Product Description

It was the children who saw - and felt - what made the town so horribly different. In the storm drains and sewers 'It' lurked, taking the shape of every nightmare, each one's deepest dread. As the children grow up and move away, the horror of 'It' is buried deep - until they are called back.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5355 in Books
• Published on: 1987-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1120 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Stephen King's idea for It came from a favorite childhood image: the entire cast of the Bugs Bunny Show coming on at the beginning. He thought of bringing on all the monsters, one last time: Dracula, Frankenstein's creature, the Werewolf, the Crawling Eye, Rodan, It Came from Outer Space.

It is about a group of adults who were once troubled children in the late '50s--"The Losers." One of them is a best selling horror writer much like Stephen King (or his friend and collaborator Peter Straub). In order to defeat the protean "It" that threatens their hometown, they have to go back- -not only to the town itself, but deep into their childhood memories, to regain the talent for magic they once had. King says It is for "the buried child in us, but I'm writing for the grown-up, too. I want grown-ups to look at the child long enough to be able to give him up."

This huge, baggy beast of a novel is a favorite of Stephen King fans--second in popularity only to The Stand. Perhaps longtime fans develop mental filters for King's sloppy storytelling to tune out the repetitions and silliness. King is like the pointillist painter Seurat: if you stand too close to the little dots, the picture falls apart, and it looks meaningless. That's why he makes the storyscape so big--to take you up to that macro-level where you like the book in spite of its flaws. --Fiona Webster

Review
'One of the great storytellers of our time' -- Guardian 'A writer of excellence...King is one of the most fertile storytellers of the modern novel...brilliantly done' -- The Sunday Times 'His finest to date!Hardly a page is without its shocks and surprises yet King still manages to give us a terrifying climax' -- Yorkshire Post

King's newest is a gargantuan summer sausage, at 1144 pages his largest yet, and is made of the same spiceless grindings as ever: banal characters spewing sawdust dialogue as they blunder about his dark butcher shop. The horror this time out is from beyond the universe, a kind of impossible-to-define malevolence that has holed up in the sewers under the New England town of Derry. The It sustains itself by feeding on fear-charged human meat - mainly children. To achieve the maximum saturation of adrenalin in its victims, It presents itself sometimes as an adorable, balloon-bearing clown which then turns into the most horrible personal vision that the victims can fear. The novel's most lovingly drawn settings are the endless, lightless, muck-filled sewage tunnels into which it draws its victims. Can an entire city - like Derry - be haunted? King asks. Say, by some supergigantic, extragalactic, pregnant spider that now lives in the sewers under the waterworks and sends its evil mind up through the bathtub drain, or any drain, for its victims? In 1741, everyone in Derry township just disappeared - no bones, no bodies - and every 27 years since then something catastrophic has happened in Derry. In 1930, 170 children disappeared. The Horror behind the horrors, though, was first discovered some 27 years ago (in 1958, when Derry was in the grip of a murder spree) by a band of seven fear-ridden children known as the Losers, who entered the drains in search of It. And It they found, behind a tiny door like the one into Alice's garden. But what they found was so horrible that they soon began forgetting it. Now, in 1985, these children are a horror novelist, an accountant, a disc jockey, an architect, a dress designer, the owner of a Manhattan limousine service, and the unofficial Derry town historian. During their reunion, the Losers again face the cyclical rebirth of the town's haunting, which again launches them into the drains. This time they meet It's many projections (as an enormous, tentacled, throbbing eyeball, as a kind of pterodactyl, etc.) before going through the small door one last time to meet. . .Mama Spider! The King of the Pulps smiles and shuffles as he punches out his vulgarian allegory, but he too often sounds bored, as if whipping himself on with his favorite Kirin beer for zip. (Kirkus Reviews)

The Sunday Times
‘A writer of excellence...King is one of the most fertile storytellers of the modern novel...brilliantly done’

Customer Reviews

Far too long
I enjoyed the tv movie of this despite the 2nd half being rather crap, everyone went on about how much the better the book was. I finally got round to reading it recently and I wish I hadn't bothered.
Far too much description of such simple things. The giant bird, werewolf and spider were ridiculous.
The biggest complaint however is the description of the 11yr old children having group sex in the sewers, it had nothing to do with story and in no way contributed to it. The mere hint by Bev earlier on in the book was enough.
The ending was a big let down too. We didn't really get a proper ending for anyone but Bill and Audra and even that was far too strung out.
What about poor Eddie's wife?
All in all, a massive let down, the book could've easily been cut down to half the size it is!

Dull, unoriginal and FAR too long
I love Stephen King so I can understand the amount of good reviews any of his books get, even this one, but I would not recommend it and I certainly wouldn't waste the huge amount of time it takes to read this again. It is FAR, FAR too long for one, it just goes on and on about the kids' lives for what seems like forever, enormous chunks of pages pass without even a hint of anything happening, and when something does they are usually poorly realised. I'm sorry but a giant flying bird and a werewolf in a basement (which seems to take seven pages to walk down the stairs such is the exhausting length of King's descriptions) may be scary to kids yes, but not to the people who are going to actually read this book.
There are also too many characters in this book and it is sometimes very hard to focus, or even care to tell the difference between all the different boys names, they all seem to blur into one (there is only one proper female character). Also, just as it seems like something might be happening as the adults meet up, it reverts back to when they were kids (again) and playing in the forest (again), and running away from Henry and co (A-bloody-GAIN).
The result of all this unoriginal dullness is a story, and that's it. This is not a horror, it is barely a fantasy, but it is a story - a long, boring, tedious, uneventful mess that does not live up to the hype and barely ever features the scary clown character upon which it has built its reputation.
...Only Insomnia is more sleep-enducing.

Don't read this alone
This is a fantastic book. I have yet to meet anyone who has read this and not felt the same. Just when you think you can't feel more scared he hits you again. its a story about friendship and facing your fears . Stephen King is a master story teller I also recomend his short stories.