For the reader and for the protagonist, Annie’s villainy starts in her voice. While bestselling novelist Paul Sheldon is unconscious following a catastrophic motor vehicle accident, recovering from injuries in a haze of opiates that registered nurse Annie Wilkes has given him, he hears her identity herself as his number one fan, saying she’s read everything. The sound of her voice is distorted, drawn out like the droptuned voice of a rapper describing being whacked-out of their mind on lean: “fayunnnn . . . red everrrrrythinggg . . . umberrrrr whunnnn.” Paul can’t escape the sound her any more than he can escape the coming and going of his pain; these things become the inexorable constants of his universe.

Villainy continues in Annie’s body. The body of our antagonist is unruly, defying both the expectations of a female body and the inroads of injury common to the same, despite a male protagonist who should be able to take her. Confined to a bed in her house as she both cares for him and keeps him captive, Paul is totally at her mercy. He’s her victim, and King has to manipulate both their bodies to keep him that way. The body of Paul Sheldon is battered and diminished: he’s broken his pelvis, both legs, and one arm before the story begins. In response to that diminishment, the body of Annie Wilkes is amplified, enlarged, and frighteningly unsexed. King takes pains to make clear that although she’s a woman, she’s not fragile or weak or even penetrable in the way that a woman should be:

“She was a big woman who, other than the large but unwelcoming swell of her bosom under the gray cardigan sweater she always wore, seemed to have no feminine curves at all—there was no defined roundness of hip or buttock or even calf below the endless succession of wool skirts she wore in the house (she retired to her unseen bedroom to put on jeans before doing her outside chores). Her body was big but not generous. There was a feeling about her of clots and roadblocks rather than welcoming orifices or even open spaces, areas of hiatus. Most of all she gave him a disturbing sense of solidity, as if she might not have any blood vessels or even internal organs; as if she might be only solid Annie Wilkes from side to side and top to bottom. [ . . . ] It seemed to him that if he made the first two fingers of his hand into a V and attempted to poke them up her nostrils, they might go less than an eighth of an inch before encountering a solid (if slightly yielding) obstruction; that even her gray cardigan and frumpy house skirts and faded outside-work jeans were part of that solid fibrous unchannelled body.”

King’s monstrous body is complete, and the unkillable villain is conceived in his imagination, but born in ours. We ask: Male, female, or something else? The answer is intentionally obscured. He writes Annie as mannish, strong, solid, and unbeatable. In inverse proportion, he makes Sheldon broken, helpless, and infantilized. He does not put forth the effort to make Paul effeminate, even as he unsexes Annie to make her more formidable, but Paul is certainly emasculated. After she’s amputated his foot, Annie mentions that she could have done worse: “You’re lucky I didn’t cut off your man-gland. I thought of it, you know.” The reader is thinking it, too. His manhood is as forbidden to him as if she had.

Immediately following the inciting accident, Paul stops breathing. He comes to understand later that her medication dosage practices are inexact, and she probably put him into a deep respiratory depression with too much codeine. However, in the moment, he understands only that she is forcing her way into his body. Unlike Annie’s solid, fibrous mass, Paul remains penetrable: “ . . . she had forced into him the way a man might force a part of himself into an unwilling woman. Her lips were clamped over his again, lips as dry and dead as strips of salted leather, and she raped him full of her air again.”

Framing CPR as rape is vivid and shocking, and it reverses the typical arrangement to the point where King says it flat out: Annie does to Paul what a man might do to a woman when he commits rape. This is to impress upon the reader how helpless he is to stop her, and to set us up for the reversal of gender norms and expectations of violence. By the end of the novel, Paul has recovered from his injuries and worked up some muscle tone by lifting the antique typewriter she gives him to write on when he’s unmonitored. When his strength returns to him, he has to reclaim his sexual supremacy by finding a way to penetrate the impenetrable body: he forces charred handfuls of manuscript pages down Annie’s throat.

“I’m gonna rape you, all right, Annie. I’m gonna rape you because all I can do is the worst I can do. So suck my book. Suck my book. Suck on it until you fucking CHOKE. He crumpled the wet paper with a convulsive closing jerk of his fist and slammed it into her mouth, driving the half-charred first bunch farther down.”

Many readers absorb Annie Wilkes and Misery as a text as an extended metaphor for addiction. King himself characterizes it that way in 2000’s memoir and craft book, On Writing. Thirteen years after putting Annie Wilkes on the page, King wrote that part of his mind recognized the depth of his addiction and “began to scream for help in the only way it knew how, through my fiction and through my monsters,” referencing Misery in particular as an example of a character held hostage and tortured as an expression of his own struggles with substance abuse. In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, King said plainly that Annie Wilkes is cocaine.

This is one reading of Misery, and far be it for me to argue with King himself. However, Paul Sheldon is literally and explicitly addicted to Novril on the page in the book; a fictional codeine-derived pain medication that Annie has stockpiled in a closet and doses him with for months on end. By the conclusion of the novel, Sheldon is in recovery not only from his injuries, but from his addiction to pain pills. He’s drunk all the time, getting by on “heavy duty aspirin” and jonesing for the “good dope” that Annie had fed him, going so far as to almost wish he were back in captivity if it meant the good drugs would be in his veins once more.

Misery is about drug addiction, but that’s not the only animating force metaphor or motif of fable in the text. Annie Wilkes is cocaine, but that’s not all she is. She’s also a dark mother, a terrible mother. The dark side of motherhood has been described and noted, by folklorists and psychologists who analyze literature, as an inversion of the caring, wholesome figure that motherhood is prescribed to be. As simple as the wicked queen in Snow White, the bad mother appears in stories as a figure of fright and an obstacle almost too terrible to contemplate. Paul relates to Annie in simple and infantile ways: she feeds him while he lies prone in bed. She bathes him and shaves him. She brings him a urinal and a bedpan to relieve himself. Paul is effectively her kidnapped baby, and part of the affection and control she shows him is the mother-love shown between a maternal figure and child. This is also a connection of incest; Annie’s love is impure, and the feeling Paul returns to her is even more warped in return.

“Her fingers were in his mouth suddenly, shockingly intimate, dirtily welcome. He sucked the capsules from between them and swallowed even before he could fumble the spilling glass of water to his mouth. ‘Just like a baby,’ she said . . . ”

This feeling increases in power and terror as Annie becomes intertwined with the image of the H. Rider Haggard-inspired bee-goddess Paul creates in the novel that he writes at her murderous insistence. After she has amputated both his foot and his thumb, Paul’s thoughts become less coherent, richer in both worship and horror, calling her once and only once “Annie the mom” amidst a stream of consciousness vomiting of his most paranoid and least rational thoughts.

“Annie was great Annie was good let us thank her for our food including that we don’t have to eat girls just wanna have fun but something wicked this way comes please don’t make me eat my thumb Annie the mom Annie the goddess when Annie’s around you better stay honest she knows when you’ve been sleeping she knows when you’re awake she knows if you’ve been bad or good so be good for goddess’ sake you better not cry you better not pout but most of all you better not scream don’t scream don’t scream don’t scream don’t”

Finally, Annie Wilkes’ monsterhood exists primarily in the nature of her mind. Her profound mental illness is front and center throughout the book, culminating in Paul’s discovery of her scrapbook that details the dozens of murders committed while working as a nurse. Annie kills first among the terminal wards, choosing the oldest and sickest victims. When she becomes a neonatal nurse and the death toll occurs among children, she is caught, prosecuted, and released.

Paul observes the physical evidence of her mental illness, outside of these killings and her assaults on his body, and connects them to research he conducted as a writer to learn about mental health in another century:

“There was a queer interval of silence, and Paul was frightened by what he saw on her face, because what he saw was nothing; the black nothing of a crevasse folded into an alpine meadow, a blackness where no flowers grew and into which the drop might be long. It was the face of a woman who has come momentarily untethered from all of the vital positions and landmarks of her life, a woman who has forgotten not only the memory she was in the process of recounting but memory itself. He had once toured a mental asylum—this was years ago, when he had been researching Misery, the first of the four books which had been his main source of income over the last eight years—and he had seen this look . . . or, more precisely, this unlook. The word which defined it was catatonia . . . ”

Annie progresses from these periods of catatonia to abject depression, evidencing self-injury and the inability to bathe or care for herself. From there, she shows Paul deep paranoia about everything ranging to him wandering through her house to the government taking action against her. Finally, she shows out and out psychopathy, wielding axe and lawnmower and chainsaw against him and the cops who come to free him, killing without remorse, and burying bodies in a frenzy of bloodthirst and sweaty farm work.

Among all the King’s women, Annie Wilkes is uniquely powerful. His bad mothers: Carrie’s mother Margaret White, IT’s Sonia Kapsbrak, and The Stand’s Nadine Cross are simple vessels for a larger form of villainy, and are all killed without fanfare. Annie isn’t just cocaine. She isn’t just a bad mother. Annie Wilkes is queen and goddess not just of Paul Sheldon’s limited world, but of all his villains across four decades of weaving nightmares out of words. Killing her seems impossible; Paul tries to stab her, to bash her brains in, to stuff her with flaming pages, and he still warns the state troopers who come to his rescue that she can’t possibly be dead. She rises in his nightmares and waking fantasies long after he has escaped her house of horrors.

“Annie Wilkes was in her grave. But like Misery Chastain, she rested there uneasily. In his dreams and waking fantasies, he dug her up again and again. You couldn’t kill the goddess.”

Like a god who made a rock too heavy for himself to lift, Stephen King struggles with the powerful women he creates. He nerfs them and unsexes them; he places world-rending powers in the hands of a teenage girl, but he makes sure we’re all looking up her skirt when she uses it. He struggles with fat women, and typically renders them powerless, disgusting, and pitiable. Annie Wilkes is fat and sexless, but still the object of rape for control. Annie Wilkes is not a supernatural villain, but still a goddess who rises from the grave to plague mankind. Annie Wilkes is a receptacle for misogyny and Freudian resentment, for the struggles of addiction as well as the cringe and excess of fandom. King is god, but she is the goddess. She is standing at the foot of the bed, holding the axe. The hammer. The typewriter. The dope. The truth about all the King’s women.

Like all fat people, but especially fat women, I have to accept that most of the creators I admire and respect have intractable issues with my body. They feel perfectly entitled to use it as a joke, or as the site of horror and degradation, or a proof of failure, or a metaphor for avarice, sexlessness, and/or evil. I must also prepare myself for interactions where my body is in danger (hospitals, doctors offices, interactions with the law) for the derision and devaluation my body will be afforded, because that hatred seeps through fiction to fact, from joke into policy, and is obvious at every level of public interaction.

The tropes of fat hatred are so deeply embedded in our culture as to be some of the lowest hanging fruit, suitable for the laziest writers looking for the simplest shorthand and not caring whose caricature they are painting for the thousandth unoriginal time. King, one of the most influential and widely read American authors of all time, should be better than this, but he isn’t. He has presented fat bodies in a hateful, derisive light for four decades, and he has not learned to do better in all that time. It’s not one character, in one book. It is his pattern.

Let’s examine the evidence of King’s campaign of fat hatred.

King’s 1986 novel, IT, is a gripping and memorable yet controversial novel about how terror in childhood and adulthood take on different shapes but present the same challenge. The story’s titular villain can take on any shape: werewolf, giant spider, and of course the sewer clown, Pennywise. But King pens page after page of prose frightening the reader about fat women, if there are no other monsters available.

Eddie Kaspbrak is an utterly stock character: the sickly kid. He’s small for his age and skinny. He’s always got an inhaler in his mouth, gasping through imagined asthma at any moment of tension. But his asthma is not the product of his own imagination; it is his mother’s invention.

Eddie needs an inhaler only because his mother is awful. She’s a hypochondriac, and her treatment of her only son verges on Munchausen’s by Proxy. She’s overbearing and overprotective, creating an environment in which Eddie is afraid to make friends or ever find a reason to leave her.

All of this would be enough to make readers hate Mrs. Sonia Kaspbrak, but just in case they don’t see it: she is also fat. Her body is described with utter disgust, in terms of breadth and swelling, how suffocating her massive breasts can be when she crushes Eddie to her large body. Sonia Kaspbrak dies a fat person’s nightmare death; a coronary that causes her body to block the entrance to her home and necessitate showy measures for its removal.

King’s distaste is clear, but he’s not done. When Eddie grows up, he marries a fat girl named Myra. Naturally, she looks just like his mother (in the 2017 two-part film, they are played by the same actress.) Myra is weak and solicitous where Sonia was domineering and rude, but it’s the same story. Myra keeps Eddie from joining a tennis club, from having a healthful life of any kind. They stop having sex for some reason (despite the fact that she was fat when they got married, and fat women have sex all the time) and her size is given as an acceptable and clear answer as to why they have no children. Myra Kaspbrak is a self-hating fat woman, concerned that she cannot perform her job as a chauffeur or fit into any uniform she owns for their limousine service. Her body is described in dehumanizing terms: she’s a horse, she’s a hog. King also loves to describe fat women’s bodies as “swelling like comber-waves in the sea.”

I know that he loves it, because this exact same descriptor comes up again in King’s 1983 short story, “Word Processor of the Gods.” Here, too, a decent guy is saddled with that most terrible of burdens: a fat wife. Here, too, the fat woman is selfish, a screeching harridan, a greedy bitch whom no one could possibly desire. King’s protagonist unmakes the couple’s child and stresses that, in a life where they had no offspring, the wife becomes fatter still, cruelly describing hers as a life where everything goes into her body, but nothing comes out. Lina, the woman in this story, is literally written out of existence by the titular wonder, to be replaced by her thinner sister-in-law, so that the writer in the story can be rid of his own mistakes without guilt or the expense of a divorce.

King’s 1980 short story “The Wedding Gig” lacks the description of fleshly combers, but once again casts a fat woman in the pitiable role: Maureen Scollay is a self-loathing fat bride who takes control of a mafia empire with naked aggression and aplomb during her own wedding reception, but even this does not liberate her from King’s scorn. He ends the story with the darkly hinted rumors that success and grief made Maureen even fatter; the real sin of a murderer and mafia queenpin was and always will be that she was too big for her white dress.

This derision King shows is gendered, but it is not solely applied to all the King’s women. He also clearly hates his fat male characters.

Returning to IT, Ben Hanscom is the fat whipping boy of the doorstopping horror classic. His friends call him “Haystack,” after Kayfabe-era wrestler Haystack Calhoun, who famously tipped the scales at over 600lbs. Ben is subjected to humiliations both large and small for his size, but the worst castigations come from the pen of his creator. Anytime Ben runs, King narrates hot and heavy how much Ben hates the sensation of his bouncing tits and pendulous gut. Whenever Ben considers his crush on Beverly, the ubiquitously desired girl of the Loser’s Club, he must at some point comment on his own undesirable flesh as part of the equation. Everyone, from the evil clown on down, calls Ben “fat boy.” Although he is a brilliant kid, an architect and a poet, a brave fighter against both bullies and monsters, everyone remarks first and last on his body. Ben is shamed and abused into losing weight by a high school P.E. teacher who touches his body with revulsion by way of motivation, serving up yet another terrible lesson on how King feels about fatness and the people who live it.

In King’s 1978 dark fantasy magnum opus The Stand, the great writer’s fat flogging post is Harold Emery Lauder. Harold is also described in dehumanizing terms, his fat communicating his weakness, his lack of character, and his lasciviousness to the reader at a glance. Like many fat characters, Harold is also a coward with bad hygiene and an unevolved sense of self-awareness. King is somewhat kinder to Harold than to Ben; perhaps because the characters in The Stand are facing the drastic reduction of the human population and even the assholes are precious. Harold is brilliant, like Ben. Harold is gifted by the narrative with a beautiful woman as a consolation prize, like Ben.

Fat is feminizing to both characters; their masculinity is held hostage by their own round asses and enlarged breasts. Both of these examples ransom it back by losing the weight. Ben puts himself on a diet and a running regimen designed to get revenge on a cruel gym teacher. His transformation is swift and satisfying; thinness lasts him through adulthood, and he is unfailingly remarked upon in King’s long descriptions as the kind of guy who could take home any woman he wants.

Harold, under conditions of post-apocalyptic privation and unremitting labor, gets thinner, too. He loses his feminine curvature (not to mention his acne) to time spent in the sun, doing archetypally-described honest work. Harold is not truly redeemed; his thinness does not save him from betrayal and a terrible death. But it does allow him to take on a new name and see himself in a new light. He gains what Ben Hanscom calls in his own story “a little dignity and a little peace” by doing the only thing a fat character is allowed to do to become better: losing weight. King works precisely, over the course of a thousand pages, to make the reader first hate Harold, then to pity him, and finally perhaps to love him for a fool who couldn’t be any better than this fate allowed. His weight loss is a concrete and undeniable part of his arc toward something like redemption.

This is an aspirational narrative; fat people in our culture are encouraged toward no other goal quite the way they are goaded toward weight loss. Prodigious and maintained weight loss are applauded with greater fanfare than finishing a PhD or opening a business. Americans love nothing so much as a set of before and after pictures. No other image provides positive proof that an individual can control their own destiny quite like Oprah dragging a wagon full of lard. No moment is as humiliating as when Myra Kaspbrak begs her husband not to leave by promising to stuff him with food. No moment is as triumphant as Ben Hanscom giving the skinny finger to his gym teacher.

No fat woman King has ever written has achieved anything like that moment of triumph. I’m no fan of the moral arc of a fat person becoming better and achieving their dreams primarily via weight loss, but King won’t let any fat female character recover her dignity by even that dreary and predictable means. King’s fat men lose weight and gain our respect. King’s fat women stay fat and get fatter. Their fat defines them, and drags along the classic comorbidities of greed, stupidity, and weakness.

In his 1979 short story “Quitters Inc.,” King devises a system by which women are punished if men gain weight. Under a draconian and 100% successful rehab process for nicotine users, if the new non-smoker gains too much weight in the process of quitting, the organization sends someone to chop off his wife’s little finger. This is a fascinating combination of motivating a male character through the abuse of his female partner (not a fridge, perhaps, but a mini-fridge) and expanding the concept of joint ownership of the body. Throughout King’s work, men are portrayed as the victims of their wives’ weight gain; in “Quitters Inc.,” women are made to suffer in a much more concrete fashion for their husbands’ unruly bodies. There are no couples in the story that feature a husband whose wife is trying to quit smoking; the torture never appears on the other hand. The distribution of guilt for weight gain is always biased in a King story.

The only time Stephen King’s fat women get any relief is in one brief aside in 1980’s Firestarter, when psychic protagonist Andy McGee uses his MK-Ultra powers to convince a group of paying dieters to stop overeating and go on walks; theories of weight loss that they’ve clearly tried before. However, these women lose weight due not to their actions, but to a literal magical intervention of male willpower.

With a career spanning five decades and dozens of books, it’s natural that some of King’s early work feels problematic and dated to audiences now. It is easy to pick a few books from the unenlightened eighties or the clumsy nineties to malign a writer with a long and distinguished career. From Needful Things to Thinner, King’s attitudes reflect terrible times for diet culture and fat acceptance. However, it is harder to read his 2020 release If It Bleeds. King has not learned much since his early days; evidenced in his depiction of a tertiary character, a fat woman whose children are missing in the aftermath of a bombing. Despite her reason for existing in the story as a representative of community distress in the wake of tragedy, King spends more words on how “vastly overweight” she is, how she “billows” as she moves, and most critically, how she “will be very lucky to survive the day without having some sort of cardiac episode,” than on anything else about her. The character recites the names of her missing children, but never her own.

In 2021’s Billy Summers, it’s the same old fatphobic song. King writes corpulent mobsters who waddle and gobble, who have no other characteristics besides fatness and the avarice and incaution he always groups with the fat body. When the eponymous hitman dons a fake silicone belly to bolster a false identity, an accomplice tells him to put on a sweatshirt to cover his assumed bulk. “It’s what fat people do,” she tells him. It makes me want to reach through the page and say: There’s a reason for that, Steve. You’re the reason for that.

Knowing from experience as well as documented research the dangerous medical implications of fatphobia makes me think about where doctors and nurses gain their expectation that every fat person they see is like the ones they know from books: hypertensive, diabetic, and noncompliant. I think about the books these future health care providers might have read long before college and residency. I think about Stephen King, who has lain at the mercy of an army of doctors when he was struck by a van on the side of the road in 1999, breaking his leg and hip, puncturing his lung, and bashing the brain that has brought the world so many wonderful stories. King had the advantage of lying before doctors who thought his life was worth living and his body was worth mending. No one wrote novels for his nurses to read that tell them that he was destroying his body by living in it, that he was mere minutes away from a heart attack and heroic measures would be wasted on him. They worked to save him, because his life was worth saving.

Is mine? If they saw me lying on the table and thought of Myra/Sonia Kaspbrak, newly brought back bigger than life by actress Molly Atkinson in the 2017 adaptation of IT, would they work as hard to save me?

Americans see fat people every day. We know them and love them; we work with them and we know they have sex lives and ambitions, that they do more than hate themselves and heave and cry. After all, we are them. We respond to these stories, to all of King’s stories, because we recognize ourselves and others in them. But if the books we read and the movies we watch make fat bodies into portals to horror or the butt of the joke, do we see ourselves clearly or kindly? Not in the Stephen King literary/cinematic universe. Not in 1974, not in 2021.

Other writers are building better on the foundations of what we grew up reading. Folks like Matt Wallace, Sarah Hollowell, Sarah Gailey, Jennifer Weiner, Kate Stayman-London, Julie Murphy, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado, Alex Smith, Hilary Monahan, Amy Spalding, Marianne Kirby, Jody Houser, Nalo Hopkinson, Melissa Broder, and many others are writing books and stories where fat people have sex, go on adventures, save the day, and live lives like the ones we recognize. A whole generation of writers who inherited derision and erasure from writers like King will go on fattening that inheritance, making it our own. Writers like King may never notice or reform, and that’s just fine. We do it for each other and for the people like us who need these stories. We do it so that thin old men who hate the fat body aren’t the only ones on the shelf in horror, in fantasy, in science fiction, or anywhere.

Stephen King is a rich and inventive multiverse unto himself, populated by interconnected horrors and wonders that have terrified and electrified millions of readers, myself included. He is a blue-collar everyman white novelist whose fears look familiar to us, because his vision is the one that has always been accepted, just as his body is the kind that must always be protected. But he still writes a fat body—my body—as one of the scariest things in all the many worlds.

Good thing there are other worlds than these.

Our fingers flew with fury, rage-tweeting how bad the movie was. Everything that could have been updated to be less sexist or less racist than the late-eighties source material was somehow made worse. The three of us screeched like harpies about a multitude of injustices: the teased but intangible Turtle, the flattening of the story’s only Black character, but most of all: Beverly.

There is much in the character of Beverly Marsh that we three remembered fondly from the book, but the original novel is also very problematic. Remakes allow us to recontextualize, to update, and to analyze the texts that make up the foundation of our culture.

This is particularly true in King’s construction of nonwhite characters, and in his women. Unfortunately, the film took what was good about Bev and Kobe’d it into a cosmic dumpster. I reread the novel, trying to recapture what I had loved about her, to regain my sense of Beverly Marsh, the gunslinger.

Perhaps this is almost always the case with rereading, but I found that it was worse than I remembered.

King is better than most male writers at constructing female characters, but the bar is so low that it makes me grit my teeth to admit that he beats the average.

Bev Marsh is the only female main character in IT. Tropes: she’s a Smurfette. She’s a Cool Girl, a tomboy who doesn’t know she’s hot and is just one of the guys. She’s valuable only for sex, and that doesn’t even make any sense when compared to the other characters.

As adults, each of the boys has retained the supernatural powers won and honed in the confrontation with the amorphous villain of the tale. Bill becomes a novelist because he was their leader and storyteller. Waifish little Eddie Kapsbrak has a successful limousine company because he was always their navigator. Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier turns his voice acting and smartassery into radio DJ celebrity. Ben Hanscom, the group’s builder and fabricator, becomes an architect. Stanley Uris brings his precognitive certainty about the right course of action into his marriage, to his wife’s surprise and disquiet. Mike Hanlon begins and ends in the role of archivist and memory for the group; he brings in the Derry chronicle as evidence of the monster’s longevity and keeps the watch for its return as a librarian in his hometown. Each boys’ skills carry forward into their adult life.

• • • •

Beverly Marsh doesn’t carry marksmanship forward by becoming a sniper or even a darts champion. She doesn’t carry the power of her sexuality into adulthood, or use it in any substantive way. Instead, her damaged sexuality functions as a beacon to attract abusive partners like her father. Bev’s brush with the infinite gives her no gifts, not even the confidence that a positive early sexual experience might impart. There are clues to this in the final battle itself: the Ritual of Chud and the lead-up to it. Bev is anointed their marksman when the boys realize she’s the best shot in the group. She gets a chance to wound the monster with a silver slug and a slingshot, but she has Final Girl disease, so the monster must come back after she’s had her moment with it. During the ritual, Beverly becomes the utterly predictable horror bystander, shouting things like “Help him!” or “Somebody do something!” while Bill and Richie and Eddie make bold and brave moves.

If Beverly’s power is in her sex, then fine! I’m in favor of all the sex we can swallow in cosmic fiction. King could have put that to use in the final fight. She could unite the team physically at some crucial moment. She could even fuck the monster in a bit of astral distraction as later King heroine Susannah Dean does, because this is naturally one of the powers the author gives the only woman in the group (The Waste Lands, 1991). Bev does none of this. Her power goes nowhere. It serves her only once: in the infamous tween gangbang scene, where she uses “this essential human link between the world and the infinite, the only place where the bloodstream touches eternity.”

Sex is where Bev Marsh gets weird. She’s the best shot among the boys. She’s as brave as they are when it comes to fighting monsters or standing up to bullies. She’s one of the guys when they’re not thinking about it. However, when they do think about it, it’s all they can think, and the reader is treated to version after version of their evaluations of and fixations on her body. That’s germane to an adolescent experience, but it never balances out. The boys in the story do not experience embarrassing erections in class or the confusion of nocturnal emissions.

• • • •

There are so many references to Beverly Marsh’s new-budded breasts that one feels compelled to check the byline to be sure King isn’t Humbert Humbert in disguise. She thinks about them all the time, because they hurt. They embarrass her. She wakes up in the morning to examine them in the mirror, to see if they have grown. “They were extremely small—not much more than spring apples, really—but they were there,” King writes in her little-girl voice. The boys think about Bev’s breasts all the time, because they can see them and as everyone knows, visible breasts are public property and men and boys are rendered senseless by their existence. King writes Bev busting out of her prepubescent clothes, erotically and frighteningly aware of the curves of her hips and ass in her tight jean shorts. Even her father gives her the hot-eye.

• • • •

Some of this is pretty true to life.

• • • •

Having lived through female-bodied puberty myself, I can tell you that growing breasts does hurt and I was often aware of them as they came in. Maybe some readers found Bev’s report on that experience authentic. However, the real problem is that none of the boys, who are as old as Beverly and going through the same biological process as she is, are ever presented to the reader in the same way. Bill is tall, Ben is fat, Mike is black, Eddie has asthma, and so forth. All of their bodies are characterized to us, but never sexually objectified for the reader, or for each other. When they experience desire and arousal for the first time, that experience is made holy and crystallized into beautiful moments of blameless voyeurism and familiar locker-room evaluations of Bev and other girls. The author does not linger on their calves or their curves to describe them to us in aching detail. They are allowed to be boys, pure and innocent in their nascent sexuality, until Beverly initiates them, motherly in her generosity. This has to occur, because Bev’s power lies inexorably in her sex. As her own father asks her, what does a girl do with all those boys if it isn’t what she does on her back?

• • • •

Try as he might, King can’t provide her (or us) with an answer.