...Float back in time to childhood and wonders and endless summers with friends that you never imagined one day outgrowing and forgetting. To a time when there was pain and uncertainty as you stretched towards being the person you would eventually become, but also joy in simple pleasures and uncomplicated friendships. And that's what makes a gigantic novel like this work: if it was purely a story about a creature that dresses up as a clown and drags children into the sewers,it would be functional, as so many of the horror novels to be found here on amazon and elsewhere are... but it wouldn't necessarily touch you. Yet this book does. Yes it's horrifying to see a clown with a bloody smile clambering up the river bank at you on a winter's day, but it's also mortifying (in a completely different way) that the object of your teenage affections may have guessed that you sent her that corny poem! King is just as adept at making you feel one emotion as the other.
I read this book as a teenager and recently after nearly 30 years decided to return to it (which kind of mirrors the journey the protagonists in the book take, returning to their childhood home). I did it idly, not sure whether it would grip my older jaded self the same way... I started flicking through the first few pages just to get a "feel" for the book, not intending to go very far. But then I was running along a rainy street with little Georgie Denbrough watching his paper boat sail into a dark drain.... and the next thing I knew it was late at night and I had raced through 150 pages.
Over the next week and a half, I flew through the rest of this book, losing myself in the imaginary town of Derry which King has done an incredible job of creating: he has given it a geography, a (dark) history, populated it with memorable characters (even if some only appear for just a couple of paragraphs) and most of all, given it an atmosphere, an atmosphere I could almost feel in empathy with the characters. The only comparable instance I can think of of an imaginary location given such substance is Ed McBain's imaginary "Isola" city, but McBain had decades and dozens of 87th Precinct novels to flesh it out.
The slightly negative aspect about this, of course, is that it comes with a price: you do have to be prepared to take long detours in the narrative as King delves into the history of the town, or the history and inner thoughts of his characters, before meandering back (you may find yourself often starting a sentence or paragraph which has so much additional, perhaps even immediately unrelated, information bracketed in that you have to go back and reread the whole sentence for it to make sense!). Sometimes you may even question why he does that: early on in the book we are introduced to a character whose life and personality and desires are marvelously detailed in close to 25 pages... and then that character disappears from the story. I can imagine a lot of readers may take exception to that so it is something to be aware of. But let me say this: whereas I find myself becoming impatient with, say, Dean Koontz, for a two page description of "a Spanish style California house with creepers and bougainvillea" (one of the many reasons I just lost interest in his work a long time ago), somehow with King, I am willing to take that narrative detour because at the end of it, I feel the character feels that much more real, the story that much more fleshed out. If you are willing to make that trade-off, you will be rewarded with a story that captivates and draws you in.
As far as the horror, it is there in spades, but it never feels like a "horror story" per se, although there are some truly horrific scenes - overall the horror is from this disquiet that the author introduces with his first few chapters (Georgie Denbrough, Adrian Mellon), that there is something just WRONG in Derry. The story does veer into, I don't know, almost "psychedelic" territory towards the end, but somehow a storyteller like Stephen King makes it work. The whole point of this novel, though, isn't the destination: it's the journey taken to get to that destination.
One last thing: the story follows two main threads, one in 1958 following the 7 protagonists as children and one in 1985 as adults, and both follow their path towards confrontation with the eponymous It. As the story progresses, the author draws the threads closer and closer but in essence, this is not a story told in the traditional linear sense: there are references to events which we the reader will not encounter till further in the narrative, events which we do not encounter at all and references to events which although we the reader have encountered earlier in the story, have not as yet happened for the characters and the town. It does get quite tricky and the closest analogy I can draw is the television series "Lost" with its flash-backs, flash-forwards, flash-sideways, often without knowing where (or when) Jack and co are in the narrative. If you are fine with that, you should be fine with this.
In closing, before I write a review almost as long as the novel itself, I highly recommend this book but it is one that you have to be prepared to be patient with to be ultimately rewarded. (Now with my appetite whetted I'm off to find one of the few comparable novels with similar themes that I read over a quarter century ago, "Boy's Life" by Robert McCammon)
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To label this book would be an injustice, to label it horror would be plain wrong.
O! M! G! This book is hard for me to review objectively because IT and I have history. (See what I just did there?). I've read it before you see, twice in fact. The first time, when I was young, closer in age to the kids in the book, I saw things from their perspective, and then, as I got older, I related to the adults more, and now, on my third visit, well, I just feel for them all. This epic book runs to one thousand one hundred and sixty-six pages and has such depth, not just in the characters, but in the history of the town in which they live, that in spite of its length, it has pace, firing you out from one chapter to the next. You read the first fifty pages and you're hooked, the next two hundred pass in a blur, of excitement, of reunion, of horror, and then, before you know it, you're half way through, but still, new things are happening. Like the shootout in front of the pharmacy in broad daylight, where half the town came armed and ready to kill. The explosion of 1906 that killed 88 kids on an Easter egg hunt. The great flood that washed half the town away decades before, and of course, the realisation that every twenty-seven years, kids go missing, die, left, right and centre, but with no one seeming to noticing, seeming to care. And why don't they notice, why don't they care? IT . . . that's why. IT has a hold over the town of Derry. People turn a blind eye, forget, dismiss, delude themselves that the missing and the dead left town, were trouble makers, fell out with their families, anything but admit the truth, but in the summer of '58', just as they break for summer vacation, seven kids become friends, become The Losers, and one of them, stuttering Bill, who lost his brother in the fall of '57', has a score to settle, a score that may well take him twenty-seven years to fulfil. To label this book would be an injustice, to label it horror would be plain wrong, because it's a, coming of age, thriller, horror, murder mystery, sci-fi, history book, all rolled into one, and I bet you can’t say that very often, and the other thing, the worst thing about this book, (there always has to be a 'but' it seems), is that once you've raced through the first nine hundred or so pages and the end is nigh, you want it to slow down, because deep down you know, that when you turn that last page, read that last paragraph, you're gonna be left with a massive hole where those Losers where and the biggest book hangover you've ever had. To give this book a star rating any less than six out of five would be a travesty, but as we're governed by convention I will have to settle for five. If you haven't yet taken a journey to Derry, never been to the Barrens and met Henry Bowers, been in the thick of an apocalyptic rock fight, smelt the scorched remains of the Black Spot, been chased from 29 Neibolt street by a leper, a werewolf or Pennywise the dancing clown, you’ve never really lived. Put simply, one of the greatest books I have ever read.
Top reviews from United Kingdom
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 May 2025
My second attempt at getting a book without damage and must say it’s not bad. Not perfect but not too bad. Still expensive for what it is.
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 October 2018
O! M! G!
To label this book would be an injustice, to label it horror would be plain wrong.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 October 2018
This book is hard for me to review objectively because IT and I have history. (See what I just did there?). I've read it before you see, twice in fact. The first time, when I was young, closer in age to the kids in the book, I saw things from their perspective, and then, as I got older, I related to the adults more, and now, on my third visit, well, I just feel for them all.
This epic book runs to one thousand one hundred and sixty-six pages and has such depth, not just in the characters, but in the history of the town in which they live, that in spite of its length, it has pace, firing you out from one chapter to the next.
You read the first fifty pages and you're hooked, the next two hundred pass in a blur, of excitement, of reunion, of horror, and then, before you know it, you're half way through, but still, new things are happening. Like the shootout in front of the pharmacy in broad daylight, where half the town came armed and ready to kill. The explosion of 1906 that killed 88 kids on an Easter egg hunt. The great flood that washed half the town away decades before, and of course, the realisation that every twenty-seven years, kids go missing, die, left, right and centre, but with no one seeming to noticing, seeming to care. And why don't they notice, why don't they care?
IT . . . that's why.
IT has a hold over the town of Derry. People turn a blind eye, forget, dismiss, delude themselves that the missing and the dead left town, were trouble makers, fell out with their families, anything but admit the truth, but in the summer of '58', just as they break for summer vacation, seven kids become friends, become The Losers, and one of them, stuttering Bill, who lost his brother in the fall of '57', has a score to settle, a score that may well take him twenty-seven years to fulfil.
To label this book would be an injustice, to label it horror would be plain wrong, because it's a, coming of age, thriller, horror, murder mystery, sci-fi, history book, all rolled into one, and I bet you can’t say that very often, and the other thing, the worst thing about this book, (there always has to be a 'but' it seems), is that once you've raced through the first nine hundred or so pages and the end is nigh, you want it to slow down, because deep down you know, that when you turn that last page, read that last paragraph, you're gonna be left with a massive hole where those Losers where and the biggest book hangover you've ever had.
To give this book a star rating any less than six out of five would be a travesty, but as we're governed by convention I will have to settle for five.
If you haven't yet taken a journey to Derry, never been to the Barrens and met Henry Bowers, been in the thick of an apocalyptic rock fight, smelt the scorched remains of the Black Spot, been chased from 29 Neibolt street by a leper, a werewolf or Pennywise the dancing clown, you’ve never really lived.
Put simply, one of the greatest books I have ever read.
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Top reviews from other countries
- Emily HelalReviewed in Egypt on 29 June 2024
Been a fan of Stephen King since I was a little kid
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