Two Halloween-ish reads this month! I’ve been lagging behind a bit and that’s mostly to do with the fact that I ended up picking two hefty tomes that I didn’t enjoy all that much.
First up: Stephen King’s IT.
We all know the story: mysterious killer clown kills children in `the small town of Derry, is chased by a group of people, first as children, then as adults. My dad made me watch the film when I was six. That’s all you need to know about my lack of mental stability.
I know King has said he wrote a lot of books on a lot of cocaine and I’m guessing this is one of them. I’m on the fence about King as it is, but I think this might be one of the rare books where the movie is better simply because it does away with the extraneous plot. There’s a lot about the group of friends: how they meet, how the dynamics work, the shit they get up to (King leans heavily on the fifties’ nostalgia that the his target audience would’ve had when the novel was first published). We see their dealings with It, and the plan they form to defeat It both as children and as adults.
The adult relationships rarely stray beyond the superficial; the children fare a bit better, but at the same time the novel feels dragged out and repetitive. It’s a bulky story that resembles a large piece of luggage with random bits sticking out through the broken zipper: it’s a big bag but it’s still not big enough to hold everything King has tried to cram in. I skimmed through the last 100 pages or so; I’m sure their thrilling but by the time I got there, I was just done with the thing.
(Skarsgård or Curry? My love for Tim Curry knows no bounds, but the Skarsgård edition is probably better cinematically speaking)
Then, on to R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis
This was a book club pick; the person who was in charge of the selection this time is big on fantasy so that’s what we got. And I have to admit that the concept is pretty cool: Alice Law, student of Magick at Cambridge university, travels down to hell to fetch her former professor after his untimely death. She is accompanied by Peter Murdoch, academic genius and enigmatic scatterbrain. They travel through the circles of hell and have to find their way around all that’s in it before they can emerge victorious.
And I really like the title, too: Katabasis means descent into the underworld in classical Greek. Add that to your repository of rarely used words to impress people at parties.
Unfortunately, it’s not that exciting. Alice as a main character is dull; her entire focus is on academics, so I assume this was done on purpose, but she’s not particularly interesting or exciting to read about. You don’t exactly root for her to make it out of hell, necessarily. Much the same goes for Peter, who is somewhat more sympathetic but at the same time rather insufferable, if that makes any sense. Alice, in any case, sure can’t figure out how she feels about him.
The novel leans heavily on Dante’s interpretation of hell (there is talk of a pizza anus. Don’t ask), yet all circles seem to have something to do with academia. Spirits try to write their dissertation in the hopes of being released from hell and reincarnated into blissful oblivion, yet their work never seems good enough. The trick works for the first two circles, but it grows stale after that. A lot is made of the involvement of other characters, such as an evil pair of magicians roaming the underworld looking for blood, but it all fizzles out like faulty fireworks. The objective of their search, a professor named Jacob Grimes, is equally disappointing.
Kuang herself is doing a PhD. After reading this novel I wonder how happy she is doing that. She certainly doesn’t seem to like the world of academia all that much.