Still Floating: 40 Years of Pennywise

By the time IT was released when I was a budding 13 year old horror writer, I was a die-hard Stephen King fan, as only a horror lover who grew up in the ‘80’s with a tiny town library could be - which is not to say I’m not still a fan - especially nostalgically - just that my horizons have greatly expanded.

My enjoyment of Still Floating: 40 Years of Pennywise, edited by Tom Deady, is in part due to my expanded horizons, as many of the essayists are among some of my favorite writers today, like Gwendolyn Kiste, Jonathan Janz, Mercedes Yeardley, Rebecca Cuthbert, the list goes on and on.

My relationship with horror - and with IT - changed vastly as I grew up - especially growing up as a woman, an SA survivor, and a writer - and reading about the impact It had on these writers and how they connected to it will become part of the mythology I hold in my mind for this formative work.

When I read first read IT, I connected immediately to Beverly as a child; we were almost the same age and had similar backgrounds and shared experiences, so my first reading of the book felt like a personal journey, in spite of the supernatural aspects.

In Still Floating, many writers shared their commonalities, from Lee Murray’s comparison of her high school experience in New Zealand to Glenn Chadbourne’s connection as a Mainer while others took a more scholarly look, like Gwendolyn Kiste’s essay on iconography or Tamika Thompson’s article on racism in IT. Perhaps my favorites were the ones that referenced the importance of found family and friendship, such as Mercedes Yardley’s (and not just because she’s one of my newly discovered favorite writers.)

As I read Still Floating, I experienced a bit of a flashback of my own similar to the ones the characters experienced.

Almost 40 years ago, in my first days at high school (which started in 8th grade/13 years old in my town - what were they thinking?), I would read IT during lunch, my head hidden completely behind the book, and one day a girl asked, “What are you reading?”

I, painfully shy and awkward, held up the book so she could see the title and went back to reading.

Some time later, we ended up becoming great friends, at which point she told me she thought I was an incredible snob, and we laughed about it for many years.

Wikipedia tells me it was Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr who said, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” I am typing these words, nearly 40 years after that awkward lunchroom introduction, sitting at a lunch table at a new-to-me office location, where I just finished reading Still Floating - the only difference is the e-reader instead of a giant hardback hiding my snobbery.  I expect I’ll accidentally make a new great friend when they ask me what I’m reading.

Thank you to NetGalley and Greymore Publishing for the review copy.