 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to some more Stephen King content. Today we are talking about whether or not I feel that Floating Dragon by Peter Straub was inspiration for Stephen King's It. Now with this book I see the whole reason I read it is because so many different people mentioned, and my friend Anthony Vaca, Cody Tidwell, numerous people that too many to name here brought up the fact, especially when I started talking about how much I felt Dean Coons' Phantoms had inspired It. There were quite a few comments about this book, even though I did say in that video that there were rumors going around that this one inspired that. I see it, I really do, but as far as a side-by-side comparison is concerned I really feel like even though there's a kid in this one and there's not a kid in Phantoms, I really do feel like Phantoms is still the winner of the inspiration for It. There's a lot of stuff that was reused in the 80s, especially by horror authors, especially when it came to towns. For some odd reason everybody ended up using giant spiders at some point in time. No, I think it was Ramsey Campbell's The Hunter's Moon, I think is what it's called. That one pretty much ends almost exactly like It. And before we go any farther, of course this video is going to be spoiler-laden throughout for every single book I'm talking about. Off the top of my head I know I'm going to be talking about Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub and I'm going to be talking about Stephen King's It and I'm going to be talking about Floating Dragon. All of it's going to be in-depth spoilery, so if you're worried about spoilers definitely get out of here. I'm going to go note by note as I've written them. Yes, I write my books, especially my reader's copy and this is my reader's copy. It's fallen apart, I mean a little writing anchor, it's probably the only thing holding it together. Just kidding. So we're going to go note by note. Right off the bat by page 131 I have written several times that this reminds me of Kerry, this reminds me of the Shining, this reminds me of the Stand. So while this book does have some things in common with It, I would say that there are heavier influences as far as King on Straub instead of Straub on King, especially with the stand, with the opening of the stand, at least the uncut edition. There are some very, very close, very similar aspects. Now it could be said for the cut version of the stand it doesn't open the same way that the uncut version does, and the uncut version didn't come out until the 90s. I think between 92 and 96, I can't remember off the top of my head, but the original version of the stand, the 800, 700, 800 page version of that one, does not open with the stuff that I'm talking about. So had Straub read that version of the stand? Who knows? Did they even know each other at this point in time? I'm not 100% sure. Before we go on to the inspirations for each other, for this book and It, I do want to make note of something else. Here's spoilers for The Black House. While reading this, I was not alarmed, but I was very surprised by how much of this book's scenes, whole scenes, were taken from this book and put into Black House, especially the gigantic dog, the dog that attacks both the bikers and Jack in Black House, and in this one where the dog attacks, I think it's Richard and Graham in their house, and they're going after him with a shotgun. There's quite a few things going on, the serial killer aspect, the whole town aspect period, really reminded me of Black House. And of course, this book was first, so I'm wondering why Straub decided to reuse all this content, or is it King reusing the content? I'm honestly not sure, but this one especially felt like there were whole scenes borrowed for Black House, and that was very odd to me, considering the books are so far apart. Now, by 141, I realized there was the whole returning to town theme going on, people who had left. Of course, in this one, it's more the family members coming back, the ancestry, I guess, people related to people in the town. Furthermore, there is once again, just like even Ramsay Campbell's, I think it's the hungry moon, maybe not, it may be the hunter's moon, I can't remember. But the hibernating sequence in here, I think it's 30 years that the evil hibernates and then it comes back to eat again. I caught that stuff. Around page 220, I started to feel a little bit of the town history that Stephen King might have been inspired to write all the town history sections for it. I did see a lot of that, a lot of similarities to that, especially with Graham going and hunting up the history of the town, kind of like Ben and Mike, you know, look up the history of Dairy. Actually, it's just Mike that looks up the history of Dairy. I'm getting the movie confused with the book now, that's wholly upsetting to me. But I believe in the book, it's only Mike that does all the hunting up of everything. But then again, there is the show and tell, is the show, man, that's gonna bother me. I know I'm wrong about one or the other, but I'm sure everybody will let me know down in the doobly-doo. Let's see here, 242, I have something, oh yeah, there's a scene in here. This is probably one of the only scenes that hearkened back, not hearkened back, but really made me think of it throughout the entire read. Now mind you, going into phantoms, I had no idea that there were so many odes, well not odes, so much inspiration in there for it. Going into this one, I was looking for it and this is the only scene where I said, okay, side by side comparisons, this is a bit much, but there's a scene in this book where a book comes to life and starts flipping pages and of course there's a scene like that in It. In this one, it's a little, I think it's a little more on the goofy side because an actual literal dragon comes out of the book, so I thought that was rather silly. And of course, I'm still a much bigger fan of It than I am a floating dragon. In fact, I didn't like this one near as much as I did phantoms. Again, I'm giving this one, I said three stars in my review, but I'm actually gonna end up on the two-star thing. I believe my written review should already be up. 298, there is a ghost story reference. I don't recall this, so I'm just gonna go ahead and look in there, see what it is. Yeah, he talks about Hawthorne. I believe Hawthorne was a, let's see here, yeah, he was a character in ghost story and he was a writer as well, part of a club, all that stuff was taken there. Then on page 422 through 423 of this version of the book, there's a sewage backup that may or may not have, I still feel that that scene in phantoms where, and there's phantom spoilers in this review also from Dean Coombs. In the phantoms book, there's voices in the drain and then there's the bubbling and everything spurts up. And that's basically what happens, but it's blood in it. In this one, it's just the sewage backup. There is a very, very unsettling scene in this one that almost reminds me of the scene with Ben on the bridge where he looks down and he sees the mummy in it, and it's not really the mummy, it's part mummy, part clown, what not. But in this one, it's just Richard Albee walking down the street and he happens upon Laura, his dead wife who was murdered by the dragon, and he sees her but he doesn't want to look at her. He feels that to look at her, he will completely become undone as a human being. His mind will unravel. It's one of the best scenes in the book. It's very, very creepy. I enjoyed that. There's a lot of stuff in it like that where they don't want to look at the horror because all their worst fears are used against them. There's also around page 470, I felt there was a theme of forgetting anybody who left the town or wasn't in the town during all this mess, ended up just forgetting about it, just letting it pass on. So there's also that. 568, oddly enough, might have been some of the inspiration for the 11 year olds and their orgy down in the sewer. There is a scene in this book where Richard Graham, what's the boy's name, Tabby, and what's her name? Wow, I completely spaced on Patsy. And Patsy, they pretty much defeated the evil or they're in the course of defeating the evil. She starts to have sensual sexual desire for everybody in the party. Now I kind of give Stephen King's book a pass because it's all kids. In this one, this is a grown adult woman fantasizing about a preteen boy and the other two men for whatever reason. It's not really all that well explained. In King's book, there's a purpose for the scene. In this one, it just felt really, really weird and awkward. There's also some awkward sex stuff in this book that just gave me the heebie-jeebies more than anything else. Coontz, King, Straub, even Barker to some extent have all given me the heebie-jeebies with their sex stuff. Just dudes writing sex, I don't think they're very good at it. And if you want to discuss this down in the doobly-doo and tell me a dude that you think writes good sex scenes, I'd love to check it out because I haven't found one yet really that didn't end up coming out that it was actually a woman using a man's pin name. In page 576, there's destruction and all that after the dragon is killed. Kind of mirrors what happens at the end of it, but not to such a great extent. And in it, it didn't happen in nowhere near the extent that it happened in Phantoms. In Phantoms, it pretty much destroyed the whole damn town. In it, it just ran, you know, there was a lot of destruction. In this one, I think it only really affects a bar and some houses. Some things fall into the ocean, I believe. Kind of muddy on that aspect. And I think that's everything so far. But I think the biggest thing is the town history, the forgetting. We got another shape-shifting monster kind of deal, but this one, it wasn't as prevalent as it was in Phantoms. And it just felt like that was their main weapon. They had weaponized shape-shifting kind of deal. That's how they got people to trust them. That's how they got close to people. That kind of thing. And this one didn't really need it. But that's all the stuff that I found. If you're one of the people who feel very strongly about this, I would love to hear from you down there in the doobly-doo with a whole list of stuff that maybe I might have missed or that you think is a harder connect to it than what I alluded to. I'm gonna double down and still say that Phantoms was bigger inspiration for Stephen King's It, then Floating Dragon. But I would love to hear from the community about this. So until next time, I have an E. You have an U. This has been some more Stephen King content. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!