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I want to make a case for IT as something more than a horror novel. It is that — it’s a horror novel that has genuinely terrified readers for nearly forty years, and Pennywise remains the most effective monster in popular fiction — but it’s also one of the finest coming-of-age stories ever written and a deeply serious meditation on memory, loss, and the cost of growing up.
That King managed to combine all of this in a single 1,100-page novel without any of it collapsing under its own weight is the most impressive thing about a very impressive book.
What’s It About?
IT alternates between two timelines: 1958, when seven children in Derry, Maine, encounter an ancient evil that preys on the town’s children, and 1985, when those same children — now adults who have almost entirely forgotten what happened to them — are called back to finish what they started.
The monster presents itself most often as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, though it is much older and stranger than any single form. It lives in the sewers beneath Derry. It has been doing this for a very long time.
The seven children — the Losers’ Club: Bill, Beverly, Richie, Eddie, Stan, Mike, Ben — are misfits in the particular way that King writes misfits: specific, funny, genuinely vulnerable, and bound together by shared outsider status in ways they can’t articulate at eleven but will understand when they’re adults.
The Childhood Sections
The 1958 sections are the heart of the book and they’re extraordinary. King writes childhood with a fidelity that can be painful — the particular way summer days stretched out, the specific cruelties of bullies, the intense and uncomplicated bonds between kids who’ve found each other. The Losers’ Club feels like a real group of real people, and the horror lands harder for it. You don’t want these specific children to suffer, which is exactly the point.
Pennywise operates on fear — it reads your fears and becomes them. The clown form is for children who fear clowns, but the monster slips into other shapes too: werewolves, mummies, whatever specific terror lives in each child’s mind. It’s a deeply intelligent construction.
The Adult Sections
The 1985 sections work differently and, for many readers, less successfully — though I’d push back on that. The adult Losers are deliberately diminished versions of their childhood selves. They’ve forgotten. They’ve become smaller, more defined, more ordinary. King is making a point about what adulthood costs. The scenes of them tentatively remembering who they were have a specific emotional register — grief, joy, shame — that the childhood sections can’t quite access.
The Length
Yes, it’s 1,100 pages. It earns most of them. The deep immersion in Derry’s history, the slow accumulation of childhood detail, the space given to secondary characters who matter — all of this requires length to work. There is one notorious section near the end that most readers agree should have been edited. You’ll know it when you reach it. Push through.
Should You Read It?
If you have any interest in horror — yes, absolutely. It’s the benchmark. If you think you don’t like horror — consider that you might like this anyway. The horror elements are inseparable from one of the warmest, most affectionate portraits of childhood friendship in American fiction. They make each other stronger.
Rating: 5/5
Rated 4.7 Stars on Amazon. Buy IT here.
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- Stephen King Books in Order
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- Is The Dark Tower Series Worth Reading?
- Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill Review
Check out Sunset In the East — a mind-bending short story collection from Ben Luxon.
