IT, book review. (Stephen King)

My 1st edition and film tie-in copy along with themed T

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.

My copy from 1986

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.