Stephen King's Books Keep Getting Banned in U.S. Schools

I tried to read Stephen King’s IT when I was 12. The miniseries had been a source of dread for me for years, but at the age of ten, it stopped seeming so scary. I rented the VHS often, and then, when my aunt told me that the book was way better, I checked it out at the library. No muss, no fuss. I remember getting to a moment when one of the lead characters shoved their husband’s hand between their legs, and never got any farther.

It wasn’t that the particular scene made me feel a certain way. I didn’t even understand what was happening (nor did I grasp the wider, darker implications of what was going on). The main deterrent was that I was not a good reader. Making my way through school-assigned books was difficult enough. A 1200-page tome should have been inpenetrable to someone my age with my lack of attention span. But, above all else, I probably just shouldn’t have been reading it yet.

Everybody is different. I’ve already written about how I’m sharing spooky stuff with my kids, and how that may or may not be too early. Regardless, I can say pretty definitively in this moment that I would not let them read IT when they turn twelve. That’s far too soon to even understand some of the themes and scenes in that book, much less be exposed to them. To me, it makes sense that King is the most-banned author in the U.S.

First and foremost, understanding is not endorsement, and I’ll elaborate on this in a moment. A new report from PEN America suggests that King is the most-banned author in this country. The company says that of 6800 instances of books being banned last year, King was banned 206 times. They also noted that 80 percent of the bans came from Florida, Texas, and Tennessee, while Illinois, Maryland, and New Jersey banned almost nothing (Jersey strong, babyyyyy).

Seeing which three states do the most banning should tell you all you need to know. Book banning is a political tactic aimed at exposing students to as little of the real world as possible. It’s about control. Some books are banned because of the content of a single page, rather than just having a conversation about what that single page contains. And there lies the rub. I’m glad that I was allowed to carry around IT when I was younger. My mom checked it out for me, but we were not talking about it.

It’s a two-fold idea. You can’t just let your kids run around being exposed to every little thing without talking to them about it. There’s a pretty infamous scene in IT, and I don’t know how I would have handled reading it at twelve. I know for a fact that my mother wouldn’t have talked to me about it, but I also don’t think she even knew it was in the book. I both marvel at the idea that she let me read it, and am horrified by how little restriction I had.

But, at her core, I think my mom was just excited to see me reading. It didn’t matter that it was King. She just didn’t want to see me plopped in front of the TV for hours, which was often the case. I feel similarly with my kids. They’re nowhere close to reading on their own, but I’ve been reading them Goosebumps before bed, despite the protestation of a few other parents, and they love it. Their vocabulary is growing. It’s great, and hopefully creates a love of reading within them that I never had.

Stephen King isn’t for every age group. He isn’t even for every person. That doesn’t make his frequent banning any less ridiculous. If parents want to monitor their kids’ habits more closely than mine, I get it. That doesn’t mean restricting access for others. Doing that is only going to make them want to read it more. That said, you might get lucky and have them pick up an enormous book, get about 200 pages in, and then swiftly go back to their afternoon of Boy Meets World reruns.