It by Stephen King

this is a story about how a book about an evil clown completely rewired my brain at age 14.¹

published in 1986, this horror novel tells the story of the Losers Club, a ragtag group of preteen misfits in Derry, Maine. in 1958, they banded together to defeat the evil monster haunting Derry. in 1985, they have to come back when the monster awakens.

sounds pretty simple, right?

this book² clocks in at 1,138 pages. which i suppose is sort of justified, since it's told from at least ten points of view.³ it explores the history of Derry, the darkness at the heart of nostalgia, the inaction of adults with power in the face of unspeakable violence⁴, the limitations of an authorial self-insert, and how many ways Stephen King can describe erections.⁵

there's a lot going on. like, even for a mid-80s Stephen King book, there's a lot going on.

It was the third Stephen King book i read. i started with Carrie (always a good read for a 9th grader entering a public school for the first time since kindergarten), followed that up with The Shining, and then i wanted to read 'Salem's Lot, because i heard it had scary vampires.⁶ but that book was checked out, and placing an item request would require me to remember my login information (as impossible then as it is now) or once again explaining to the extremely unchill librarian at the front desk that i did have permission from my parents to get books from the adult section and she didn't need to wait for them to confirm that i was allowed to request scary books.⁷ so i chose this brick instead, on the basis of this extremely sick cover art.

all subsequent covers want what this has.

i tore through the entire book in a week. which is fast for something that's over a thousand pages, but also oddly slow for me. i savored this book and its world, which felt to me as real and solid and seething as the wildlife you'll see roiling underneath a log. it scared me, it confused me, and i wanted to learn it by heart.

i kept the book until the library wouldn't let me renew it, and then i begged my mom to take me to the Waldenbooks in the next county, where i had to special order a paperback copy.⁸

i kept this copy until it literally fell apart in 2019. just broke into two pieces when i opened it up to start my reread.

but my relationship with this book is... complicated. one of the (many) times i've talked about this book in real life, my friend asked if i liked the book or not.

to which i can only respond "...???"

i can't really explain this without just diving into the whole thing. so let's go into the sewers.

The Characters

Derry

now i know that including the literal town as a character sounds like some absolute "realized at 10 pm that this paper is due at 11:59 pm" bullshit. but hear me out.

^{1. this is where i will put my many, many insufferable footnote digressions, because of who i am as a person. blame it on bible quiz and the clown book the old Mainer wrote while still having Jack Daniels and cocaine for breakfast.↩}

^{2. brick.↩}

^{3. my annual reread isn't until August (i do it as a little birthday treat for myself), but off the top of my head: the Losers (7), Patty Uris, Bev's horrible husband, that random Nebraska bartender who narrates Ben's first adult chapter, Patrick Hocksetter in That One Chapter, the cop in the opening... if i've done my math right, we're at at least eleven? and i'm still not confident that that's every POV in the book.↩}

^{4. well fuck, i didn't want this to feel timely and yet.↩}

^{5. ! stanley uris, honey, i'm so sorry.↩}

^{6. look, it was 2009, being obnoxious about how how sexy vampires aren't real vampires was essentially a national sport at that point.↩}

^{7. as someone who is now an adult and a librarian-- extremely Not In The Spirit of The Profession of you, unchill librarian. i hope you are retired and not bothering children about what they choose to read now.↩}

^{8. my hometown's only bookstore was a Christian bookstore, and despite Mr. King's well publicized belief in God, their inventory was strangely light on his work.↩}