It

I avoided It for years because of size and clowns. The book is over eleven hundred pages in the Viking edition from 1986, and I do not like horror that relies on shock. What finally pulled me in was hearing readers talk about the friendship more than the fright. They said the scary parts are strong, but the childhood summer is the reason to stay. That proved true for me. I read it across most of September, a chunk each night, sometimes too late, with the hallway light on after the Neibolt Street scenes. I finished tired and oddly attached to seven kids from a made up town in Maine.

Georgie, Bill, and the paper boat

The story starts in Derry, Maine, in 1957 with a paper boat. Six year old Georgie Denbrough chases his waxed boat down a rain filled gutter. It slips into a storm drain. Inside the dark opening waits a clown who calls himself Pennywise. He talks to Georgie, offers balloons and circus smells, and then kills him. The image is brutal and famous for a reason. It sets the terms. This evil hunts children first, uses friendly masks, and lives below streets people trust.

Georgie's older brother Bill carries that loss into 1958. Bill is eleven, tall, with a stutter that worsens when he is upset. He leads by stubbornness rather than charm. He builds a dam in the Barrens with other outcast kids. He keeps Georgie's photo. He believes something took his brother and that adults will not name it. Around him gathers the group that will call themselves the Losers. Ben Hanscom is new in town, heavy, bookish, good with building and history. Beverly Marsh lives with an abusive father and learns early how to read rooms. Richie Tozier talks fast, does voices, earns the name Trashmouth. Eddie Kaspbrak has asthma, or thinks he does, and a mother whose fear keeps him small. Stan Uris is careful, Jewish in a town with quiet prejudice, afraid of birds after a strange encounter at the Standpipe. Mike Hanlon is Black, homeschooled at first, strong from farm work, and the keeper of Derry history through his father's photos and stories.

King cuts between their home lives with patience. Ben is mocked at school and finds refuge in the library. Beverly dodges her father Al's stares and fists. Eddie carries a placebo inhaler and a list of rules from his mother Sonia. Stan cleans his bike and tries to keep order. Mike works with his parents on the farm outside town and hears about the Black Spot fire that killed Black patrons while white town leaders looked away. These chapters are not filler. They show why seven lonely kids would choose each other, and why Derry adults will fail them later.

Summer when the town blinked

In the summer of 1958 each Loser meets It alone first. Ben sees a mummy on a frozen river that should be summer warm. Eddie sees a leper under a porch house. Beverly hears voices in her sink and sees blood that only children can see. Richie sees a werewolf in a movie house. Stan hears dead kids in a flooded Standpipe. Mike sees a giant bird. Bill sees Georgie in a basement photo album, bleeding through pages. The forms shift to fit private fear. The clown shape appears often because circuses promise fun to kids, but It also wears a werewolf face from a film they just watched, a creeping leper for Eddie's fear of disease, a mummy for Ben's love of old movies.

They compare notes in the Barrens, a patch of woods and streams where they build a dam and a clubhouse. At first they joke and test each other. Then they return to the places where they were scared, together, with slingshots and planks and [bold]homemade courage[/bold] that feels real because it shakes. The old house at 29 Neibolt Street becomes their proving ground. It is abandoned, rotting, with a porch that sags and rooms that smell of damp. Inside, It cycles through masks fast. A clown in a fridge. A werewolf that tears a poster. Blood, fog, moving shadows. Eddie breaks his arm. The group drags him out and lies to nurses about how it happened. That lie binds them. Adults cannot be told because adults do not see.

The human evil runs beside the supernatural evil. Henry Bowers leads a gang of teen bullies with Belch Huggins and Victor Criss, later joined by the colder and stranger Patrick Hockstetter. Henry carves his name on Ben's belly. He chases Mike with rocks and slurs. He beats Eddie. His father is a cruel ex cop who fills him with hate. Henry's violence grows as It nudges him, feeding on anger the way It feeds on fear. The summer peaks with a rock fight where the Losers, outnumbered, stand together and drive Henry off. It is one of the most joyful scenes in a dark book, kids shouting and throwing stones until bullies run.

The Losers decide to enter the sewers to hurt It before it sleeps again. They use silver earrings melted into slugs for Beverly's slingshot, based on old monster movies. They map tunnels with string. They find It's lair under Derry, a vast dark space with a floating pile of dead. They wound It. They hurt it enough that it retreats to sleep for decades. They swear a blood oath in the tunnels to return if It ever wakes. Then they scatter. They grow up. They forget, the way survivors of childhood illness forget fevers. Only Mike, who stays in Derry as librarian, remembers and watches.

We all float down here. You will too.

Pennywise says this sing song line in different forms, coaxing and gloating at once. It sounds silly on the page and chilling at night because it promises that floating, which should be light, is really drowning.

Adults who forgot get a phone call

The second timeline opens in 1985. Derry police find a gay man beaten and thrown from a bridge, with a clown seen nearby. A child is found dead in the park. Mike, now the town librarian, sees the pattern. A cycle of killings every twenty seven years or so. He calls the others. Bill is a famous horror writer married to actress Audra Denbrough, still stuttering under stress. Ben is thin now, a successful architect, still in love with Beverly. Beverly is married to Tom Rogan, a man who mirrors her father's control and hits her. Richie is a radio comic in Los Angeles, quick with voices, lonely underneath. Eddie runs a limousine service and married a woman much like his mother. Stan is an accountant in Atlanta with a neat life and a deep dread he cannot name.

Stan kills himself after Mike's call. He writes that he cannot go back into that dark. His death shadows the reunion. The rest fly to Derry, stay in the same hotel, eat at the Jade of the Orient, walk old streets that feel both smaller and wrong. Memory returns in flashes. A photo. A street. A scar on a hand from the blood oath. Mike shows slides and newspaper clippings of Derry disasters. A fire at the Black Spot nightclub. An explosion at the ironworks. A shootout with gangsters. A mill collapse. Each disaster lines up with a waking period, and each time townspeople forgot fast or told a cleaner story. King uses these histories to argue that Derry itself is sick, not only haunted. People look away because looking would cost them.

Henry Bowers, now grown and broken after years in an asylum, is pulled back by It to hunt the Losers. He stabs Mike and chases others through the library and hotel. Eddie's wife and Beverly's husband follow to Derry and cause more harm, Tom beating Beverly and then meeting It in a terrible hotel scene. Audra follows Bill out of love and ends up catatonic after seeing too much. These adult threats keep the middle from feeling like only nostalgia. The Losers are fighting memory and present danger at once. They are tired, divorced, scared professionals with bad backs and mortgages who must act like kids again.

Down again under Derry

The final return to the sewers mirrors the childhood descent but with adult weight. Bill leads. Richie talks to cover fear. Ben carries practical tools. Beverly aims the slingshot again. Eddie, whose arm broke as a boy, will break again in worse form. Mike, hurt by Henry, talks them through tunnels by radio and memory. The Neibolt house is worse now, leaning and stinking. Inside, It shows them personal horrors fast. A giant bird for Stan's absence. A mummy. A leper. Eyes in the dark. The clown paint looks cracked and old. Pennywise mocks their marriages, their jobs, their thinning hair, trying to make them feel small the way Henry once did.

Under the town they find not only a spiderlike body but a sense of vast age. King reaches for cosmic ideas here with the Turtle called Maturin, a kind creator force that vomited up the universe and sleeps, opposed to It, which fell from outside and feeds. The Ritual of Chud, a battle of wills through jokes and stories and biting tongues, returns. As children they drove It back with belief and silver. As adults they must remember how to believe. Laughter matters. Insults matter. Bill shouts that It is only a clown, a mask, and the group laughs through terror to shrink it. Eddie dies saving Richie, crushed after spraying his inhaler, now filled with battery acid in a brave bluff, into It's face. It is a costly win. Derry above them breaks open in a storm. Streets flood. Buildings fall. The Standpipe cracks. The town that forgot pays in concrete and water.

They pull Audra out of catatonia with a bike ride that echoes childhood speed and care. They leave Derry as the scars on their hands fade. They start forgetting again, this time as a mercy. Mike's diary pages empty. Phone numbers blur. What remains is not detail but a feeling of having been brave together. Bill writes a new book without knowing where the idea came from. Ben and Beverly, finally together after years of wrong partners, hold onto each other. The evil may not be fully dead, only sleeping or starved, but the Losers kept their oath.

Too long, too much, still hard to leave

Length is both the gift and the problem. At 1138 pages, King has room to build Derry street by street. The library, the Barrens, the Standpipe, the ironworks, the theater, the farm roads. Minor people get full lives. But those town histories in the middle slow momentum. A reader eager to return to the sewers must sit through twenty pages on a mill fire or a nightclub blaze. Some passages repeat fear beats. Another foggy street, another balloon, another voice in a drain. The repetition creates dread, yet it can tire even patient readers. The cosmic Turtle chapters divide fans. Some find them thrilling and strange. Others find them vague after so much concrete horror.

There are harder criticisms to name plainly. The book's treatment of some characters reflects its time in ways that grate now. Fat jokes around young Ben linger too long. Beverly is seen with care in some chapters and through a male gaze in others, including a much discussed sewer scene involving all the boys that many readers find unjustified and upsetting. Henry's racism and homophobia are shown as evil, which is the point, but the slurs and beatings are frequent and graphic. Readers should know the book contains child harm, sexual violence, animal harm, and hate crimes described in detail. It is not a book to hand to a young teen without talk, even though its heart is about kids.

Still, the friendship writing is unusually strong for horror of this size. Bill's stutter and guilt over Georgie never feel like props. Ben's love for Beverly is patient rather than possessive, shown in a haiku and in quiet building work. Richie's jokes cover a fear of being unloved if he stops performing. Eddie's growth from his mother's rules to choosing risk feels earned. Stan's absence in the adult timeline hurts because his order and doubt balanced the group. Mike's role as memory keeper gives the book its moral spine. He stays, watches, calls, and pays the most. When these seven stand in a circle, whether with fists full of rocks as kids or flashlights as adults, the book earns its length.

I finished with respect more than fondness for the clown. Pennywise is memorable because he listens. He learns what each child fears and speaks in that voice. That makes him harder to shake than a simple killer. But what stayed with me after the last storm was not paint or teeth. It was the dam in the Barrens, the bike called Silver, the library afternoons, the oath cut into palms that faded when it was no longer needed. For readers who can handle the size and the graphic passages, It offers a full town, a full childhood, and a second chance to face what chased you. Read it in daylight when you can. Call a friend after the Neibolt chapters.