Stephen King's The Library Policeman, part of the Four Past Midnight collection, is a great story, but features a profoundly disturbing plot point. One of the most beloved authors of all time, there's no real debate that King knows how to craft a story well. His dark subject matter and wordy world-building isn't necessarily every reader's cup of tea, but that's fine, as it's impossible to please everyone. What King has managed to do for over 40 years now is consistently scare and thrill millions of fans.
Of course, even some of King's devotees occasionally question some of his creative choices. That was the case with his 1977 novel Rage, written under the Richard Bachman pen name. That book sees a gun-toting high school student take a class hostage, murdering teachers along the way. It raised some eyebrows at the time, but as the years went by, so many school shooters seemed inspired by Rage that King himself made the call to take it out of print.
There's also perhaps King's most controversial sequence, when IT's underage Losers' Club all has sex with each other in the sewers of Derry after battling Pennywise. As questionable a choice as that was though, at least it wasn't a plot point central to the story functioning, and was pretty easily adapted out of the IT movies. The Library Policeman, on the other hand, contains an upsetting sexual twist that's much more integral to the story's core.
Why The Library Policeman Will Probably Never Be Adapted
The Library Policeman centers on a man named Sam Peebles, who while researching speechwriting techniques at his local library, runs afoul of a creepy librarian named Ardelia Lortz. A poster warning of a Library Policeman catches Sam's eye, leading Ardelia to remark as he checks out the books to return them on time or she'll send the menacing character after him. One could dismiss it as a joke, were it not for the fact that Ardelia is actually a ghost, or even worse, wasn't exactly human when she was alive, feeding on the fear of children.
Ardelia seeks to use Sam to return to life fully, and while attempting to defeat her, Sam regains access to a horrifying repressed memory. When he was a young boy, he was lured in outside a library by a man claiming to be a Library Policeman. Before he could realize what was happening, the man began raping him, and the sexual assault is depicted extremely graphically in Stephen King's prose. Afterward the rapist threatens Sam to not tell anyone what happened, and he goes on to block out the traumatizing circumstance. Even if not depicted in the graphic manner King used, it would be almost impossible to excise this extremely uncomfortable plot point from the story, were The Library Policeman to be adapted. The fact that Ardelia preys on Sam's most tragic memory is an essential part of their emotional battle, and to dilute that would be a disservice. At the same time, one can get away with a lot more in a book than on film.