The Science of Stephen King

If you have coulrophobia, consider gradual exposure therapy led by a professional. By looking at pictures, videos, and eventually being in the presence of clowns, you can train your brain to lose the fear!6

The creature living in the sewers of Derry will do anything to scare the children above. They taste better scared! No wonder it plays upon their greatest internal fears to lure them in. Little did it know that the Losers Club would work together to kill it. Pennywise is an extension of the creature, yet he has become the face of It, spawning many look-alikes in haunted houses across the world. There was even a surge of clowns terrorizing small-town America in 2016. From Ohio to South Carolina and beyond, reports of clowns stalking the night flooded emergency services. In the documentary Wrinkles the Clown (2019), an unidentified man chronicles his quest to scare “misbehaving” children, paid by their parents.

If the presence of a clown makes you uncomfortable, you can thank Stephen King. While the media might not be all to blame, it certainly seems to exacerbate our already unnerved reaction to the uncanny. As the author himself says, “Clowns are scary. There’s just no way around that. Clowns can be as angry as they want, and that’s their right—they’re clowns!”7

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Drawing of the Three

If you’re familiar with Stephen King’s work, then you notice when the number nineteen pops up. In his introduction to The Drawing of the Three, King recalls nineteen was the age he was inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to write an epic of his own. He put it off, but kept the thought in his mind. Years later, while watching Sergio Leone’s movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), King realized he wanted to combine Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic set against a majestic Western backdrop.

King’s other inspiration for the series included Robert Browning’s 1855 poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Several character names are contained within it and the plot even mirrors some of the imagery created by it:

Thus, I had so long suffer’d, in this quest,

Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ

So many times among “The Band”—to wit,

The knights who to the Dark Tower’s search address’d

Their steps—that just to fail as they, seem’d best.

And all the doubt was now—should I be fit?1

The poem has been interpreted by many and after Stephen King read it in the late 1960s, it stuck with him.

Browning never says what that tower is, but it’s based on an even older tradition about Childe Roland that’s lost in antiquity. Nobody knows who wrote it, and nobody knows what the Dark Tower is. So, I started off wondering: What is this tower? What does it mean? And I decided that everybody keeps a Dark Tower in their heart that they want to find. They know it’s destructive and it will probably mean the end of them, but there’s that urge to make it your own or to destroy it, one or the other. So, I thought: Maybe it’s different things to different people, and as I write along I’ll find out what it is to Roland.2

This journey to discover the Dark Tower along with Roland is one that has captivated readers for decades and concluded in the final novel of the series, The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower in 2004.

The character Odetta Holmes has dissociative identity disorder. Research indicates that approximately 2 percent of people in the world experience dissociative disorders and they are more commonly diagnosed in women.3

One constant of our love for Stephen King stories is the characters that he creates. He is able to deftly describe people so that even if we can’t relate to them, we are able to understand them perfectly. The character Eddie is addicted to heroin in The Drawing of the Three. What is the science behind addiction? The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) defines addiction as “a chronic, relapsing brain disease that is characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use, despite harmful consequences.”4 When we are addicted to something, it changes the physiology in our brains and the way they function. Some people use drugs to feel better while others use them out of curiosity. Depending on the person and their ability to exert self-control, addiction may become inevitable.