There’s no doubt that Stephen King’s novel IT, and the various adaptations for cinema and TV, have an almost unique claim to cult status in the horror genre. However, I am strongly of the opinion that this eerie tale of past trauma and present-day striving for redemption is much more than just the world’s favourite scary story. In my view, it’s a work of art with a technical assurance that puts it up there with the best of literary fiction.

The most impressive of Stephen King’s achievements in IT is, without doubt, the double narrative – allowing stories from 1958 and 1985 to run alongside one another and interact in complex ways. For a full account of how he approaches that challenge, you can check out the Popular Fiction Masterclass title Write Like Stephen King. But in this blog post I’m going to cast a fresh light on the technique. I’ll be looking at how other novelists and screen writers make use of double narratives to pursue their own artistic ends.

Let me start by giving a couple of anti-examples. These are stories that illustrate what IT is not. Firstly, IT is not structured around flashbacks. A flashback is a window into the past that is forever anchored in the present – a story about the past is being told by someone in the present. A good example would be the movie The Usual Suspects. Its story is largely told in hindsight by a man being interviewed by the police. The past narrative therefore derives its meaning and pretext entirely from the present-day recollection.

It’s true that there are a number of occasions on which Stephen King’s characters are launched from 1985 back into their own 1958 childhoods by moments of recollection. For example, in Part 2 we see a number of chapter section endings that cut off a sentence in mid-flow as a character is in full reminiscence, then resume it back in 1958 at the start of the next section. But that is by no means always the case. The transition between the years is often unannounced. In fact, by Part 5 it’s intentionally difficult to tell which year we’re meant to be in. This means that the 1958 and 1985 narratives have a separate existence with no dependence and very little anchoring.

It’s interesting to note that, in The Usual Suspects, the flashback is almost the entirety of the movie. As in that great cinematic classic, Citizen Kane, the writer has pushed the flashback structure to its very limit – way beyond the cliché of a shimmering screen followed by a brief, voiced-over episode from the past. And yet, for all that, the past narrative in The Usual Suspects remains anchored in the present. The final moments of the present-day narrative, which reveal the identity of master criminal Keyser Söze, complete the meaning of the flashback scenes.

In IT, the 1958 story could have an independent existence as a novel and it would be a perfectly satisfying read. The presence of a 1985 story adds another dimension to it but doesn’t complete it as such. In that sense, we’re seeing a more elusive and ambitious narrative project.

Now my second anti-example – the movie Donnie Darko. In many ways this account of the events leading up to a devastating accident are exploring territory that’s very similar to IT. Circularity is the defining structural principle of both narratives. Donnie Darko begins with the destruction of a house by an aircraft engine that seems to fall out of nowhere and ends with a depiction of the events that lie behind the aircraft accident. IT is full of circular structures, but the most prominent is the central characters’ exact repetition of their childhood rebellion against a supernatural foe. The difference is that the movie tears up the normal rules of time and space and simply plugs the end of the narrative into the beginning. As such, it arguably sits within the time travel genre. By contrast, the novel restricts its circularity to narrative structures as experienced by the reader rather than life events as experienced by the characters. Stephen King flirts with the idea that the 1985 events are influencing the 1958 events but keeps that firmly within the bounds of metaphor. For example, Mike Hanlon (in 1958) walks past the house where he would live 1985 and (we are conspicuously informed) feels nothing!

Both Donnie Darko and IT are using the idea of circularity to evoke the disturbed inner world of their central characters, but it has to be said that Stephen King’s approach is a much subtler instrument. The sections on narrative in my book Write Like Stephen King fully describe the many variations on the novel’s circularity metaphor.

Let’s move on and look at some examples of writers doing things with double narratives that are very similar to IT.

My first example is a novel that quite clearly falls into the ‘literary fiction’ category: Waterland by Graham Swift. I’m not at all embarrassed to place a bestselling horror novel alongside a modern classic that appears on university reading lists. I believe IT should be seen as part of the same cultural landscape as literary fiction. Waterland has its own double narrative. It takes place in rural Norfolk before the war and London in the 1980s. The central characters are seen undergoing a traumatic coming of age that leaves them unable to have children. In parallel, we are shown the consequences of this sterility – a psychological and marital crisis late in the characters’ lives. One of the defining characteristics of Waterland (and many other novels that are considered ‘postmodern’) is the fact that it uses its narrative structure as a kind of metaphor to express its own thematic meanings. Specifically, the double narrative – alternation between pre-war Norfolk and post-war London – seems to mimic one of the novel’s central images: the idea of circularity and inescapable patterns of behaviour. The story of Waterland is full of images reflecting that idea – eels being the most important one. We hear how these creatures swim all the way to the Sargasso sea to breed, whereupon their young swim all the way back to the waterways of Norfolk. The to-and-fro movement between past and present in the novel powerfully expresses this strange, cyclical behaviour.

This metaphorical use of structure is also seen in IT. In fact, the meaning expressed through that technique is rather similar to the circularity idea in Waterland. Cycles of harmful behaviour (social and psychological) are found everywhere in IT – guilt, alcoholism, inappropriate sexual relationships, and so on. Almost every character and community in the novel seems to be going round in destructive circles, unable to leave their past behind. The novel mimics this in its alternation between past and present. As the 1958 and 1985 stories are narrated in parallel, with the same group of characters undergoing two very similar journeys at 27 years remove, the reader begins to feel the disorienting weirdness of that inability to escape harmful behaviour.

The idea of a double narrative, with one story set in the past and one in the future, has become a very familiar feature of contemporary literature and cinema. The metaphorical possibilities have been recognised by authors both literary and popular, but there are other approaches to the double narrative structure that can be equally powerful.  Let’s now look at a movie example that illustrates a slightly different approach.

The Godfather Part II cuts between the early life of mob boss Vito Corleone – In turn-of-the century Sicily then New York – and the experiences of his son and successor Michael Corleone half a century later. This is no mere flashback fest since there is no dependency between the two narratives. Vito’s early life is not being recalled by someone within Michael’s story, for example. Nor does the 1950s story complete or explain the earlier events in a way that’s similar to The Usual Suspects.

The parallel narration of Vito’s and Michael’s stories does not seem to serve a metaphorical purpose akin to the use of narrative structure in IT. Naturally, it’s no less expressive for that. Its main strength is that it creates a gap across which sparks of meaning can jump. Similar themes surface in both Corleone narratives – family, loyalty, revenge, religion, roots, the responsibility of leadership etc. – and we are able to consider from different perspectives thanks to the differing events of Vito’s and Michael’s lives. For example, Vito returns to Sicily to take revenge on his mother’s killer. By contrast, Michael kills a family member – Fredo, his brother. However, there’s a strange act of mercy in that he waits for his mother to die before ordering the killing. It’s a beautiful and poetic technique, capable of creating an incredibly rich fabric of interconnecting meanings.

This concludes my brief survey of the double narrative structure. It’s now over to you. Can you think of any movies or novels that make use of it? If so, what specific purpose does it serve?