What It Is: Throughout King's novels, children are often the target of attack, kidnap, abuse or murder. Probably the most famous example is found in IT, which sees seven children terrorized by Pennywise the Clown. It's not uncommon for King's villains to specifically want to harm children for their own personal enjoyment. What It Means: Children are used by King in multiple ways. For a start, they're a way of heightening the depravity of a villain. Any villain who wants to hurt or make suffer a child is clearly on the psychotic end of the spectrum. To many, children represent total innocence before the reality of adulthood. Threatening or harming a child, then, is a way of showing total and utter evil. But that's not all. Children are often depicted as capable of much more than adults in the face of the supernatural. Whereas adults have an established idea of reality, children's reality tends to be fluid, and open to expanding. This allows children to face horrors that adults are unable to perceive, or cannot fight against.
