberty. As far as they're concerned, she drips sex. So it makes sense for it to be told in that mind set. She is on a pedestal.
And I hate it when people call it an orgy or a gang bang. It was a fucking train at worst. It's 2 pages out of 1100, and you can tell it's not even written to be hot. And like someone said, no one mentions anything about the grisly murders in his books, Dolores Claiborne has a guy trying to fuck his own daughter, but when kids do things of their own accord, somehow people make it into a big deal.
How does that work?
Hell, It doesn't even have a proper endng.
OP here, there was one part I actually found legit spooky. It was when the Losers all split up as adults to get re-aqquainted with the town, and it's Bill's turn, and while everybody else had something horrifying happen to them (awful scene structure like points out) but Bill gets something more quietly unsettling and unexplained. And I'm not talking about the bike part.