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MYSTERY IN DERRY
George sifted through the junk on the shelf as fast as he could - old cans of Kiwi shoe polish and shoepolish rags, a broken kerosene lamp, two mostly empty bottles of Windex, an old flat can of Turtle wax. For some reason this can struck him, and he spent nearly thirty seconds looking at the turtle on the lid with a kind of hypnotic wonder. Then he tossed it back...
It


On the eighth page of It we are presented the mystery of the Turtle. What is it? What possible significance could a turtle have in a horror story? We are left to our own conclusions for most of the story. Indeed, King never does tell us exactly what this entity is or how it came to be. We are left with clues and vague references to decide for ourselves how important the Turtle is to the story, and to the characters in it.

Comments From Readers


Dion Turner:
But what of IT? I always got the feeling it was an Alien evil force, in a way like the TommyKnockers... although they weren't evil, just vicious. IT seemed to be somewhere between Flagg and Tak... it seemed to be confined to Derry, or at least happy to stay there. Do you think IT was totally alien to this world, or does it have a part in CK's greater plan? I've had the idea that IT was alien since ((ok it's been a couple of years since I read the book)) the part where the kids have the 'Indian vision quest' where one of them sees something crash into prehistoric Derry. Maybe this was a creature that the evil force took over rather than the evil force itself.

Dara:
I'm not sure that the 'spider' in IT was totally alien but I remember reading the phrases about seeing the glimpses of silver when someone looked at IT. I could never reconcile that with some spider-looking demon thing that lived in a cave under Derry, MA. But then, I'm not sure what I thought it really was. The silver references still throw me. Is it some metallic entity from outer space or what? I'm open to interpretive viewpoints here, as well. The Tommyknockers were obviously alien and did not have our best interests in mind. They were a more organized and intelligent lifeform and therefore capable of greater evil than IT which only had ITself to 'feed' and snared IT's prey in a much more primitive manner. Does that make sense to anyone?? Now on the ladder of evil, I don't know where they all shake out, because MHO is that nothing is evil unless it has a cognizance of and an intention to do harm to another living thing. If one lifeform kills another to survive as a species does that make it evil?? What if the prey is us?? Does that automatically make it evil??

Dodd:
It was a whimp! Some runaway clown that couldn't take it anymore and became some freaking spider! But serious: I think it wasn't alien. Why, you would ask? I don't know, it just doesn't feel that way.

No, Bill thought coldly, not a Spider either, not really, but this shape isn't one It picked out of our minds, it's just the closest our minds can come to (the deadlights) whatever It really is. But It's something else, there's some final shape, one that I can almost see the way you might see the shape of a man moving behind a movie screen while the show is on, some other shape, but I don't want to see It, please God, don't let me see It... It was imprisoned in this final shape, the shape of the Spider, by their common unsought and unfathered vision. It was against this It that they would live or die.
It PAGE Ritual of Chud, Under the City, Ch13, a couple of pages in



Kelly Keil:
I'm pretty sure that the turtle in It has some connection with the DT series. Derry has other connections as well, as seen in the book Insomnia.



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Carrie Norfleet hillarynorfleet@chartermi.net
last revised on October 18, 1999
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