While Ardelia Lotz isn’t as famous as IT’s Pennywise, she may secretly be an even more horrific Stephen King villain. In the decades that Stephen King has spent on the bestseller list, the horror icon has come up with some chilling monsters. Some human, some supernatural, and many an unsettling mix of the two, King’s villains are famously the stuff of nightmares, and few of them are as terrifying as IT’s Pennywise.
While Welcome to Derry will soon give Pennywise a prequel backstory, the character’s origins are not what makes IT’s titular threat so scary. An ancient being that has existed since time immemorial, Pennywise feeds off misery, fear, and terror, eating innocent children to sustain itself while also compelling living people to do awful things. From that description alone, the character sounds tough to top, but there is a largely forgotten Stephen King character who acts as an even worse version of Pennywise.
Ardelia Lotz of “The Library Policeman” appears to be an elderly librarian but turns out to be a monstrous, ageless evil that feeds off the fear of children – which sounds a lot like the sewer-dwelling Pennywise initially. However, the disturbing difference is that Ardelia Lotz uses a psychical connection to control her human hosts (described in her only canon short story appearance as “a lump of pinkish jelly that throbbed and pulsed with the beat of her heart“), making her a more intimate sort of threat than the supernatural Pennywise. Ardelia Lotz feeds off the bodies of her adult victims and is parasitic in nature, making her all the tougher to defeat since anyone who fights her off risks becoming the villain’s new host.
Why Stephen King’s Darkest Villain Is Worse Than Pennywise
While Pennywise is chilling thanks to the monster’s ability to shape shift into whatever he can sense his latest victim is afraid of, he is almost comically easy to defeat. In both the miniseries and movie adaptations of IT, Pennywise is eventually bested by the power of friendship, with the stars of the tonally awkward IT: Chapter 2 simply heckling him to death. In contrast, Ardelia Lotz can attach herself to the humans she is tormenting, using them to further her evil goals even as they are trying to defeat her.
That said, Ardelia Lotz is not quite unstoppable. In her lone short story appearance, she is defeated temporarily when the hero finally stands up to his fears and faces his childhood trauma, while the growth that represents her attachment to him is thrown under a train by his love interest. However, because this is the only appearance of Ardelia Lotz in King’s writing, there is no reason to believe she is defeated for good at the story’s end. The dark coda of “The Library Policeman” could well be another temporary defeat for the seemingly un-killable entity, making Ardelia Lotz an even more formidable Stephen King villain than IT’s Pennywise.
