There are lots of different ways of knowing and navigating a place. There are maps to guide a person from Point A to Point B or to spatially locate themselves within the surrounding environment. There are points of reference or local landmarks that can similarly serve to orient the individual and act as a shared collective shorthand. But some of the most powerful ways of knowing a place can be intensely personal, like secret spots, an emotional connection, or a significant moment that shapes the way that place is seen, experienced, and remembered. It’s definitely safe to say that in IT (1986), different citizens have different experiences of Derry, with children in particular seeing things that lurk below the awareness of adults. 

One place of which this is particularly true for IT’s Losers Club is the Barrens. Adults rarely go down there, except when required to do so for some professional purpose—the police officer Mr. Nell comes down to see what’s causing the pipes to back up and presumably Public Works officials come down to attend to the pumping stations when they need maintenance, for example—but by and large, the Barrens are the domain of children. It’s where the kids of the Losers Club go to get away from Henry Bowers and his gang, somewhere they can play safely and not have to be constantly looking over their shoulders for bullies or adults. The Barrens serve as an escape from and corrective to larger Derry, where there is no promise of safety. The Losers are also able to make their own mark on the Barrens, to control and shape the world around them in ways that are impossible in their everyday lives at home and school: they beat down the paths that become their thoroughfares over the course of that long summer, they dam up a small stream and change the landscape of the Barrens (before realizing the unintended consequences of their actions and having to dismantle it), and they build an ingenious clubhouse that afford them both power (in the smoke-hole experiment that shows them It’s arrival) and safety (when Ben and Bev hide from Henry and his gang on that last, horrible day). The Barrens becomes their place more than anywhere else in Derry, a location that is nearly sacred, and for which they are willing to fight. 

Derry as a whole serves as a backdrop for their day-to-day lives and childhood memories as well, from Richie’s contemplation of the Paul Bunyan statue and his mad dash through Freese’s Department Store to movies at the Aladdin. When the Losers return as adults, Derry is rendered uncanny through the passage of time, in part because things have inevitably changed over the years but also because their childhood memories remain just out of reach: they see familiar, recognizable landmarks, but the sense of not-quite-right-ness pervades any nostalgia they might experience. Bill looks out the window of the cab that takes him to lunch with his long-forgotten friends, seeing what has changed and what has stayed the same as he experiences “a queer doubling sensation in his mind, the sort of sensation he remembered getting the first time he watched a 3-D movie. Trying to bring together two images that didn’t quite jibe” (488). While this shifting landscape can be objectively charted and categorized, the ways in which the Losers themselves have changed are more profound, as Bill reflects that there are now “banks erected inside their heads where once magic picture-palaces had stood” (491). 

While the lived experiences of the Losers create an intimate and personal map of Derry’s horrors of which adults remain unaware, they also come to know Derry through its history of violence, though understanding what has come before and how these earlier events fit into Derry’s larger landscape. The Bradley Gang was gunned down on Derry’s Main Street in broad daylight and members of Derry’s Legion of White Decency trekked through the woods that separated Broadway from the Black Spot, a nightclub for Black servicemen, to set it on fire. The ruins of the Kitchener Ironworks still bear the marks of the devastating explosion during an Easter egg hunt. All of these acts of violence—and more—become part of the Losers Clubs’ way of knowing, understanding, and navigating Derry, bolstering their instinctual knowledge that bad things happen in Derry and there’s no guarantee that the adults will see or keep them safe. When Norbert Keene is telling Mike about his memories of the Bradley Gang and Mike wonders about the silence surrounding this story, Keene tells him “it happened in Derry … The place makes it news as much as what happened in the place, sonny” (660, emphasis original). While Keene’s intended argument is that if this had happened in a big city there may have been more attention, Mike interprets this remark differently, musing that “I’ve heard it before, and I suppose if I continue to pursue this I’ll hear it again … and again … and again … They say it as if it were a natural law any natural man should understand. And, of course, the worst of it is that I do understand” (661, emphasis original). Bad things happen in Derry and that’s that.  

When the Losers return to Derry as adults, their ways of knowing Derry become even more complicated, with their present perspective and adult rationality undercut by the memories that return and the knowledge of their childhoods, as well as their larger awareness of the kind of place Derry is from the history they know and the stories Mike shares with them. They find both nostalgia and nightmares as they walk through Derry’s streets once more, remembering what they have forgotten as they follow in the footsteps of their younger selves.

[Page numbers are from the 2017 film tie-in edition of IT]