Stephen King Deliberates Over Creepy Clown Debacle

Esteemed horror writer Stephen King had this to say recently to the Bangor Daily News, “Kids love clowns, but they also fear them; clowns with their white faces and red lips are so different and so grotesque compared to ‘normal’ people,” the newspaper quoted King as saying in an article posted on Friday. “The clown furor will pass, as these things do, but it will come back, because under the right circumstances, clowns really can be terrifying."

He's not wrong, of course, since phantom clown scares have been a part of our society since at least the 1980s.  The horrific harlequin sightings of the past few years are but the most recent occurrence of a known, but baffling, phenomenon.  It is widely speculated that our fear of clowns arises out of their anonymity and the inversion of social norms that they represent, but does that explain why they keep popping up in what seem like organized attempts to frighten us?  Is it merely that opportunists are willing to capitalize on our collective terror to sow their impish misery, or is there something more sinister at work?  What do you think?  Do phantom clown scares arise out of our innate fear of clowns, or is our fear created by the phenomenon?

Yours in Impossibility,

Tobias