"WE ALL FLOAT...": A Consciousness-Based Appreciation for IT: WELCOME TO DERRY (2025)
Enlightenment Through Terror
Stephen King is an essential author for me, meaning I own all of his books. I’ve read most of them, and I would never sell any of them back, not while I’m alive. And when a new Stephen King novel is announced, I order it sight unseen, and concept unknown. I consider Stephen King to be the American Charles Dickens. King has written universally essential stories that are enlightening and valuable for living an authentic, fulfilled modern life. Stephen King’s art helps round out a modern moral education, and his work is consistently entertaining, while he has remained prodigious in output well into his elder years.
Stephen King’s work taught me young to pay attention to the details of life around me. His stories educated me on the value and importance of having deep friendships while helping me understand my anxiety, anger, and jealousy around losing those critical relationships. His novels and short stories made me want to tell stories. When I was a young child, probably far too young to be reading his work.
His writing taught me how to tell stories. They helped me mature by revealing some of what lay beyond childhood, through puberty, into the often confusing and sometimes horrible adult world with its fleeting joys and lasting traumas. Through Stephen King’s gruesome and exciting, made-up worlds that are inhabited by dark, funny, tragic characters and their terrible situations, he introduced me to many of the horrors and pleasures coming with adulthood in an unfair world where we each suffer, we all die, and only some of us know true love while we’re still alive. Stephen King’s Art helped me understand that I want to be one of the latter blessed.
Most importantly, Stephen King’s stories taught me that monsters are psychological long before they ever become manifest as physical entities in our lives. People aren’t born evil, but they can easily bend that way. And the great lesson of Stephen King’s art is that people can also bend towards good. We can come together and stand up for what’s right.
So, how can a horror writer of popular fiction be this important? Well, I argue that Stephen King hasn’t written horror fiction for decades. He’s written chiefly psychological suspense stories featuring supernatural situations and characters at various levels in their unique journeys towards enlightenment and tragedy. I think this shift away from horror occurred after he published IT in 1986. I believe there was nothing more to say about horror or the story of it until I watched the first season of IT: WELCOME TO DERRY.
IT is not a horror novel about a killer clown living in the sewers. The clown is only the most convenient form IT takes when dealing with children. The creature is an alien entity that has lived here longer than the humans IT preys upon, begging the question, “Who is the real intruder in this story?” What predator actually controls this hunting ground of Derry? Is it the humans with their laughable illusions of control, safety, and justice? Or is it this creature of higher consciousness and cruel appetite who sleeps for 27 revolutions of our planet around the sun, and then wakes up to feed on the human crops nature has provided it?
When we look at situations from different perspectives of relationship, our awareness grows and so does our alignment with natural law, the way things work. If we align with the way nature works, nature will yield its bounty. If we are out of alignment, nature claims it’s food because all life is a burning fire of sacrifice and death. Life feeds on life, and there is a chain of evolution that rises with a species ’ level of consciousness.
The scariest facet of the novel IT is how accurately it depicts the power of feeding off of others’ fears. This is a lesson we are painfully still learning in America. Lately, the lessons have become more costly, and they hurt more. Nature will wake you up if you don’t start actively listening to it and getting in line.
The children, who grow up to be adults in the novel IT, eventually start listening to nature, accepting its cruel sword logic, where power rules over the control of food supply. When they are children, the heroes of IT learn that humans in Derry are lower on the food chain, and that a powerful alpha predator lives underground, feasting on fear and flesh. Those kids make a stand and nearly kill the creature, but IT escapes to hibernate and recover.
The city of Derry, which grew up around this monster, is a human farm and the streets and houses along with the. People who walk and live in them are extensions of this sublime horror. The city itself is intrinsically haunted, and this is another lesson Stephen King’s art typically conveys: institutions are often laboratories for the work of monsters.
In the scary world of adult reality, not only are monsters usually not punished, but they are also frequently enabled, and sometimes elected to do it. These children and adults in IT are most vulnerable when they are isolated from one another in their consciousness. Growing up to live materialistic and primarily intellectual lives briefly made these characters easy prey for manipulation through fear and fear’s defense mechanisms of apathy, anger, and brutality.
IT is a novel about Consciousness that conveys valuable lessons through the relationships and trials of its characters. The recent first season of the HBO show IT: WELCOME TO DERRY matters so much to Stephen King’s fans because it picks up those values and this scene and setting, but moves it back a generation, which is defined as 27 years in the story’s mythology. And it should matter to you, too, if you care about living in a better world where people stand up together for the right things in life.
This isn’t the first television adaptation of King’s work or even the novel IT. They have each had their flaws and charms, but most visual versions suffer because they’ll never deliver the depth of experience conveyed by Stephen King’s sentences, paragraphs, and story structures.
But WELCOME TO DERRY is something else entirely. It may be the best Stephen King series yet and one of the most successful reboots of an eighties narrative since Cobra Kai. Not because it repeats the story, but because it understands it and extends it from the novel, the miniseries, and two films. To understand this, we need to talk about the book.
When IT was published in September 1986, I received that massive hardcover as a gift from my grandmother, who bought it for me because she knew I would read anything with Stephen King’s name on the spine; I already had. From 1984, the year I turned nine. I devoured his entire catalog, and IT was the first new Stephen King book I read in the first wave of general readers. And the book marked me forever inside. Reading IT as an 11-year-old boy was an expansion of consciousness, which is all we can hope for and ask of our experiences with art.
On the surface, IT is a horror story about an ancient monster that eats children. In that sense, IT is no different from the darkest fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel with sewer grates. But what makes IT unique is the story structure. In the novel, films, and small-screen series, the narrative unfolds simultaneously in childhood and adulthood. Readers and viewers are given knowledge of what happened when they were children, and then we apply that knowledge to what happens when they are adults. In both situations, the reader/viewer is the connective tissue that holds the story together.
Unlike a fairytale, IT isn’t a story that tells itself. Instead, this narrative requires an active observer piecing a complex narrative together and an imagined timeline. It’s like TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN in this requirement from the observer.
Time becomes both an ally and an enemy in this story. Memory becomes fragile, a precious commodity that cements these relationships into a collective force of friendship strong enough to stand against this creature and its superior consciousness and predatory position in the food chain. Forgetting becomes survival, and remembering becomes dangerous in the story of IT.
As I said before, the clown form is a mask, a lure, a shape that entertains just long enough to keep fear manageable before paralyzing a victim, and curious terror becomes fatal. The creature, sometimes called Pennywise, likes to play with its food. Eating children in fear makes them taste better to this horrific predator.
Another lesson from IT is that children are not weaker, but because they’re more open, they are more vulnerable to manipulation, abuse, and worse. The social abuse of children is a hard lesson the world is still learning in far too many terrible ways. Stephen King wasn’t the first author to write about it, and unfortunately, he won’t be the last. Empathy with suffering children and the desire to end their suffering is a noble pursuit that sadly invites mass manipulation. It’s so morally important that monsters gather around the critical problem and exercise their need to feed, and that is not just fiction; this is our world, too.
Now, let’s shift to the cinematic timeline and the expansion of the overall narrative mythology because IT: WELCOME TO DERRY has expanded the story and shifted the timeline from the novel. The first theatrical movie IT: CHAPTER ONE (2017) takes place in 1989, and updates the novel’s cultural setting from greasers and rock and roll to New Kids On The Block and jelly shoes. The second film IT: CHAPTER TWO (2019) moves the characters 27 years ahead to 2016, the year America really came undone. What’s happened in our real world since 2016 is a slow spiral around a shrinking moral center, where the only force that brings people together is outrage, desecration, cruelty, and destruction. And this brings us to the new chapter, IT: WELCOME TO DERRY, which is actually an earlier chapter that shifts the cinematic timeline of this mythology back to 1962, an entire generation before the first film. Like the echoes across the STAR WARS trilogies, a group of loser misfits comes together and uncovers secret knowledge about the horror living under their city.
Like their future counterparts, they descend into the sewers and confront the ancient mass murderer using the only weapons they have: belief, loyalty, sacrifice, love, and their imaginations. And it works, a little bit. They wound the creature. Often, the institutions that protect monsters are so well constructed that it takes generations to gather the knowledge, experience, and skills needed to execute the change that would upset the balance and make things right. Sometimes, it takes a few generations to solve a big, complex problem. Progressive change sometimes takes centuries, especially if you live where monsters feed. And in this story, the monster feeds on the town of Derry, which IT believes it owns and defends like a farm property with human livestock.
One of the reasons IT works so well is that Derry is a typical American town on the surface, but there’s enormous rot and corruptive stink beneath it, also like America. In our modern age, this rot has festered and erupted like a pus-filled pocket of clogged skin. And the show WELCOME TO DERRY leans into this as subtext. The major subplot of this first season is a demented Army General, who had a horrific experience with the creature when he was a boy and remembered what happened through psycho-chemical analysis and treatment.
This war-headed general remembered what Pennywise was, gathered all the Army’s resources in 1962, and set up a base in Derry to capture the creature and use it to unite American culture through fear. The reasoning is that everyone united in fear would be better than everyone fighting over ideals, sex, and skin color. There’s a pathetic kind of soldier’s logic to the strategy. As things often go in my country, the burden of this first season falls on the black characters who are manipulated, hunted, discredited, imprisoned, and murdered horrifically in a way that stays true to the original novel’s narrative.
WELCOME TO DERRY, like the films, novel, and mini-series before, is about Enlightenment. The entire mythology of IT is a series of heroes’ journeys, with the heroes being groups of friends who come together to stand against pure fear and mortal threat. The creature, colloquially known as Pennywise, operates at a higher level of consciousness, but a predatory one. IT inherently instills fear and shapes the expression and perception of identity. IT exploits human isolation, shame, and loneliness. Does that sound like anyone you know?
Pennywise feeds on the levels below Love. The Losers Club ascends above and beyond the level of Love. They soar and attack from higher ground, even though they fight on equal terms in the sewer. Love, unlike fear, is a universal force, aligned with Natural Law, that works from a deeper level than even Pennywise understands. Love works across all levels of consciousness and grows stronger the deeper we go. When the children and adults come together and face their fears, without judgment or shame, they become stronger than a God-like predator. Not because they dominated, but because they refuse to isolate themselves anymore. They are one together, and they stand up for themselves by standing up for each other. This truth echoes throughout Stephen King’s writing and beyond in STAR WARS, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, TWIN PEAKS, HARRY POTTER, G.I. JOE, TRANSFORMERS, THE AVENGERS, the SMURFS, and many more. We’ve been telling ourselves these stories for years. Still, I wonder when we’re going to start listening to them and acting on that pure reflection on art, which ultimately becomes the most valuable self-knowledge.
Finally, I’m gonna leave you with an open secret. This has been known for years, but people who aren’t obsessive about Stephen King (like I am), may not know this. Nearly every story Stephen King has written and published has been a tributary extension of his central mythology in THE DARK TOWER series, another hero’s journey about a group of friends who travel across universes to the central pillar of all existence, which is constantly threatened with collapse. The story of IT is no exception. Pennywise is a creature at the threshold of a portal on a beam of the central Dark Tower around which the wheels of all possible universes spin. And there’s room for you in one of the most complex stories ever told.
This circular journey, of wheels within wheels that is THE DARK TOWER, is one of the most astounding literary achievements of any single human being’s imaginative productivity. As a concept, THE DARK TOWER is a spark of brilliance, an actual work of genius. Still, the artistry comes from decades of discipline, where one man sat at a keyboard and dreamed up another universe that looks, smells, sounds, and feels a lot like ours, because “There are other worlds than these.”
All living things must abide by the shape they inhabit. Pennywise cannot love; it’s his fatal flaw, but human beings can. And when these grown-up children expand their consciousness to understand the way nature works around them, they combine their love and their intellect to overcome the terror and establish a new order in the world, one of mercy, justice, peace, and deep human connection that lasts beyond death, and is impervious to propaganda. It is the most crucial story the world could tell right now.
So watch IT: WELCOME TO DERRY. You can start there, then watch the two films. Check out the 1990 mini-series. And when you’re ready, pick up the novel and start your master’s class on empathy through horror fiction. If IT catches you, keep going through the DARK TOWER series, and from there...”WE ALL FLOAT.”
