Book info

• Title It
• Author Stephen King
• Year 1986
• Genre Horror

Derry, Maine is just an ordinary town: familiar, well-ordered for the most part, a good place to live. It is a group of children who see - and feel - what makes Derry so horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, IT lurks, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each one's deepest dread. Sometimes IT appears as an evil clown named Pennywise and sometimes IT reaches up, seizing, tearing, killing... Time passes and the children grow up, move away and forget. Until they are called back, once more to confront IT as IT stirs and coils in the sullen depths of their memories, emerging again to make their past nightmares a terrible present reality.

Thoughts

I love Stephen King’s writing and this is a mammoth book that is pretty iconic - the clown, the balloons. I’ve not seen the recent film(s) but might take a look now that I’ve read the books. It’s scary stuff, the story of a horrifying clown menacing a Maine town and killing off children, and a group of kids who come back as adults to relive the horror and finally see an end to it. I did think the story dragged a little in places, it felt like we trod over the same ground quite a lot. But you can’t fault King’s ability to write a bad guy. Henry, and Tom, and Beverley’s father, all of them, you can just feel the menace crawling right out of the page. So good, and creepy.

Rating: 3 / 5