It by Stephen King

Synopsis:

This is a horror novel about seven outcast children that are part of “The Losers Club” living in the town of Derry, Maine. Every twenty-seven years, It awakens to feed on the town’s children. After defeating the creature once, they make a vow to return to Derry if It ever resurfaces.

Bill is a successful horror writer living with his actress wife, Audra. Beverly is a fashion designer married to an abusive man, Tom Rogan. Eddie runs a limousine company and is married to a codependent, overbearing woman, similar to his mother. Mike Hanlon is the town’s librarian and is the one who calls all of the other members and asks them to return to Derry. Richie is a disk jockey. Ben is a successful but single architect. Stan is a wealthy accountant who kills himself because of the fear of facing It again.

Tom and Audra come to Derry, Tom to find Beverly and kill her, and Audra because she’s worried about Bill. Tom dies after his encounter with It, and Audra survives and returns home with Bill. They finally defeat It and kill him and return home except for Eddie who dies down in the sewer. Ben and Beverly become a couple. They lose their memories of Derry and of each other and everything that happened there.

Review:

This was my first Stephen King book I read and for the most part I enjoyed it. It was suspenseful and most definitely a page turner. What I did not enjoy about this book was that I felt it was longer than it could have been and there was too much description.

“The terror, which would not end for another 28 years, if it ever did end, began, so far as I can know or I can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with water.”

“The fears of children were simpler and usually more powerful. The fears of children could often be summed up in a single face and if bait were needed, why what child did not love a clown?”

“And almost idly, in a kind of side thought, Eddie discovered one of his childhood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.”

“I will write about all of this one day, he thinks, and knows it’s just a dawn thought, an after-dreaming thought. But it’s nice to think so for a while in the morning’s clean silence, to think that childhood has its own sweet secrets and confirms mortality, and that mortality defines all courage and love. To think that what has looked forward must also look back, and that each life makes its own imitation of immortality: a wheel. Or so Bill Denborough sometimes thinks on those early mornings after dreaming, when he almost remembers his childhood and the friends with whom he shared it.”