IT: Stephen King
Reviewed By Yolanda Sfetsos
- Paperback: 1088 pages
- Publisher: Hodder Paperbacks; (25 July 2017)
The Blurb
To the children, the town was their whole world. To the adults, knowing better, Derry, Maine was just their home town: familiar, well-ordered for the most part. A good place to live.
It was the children who saw – and felt – what made Derry so horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, IT lurked, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each one’s deepest dread. Sometimes IT reached up, seizing, tearing, killing…
The adults, knowing better, knew nothing.
Time passed and the children grew up, moved away. The horror of IT was deep-buried, wrapped in forgetfulness. Until they were called back, once more to confront IT as it stirred and coiled in the sullen depths of their memories, reaching up again to make their past nightmares a terrible present reality.
Review
I’m a huge Stephen King fan. I’ve got a copy of every single book he’s ever released, and in some cases, I have multiple copies. Hell, I even have a pop-up book. Although I’ve read a lot of them throughout the years, there are still quite a few I haven’t gotten to yet.
One of those is this HUGE opus. Maybe it’s because I didn’t want to break my arms while holding this encyclopedia-sized tome, or it could be that I have SO MANY books to read some fall through the cracks. But at the beginning of this year, I decided that 2019 was going to be the year I changed this. Mainly because I wanted to make sure I’d read the book before the second part of the movie was released.
And thanks to Kendall Reviews, I’m going to finally share my many jumbled thoughts about this book. No, scrap that. This wasn’t a book, it turned out to be a three-week event. An experience that left me with a big hollow IT place that will hopefully fade with time.
As soon as I started reading, I was hooked. King has a certain way of beginning his stories with everyday people doing everyday things—not always good things, of course—before hitting you with the horror. Suddenly, these seemingly disconnected incidents click into place and you can’t stop reading.
No matter how much you know about the story beforehand (I have, after all, watched the 90s mini-series and the first part of the recent movie), it didn’t take anything away from the wonder and awe, the building suspense, the sense of dread, or the horrifying truth unfolding with each page, chapter or part.
Is there any need to summarise the plot at this stage? Okay, I’ll try to be as brief as possible:
A group of kids in small-town Derry face an unspeakable horror that chases them into adulthood and threatens to destroy everything and everyone in its path.
I think I’ll leave it at that.
Physically speaking, this is a GIANT novel. Over 1,000 pages that took me so long to read, it started to feel like it was the only book I’d read all year. Instead of book 100. And although it took me quite a while to reach the conclusion, I’m not even sorry that I lived and breathed this story for weeks. Spending time with the Losers Club was an emotionally draining, intoxicating experience that consumed so much of my mind, by the time I reached the amazing conclusion, I felt like the monster had eaten my brain.
There’s no other way to describe this very dark, yet in so many ways, pure adventure Bill, Richie, Bev, Ben, Eddie, Mike and Stan took me on. But it wasn’t just their story, was it? This book is packed with Derry’s insanely macabre history, one spanning a lot longer than I ever imagined. While also squeezing in the broken lives of so many messed-up people.
It’s a twisted mix of real-life drama, toxic relationships and gruesome nightmare. It’s surreal and heavy and addictive.
I loved the way these characters were portrayed. The trauma these kids go through and the awful level of bullying they put up with often rivals their freaky clown problem. And, of course, I loved how their childhood experiences have a ripple effect on the adults they become.
Another aspect that worked really well was the alternating timeline and multiple POVs. It’s easy to weigh down a book with too many of those, but because King is such a great writer and this novel has so much space to fill, this technique provides the perfect pacing. Everything unravelled in the best way possible, and having the conclusion play out with both past and present, was truly captivating. I was on the edge of my seat because I couldn’t wait to find out how they would deal with the awful chameleon.
Speaking of the clown, Pennywise is a truly terrifying creature. A chameleon with many scary faces. A mysterious and very powerful figure. An entity hiding beneath their town, but comes out to play, torment and kill children. This horrible villain is as creepy as it is scary but so very interesting. BTW, I honestly didn’t expect to be taken on a cosmic ride. That totally took me by surprise, in the best way possible.
IT is one of those stories that creeps under your skin, seeps right into your very psyche until you can’t put it down. Until all you want to do is read, read, and READ some more. Even though the act of getting through this meaty paperback took so long, I enjoyed every freaky minute.
I absolutely LOVED this story, and still can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t wait to see how they tackle the conclusion to this movie.
Well, there it is. I hope my review of this amazing book was coherent enough to make some sort of sense. And I hope, that unlike the people of Derry, I never forget a single monstrous thing…
IT
‘They float…and when you’re down here with me, you’ll float, too.’
To the children, the town was their whole world. To the adults, knowing better, Derry, Maine was just their home town: familiar, well-ordered for the most part. A good place to live.
It was the children who saw – and felt – what made Derry so horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, IT lurked, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each one’s deepest dread. Sometimes IT reached up, seizing, tearing, killing…
The adults, knowing better, knew nothing.
Time passed and the children grew up, moved away. The horror of IT was deep-buried, wrapped in forgetfulness. Until they were called back, once more to confront IT as it stirred and coiled in the sullen depths of their memories, reaching up again to make their past nightmares a terrible present reality.
You can buy IT from Amazon UK & Amazon US
Yolanda Sfetsos
Yolanda Sfetsos lives in Sydney, Australia with her awesome husband and cheeky kitty. She started writing dark tales when she was a horror-obsessed teenager who spent way too long in video stores.
When she’s not writing, she’s probably reading up a storm, watching something, searching for books in thrift stores, or walking.
She’s had a lot of stories published by different publishers, but none of those books are available. Except for her story Breaking the Habit, which was published in July 2019 as part of Demain Publishing’s Short Sharp Shocks! series.
Website: www.yolandasfetsos.com
Twitter: @yolandasfetsos
Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/yolandasfetsos
Amazon: www.amazon.com/Yolanda-Sfetsos/
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