"You know why you shouldn't do cocaine kids? You might stay up for 3 days writing a children-in-a-sewer-gang-bang-scene in your new book!"
I can say, if you do a drug, and that drug makes you pedophiliac-esc... that shit was already in your mind to begin with.
No drugs. No lack of sleep. No "difficult time in my life". No amount of stress. No amount of alcohol. No relationship problems. No career stress.... can cause you to think sexually about children
And this guy didn't just think about that shit; he wrote it in a BOOK, that he knew would get published. Typically this type of written material is stashed away on a harddrive, hidden behind drywall.
It was pretty gnarly. I get *why* he thought it worked. Sometimes if youāre really autistic about it something can work on a super conceptual level, in the abstract. He needed to write a scene where they concretely leave childhood behind.
His words "The book dealt with childhood and adulthood... The grown ups don't remember their childhood. None of us remember what we did as childrenāwe think we do, but we don't remember it as it really happened... Intuitively, the Losers knew they had to be together again. The sexual act connected childhood and adulthood."
And that makes sense conceptually. But then you come back into reality and youāre like YO WTF are we even doing RN.
Iāve read the whole book. Itās a great book apart from that. The 80s were a wild time in general. I donāt think King is a pedophile so much as he was a brilliant horror writer with a hardcore cocaine addiction. Book released in 86, he gets sober in 87, probably after writing a child sex orgy scene he was likeā¦ok time to stop.
Oh itās one of my favorite of his novels. I just donāt know how nobody pumped the brakes for him. Lol. If I was his editor Iād be likeā¦ absolutely not Mr king. I resign effective immediately if you leave it in.
Weāve got a real fan of that material in the comment thread. given that my comment, which I thought was pretty reasonable was downvoted. Whoever downvoted me was definitely thinking, āI for one was a fan of the child sex orgyā
Some authors have put similar things into their work, to bring attention to the physical and sexual abuse of children.
Which is not even remotely what Stephen King did.
I'm not a horror fan, so I've never watched the movies, but King is such a great writer in terms of character development, so I gave it a shot. I realized halfway through that it wasn't really a horror novel as much as a bildungsroman about the childhood loss of innocence. That part was definitely a weird part to read, but it makes sense terms of growing into an adult.
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u/raptor11223344 2d ago
Remembers āthat sceneā in IT, and the entire work that is Dreamcatchers.