Legendary, celebrated author Stephen King's most memorable tales feature child characters in wondrous and terrifying situations where they must face supernatural and realistic evils and overcome adversity to thrive; this is a common theme throughout his body of work.
King loves to write about children because he loves living in the realm of childhood accessed through a fictional lens. King's child characters exist in imaginative, vivid worlds full of amazing possibility where the potential death of innocence looms through his creation of predatory antagonists. Regarding the subject, Stephen King has said, "children think in different ways compared to adults. Children are in tune with their imagination. Childhood is its own world that exists by its own rules and culture." King concludes that, if he was to chat with imaginary friends as an adult, society would point fingers and call him crazy.
Some of King's most well-known child characters include the of the Losers Club, who team up to fight the evil personified as Pennywise the Clown in The Shining, little Danny Torrance endures both the supernatural evils of The Overlook Hotel and the real madness of his abusive father, Jack. All these stories vary thematically, but speak to the resilience of children and how potent their fears can be, which make excellent fuel for a horror writer of King's caliber.
IT: Pennywise Allows Children To Conquer Their Fears
King thought that the most terrifying, nightmarish creature to a child is a clown. Therefore, in his 1986 novel IT, King creates Pennywise the Dancing Clown as the personification of pure evil who preys on the children of Derry, Maine. Scary clowns also have roots in history. For example, the man responsible for terrifying an entire generation was serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who murdered boys and young men during the late 1970s in Chicago while dressed as Pogo the Clown. However, King says his real inspiration for IT came from an incident where his car broke down, forcing him to walk across a bridge in a desolate part of Maine. King wondered what kind of troll might happen to live under the bridge, and Pennywise the Dancing Clown was that troll.
Pennywise has the ability to shape-shift into whatever a child fears. In the novel, the reason Pennywise preyed on children was because their fear was so pure, as opposed to more complex adult fears, which coincides with what King has said. The ignorance of Derry continually fed IT with new victims, but the Losers Club banded together to ultimately defeat IT by facing their fears once and for all, showcasing a triumphant message of overcoming not only fear, but societal adversity in his book.
King's Sinister Parents Teach Children Valuable Lessons
King also uses the trope of a parental figure with sinister intentions to test his child protagonists. This is perhaps best expressed in King's world by Nicholson's portrayal of Carrie (1976). These two antagonists show the struggles of children who come from abusive homes and must find their own power; King accomplishes this by giving Carrie telekinesis and by helping Danny Torrance from The Shining find closure in Doctor Sleep.
Despite using child protagonists frequently, King hasn't lost any of his magic by featuring the death of innocence. In his latest novel, The Outsider, King tells a new story about the murder of a child in an idyllic small town that hides something monstrous, which is the fertile ground that Stephen King harvests. Since it has been a winning formula for him in the past and is seemingly timeless, it's doubtful his future works will stray far from using child protagonists to tell stories in future endeavors.
