Richard Macklin

"I'll have to take you up on that, Dorsey"

- Richard to his stepson. "Take you up" is, in Stephen King's words, a metaphor for "beating the shit" out of someone

"DADDY HAD TO "TAKE ME UP" BECAUSE I'M BAD"

- The headlines which appeared when evidence got out of Richard's beatings

Richard Macklin is one of the minor antagonists in Stephen King's novel IT. Richard Macklin is responsible for a fragment of the events in the novel, given that he regularly abuses his stepsons Dorsey and Eddie.

Richard is an aggressive bully, he has encouraged his wife Monica to lie about Dorsey and Eddie's beatings, saying that she will swear in the face of God (itself a major crime, given the lie) that she is innocent and that Richard never hurt the boys.

Biography
In the novel, Richard Macklin has just married Monica and is living with the two stepsons he has. He makes it clear he hates the boys and will do anything to abuse them. He physically beats them all the time, with anything he can find, even his fists. He has a special hammer which he uses for housework, which he orders the boys never to touch. Richard insists that Dorsey is an ignorant twerp and never obeys him by constantly climbing the ladder to see the hammer, despite Richard's alleged attempts to stop him. In reality, the truth is that Richard never cared for either of the boys.

Richard at one point exclaimed "You out of your mind, woman? You want the police involved?" to his wife, when she got worried about him. He was always drunk, and expressed beatings with an awful calm which proceeded them.

To make matters worse, the school staff knew about the child abuse, but did nothing, because Dorsey's teacher saw his broken hand and felt distraught, but she thought if she did something there'd be trouble, and she didn't want it. (It's implied to be the influence of IT that no adult gets involved in Derry town.) So, Richard was able to get more and more savage with his children, turning into a monster each day. Finally, he went too far when time when Dorsey touched the hammer. Richard got into a fit of rage, and picked up the hammer and bludgeoned Dorsey with it, and then at the end his son said "Daddy, stop, I love you" and Richard "eventually" stopped hitting him, but by then Dorsey was dead.

Eddie hated his stepfather so much that he dreamed of pushing Richard in the canal and watching him drown, then shouting "That was for Dorsey you cock-sucking bastard, when you get down to Hell tell the Devil that the last thing you heard was me telling you to pick on someone your own size!" Fortunately for Eddie, Richard was arrested first on suspicion of murder, then after a trail, he was presumably jailed for life. However, the judge cleared court when Richard "broke down" crying in court.

Unfortunately, Eddie was later killed and eaten by IT, because IT no longer had a human to carry out its violence.