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The weight alone (3 lbs. 7 1/2 oz.) would seem the right heft for a doorstop and the wrong one for a best seller. But King has become a brand name himself, and his publishers ordered a supernatural first printing of 800,000 copies -- and then demanded five additional printings, for a current total of 1,025,000 copies. When an author receives that kind of recognition, two factors are at work: his skills and the vitality of his genre. King, who regards It as a "very badly constructed book," may be a little too hard on himself. But the frightful theme is what continues to make him the most successful horror writer in history.
That history is almost as old as the night. In the Odyssey, Odysseus visited the land of the dead, where he reported that "pale fear got hold of me" as the spirits rose up to drink blood. Every ethnic group has spun folktales of the ungrateful dead. Even so, horror did not become a literary convention until the late 18th century, when the gothic novel described the exotic terrors of old feudal keeps. In the gaslight era, the supernatural took hold of the public imagination, and British authors quickly dominated the field. Their very names suggest creaking Victorian stairways, forbidden rooms and disembodied spirits: Montague Rhodes James, J.S. Le Fanu, Eden Phillpotts, Algernon Blackwood. In the U.S., an alcoholic and sickly journalist led readers down dark corridors that still echo in American and European fiction. Edgar Allan Poe was, wrote D.H. Lawrence, "an adventurer into the vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul." He told of disintegrating bodies (The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar), accusatory objects (The Purloined Letter) and doomed homes (The Fall of the House of Usher) -- all now standard props of horror. Once the genre was taken seriously, American writers as naturalistic as Jack London and as refined as Edith Wharton used those special effects and sojourned in those underground passages, and they have been accompanied by hundreds of others, perhaps none more influential than Henry James.
If Poe was the quirky father of modern horror, its uncle was the sobersided James, who was strongly influenced by the terrors that afflicted his family. His brother William, the pragmatic philosopher and investigator into the varieties of religious experience, recalled one of his most terrifying moments: "Suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient . . . a black-haired youth with greenish skin . . . That shape am I, I felt, potentially." This was the image of monstrosity that is only a chromosome away. Henry added another kind of apparition. In The Turn of the Screw he presented a governess and a ghostly valet who vie for the soul of a living boy.