My dissertation, “Turning the Thumbscrews Tighter: Suspense Across Versions in Stephen King’s IT” is now available in open access for all to read! I wish to thank Stephen King for giving his kind permission to reprint the quotes from his drafts and letters that are included in the dissertation.
A pdf of the full text can be downloaded via this link:
https://repository.uantwerpen.be/docstore/d:irua:25123
The fantastic cover illustration was made by Matty Jorissen. The publication’s DOI is https://doi.org/10.63028/10067/2079100151162165141.
I hope you will enjoy it!
CORRECTION
After the dissertation was completed, a source became available that sheds new light on the dating of King’s work on the second and third drafts of IT. In subchapter 2.3 of my text, I situate King’s writing of the second draft somewhere between March 1983 and March 1984, based on King’s statements in several interviews in March 1984 that IT was ready and would come out within a year. From this I inferred that a second draft must have been completed.
In July of this year, the “I couldn’t throw it out” podcast released an audio recording of an interview with Stephen King and Peter Straub, recorded in October, November or December of 1984. The authors talked mainly about the recent publication of The Talisman, but at the end King clearly stated that a new novel IT is “now about one eighth done in second draft”. He also mentioned having recently completed the first draft of Misery, which he called “The unwanted pregnancy that I had this summer”.
Based on these two new elements, I think that King told interviewers in March 1984 that IT would come out within a year because he had scheduled to devote the summer of 1984 to his second draft, and intended to do his third draft “polish” immediately after. By that timing he could have been ready to submit his novel in late 1984 or early 1985. But inspiration struck, and he ended up spending the summer on the first draft of Misery. The final page of that draft lists the date September 23rd, 1984, the date of completion. Work on the second draft of IT was then pushed back to the fall of 1984, and because of King making a commitment to direct Maximum Overdrive in 1985, writing the second and third drafts of IT ended up taking from October or November 1984 until the end of December, 1985.