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”It wasn’t make-up the clown was wearing. Nor was the clown simply swaddled in a bunch of bandages. There were bandages, most of them around its neck and wrists, blowing back in the wind, but Ben could see the clown’s face clearly. It was deeply lined, the skin a parchment map of wrinkles, tattered cheeks, arid flesh. The skin of its forehead was split but bloodless. Dead lips grinned back from a maw in which teeth leaned like tombstones. Its gums were pitted and black. Ben could see no eyes, but something glittering far back in the charcoal pits of those puckered sockets, something like the cold jewels in the eyes of the Egyptian scarab beetles. And although the wind was the wrong way, it seemed to him that he could smell cinnamon and spice, rotting cerements treated with weird drugs, sand, blood so old it had dried to flecks and grains of rust…��



Once I turned the last page of 1,153 pages, I felt like Scribner or Stephen King or someone owed me a t-shirt saying...I survived IT. When I say IT, I’m not just referring to the enormous length of the novel, but also the total sticky, blood encrusted emersion in this epic tale of horror. The book is two novels entwined together. One is set in 1958 when seven children take on this alien creature, and the other is these same children, now adults, returning in 1985 to fight this entity again. A publisher with an eye for more book sales might have convinced a writer, a different writer than Stephen King, to pull these books apart and sell them in two separate novels, but I’m afraid we might have been talking about two three star books instead of one five star book.

IT was meant to be.

King manages to take these seven kids and make them into seven distinct personalities. After spending so much time with them, I feel like I know them better than friends I’ve had for decades. Even as King reintroduces us to them again as adults, we see the personalities of the children, like a hot stamped template, still in the adults. Mike is the only one who stays in Derry, Maine. He becomes the town librarian, and by default, the person who keeps an eye out for signs of the return of IT. The other six all leave and become very successful. Bill becomes a novelist and overcomes his childhood stutter. Beverly becomes a fashion designer, but still can’t shake her need to be with a man who hurts her. Ben loses all that weight he carried as a child and becomes a famous architect. Stan becomes a wealthy accountant. Richie is a disc jockey in LA. Eddie runs a successful limo service in New York.

Mike speculates that IT has something to do with their career successes.

But what exactly is IT?

”Glamour, he said, was the Gaelic name for the creature which was haunting Derry; other races and other cultures other times had different words for it, but they all mean the same thing. The Plains Indians called it a manitou...These same Indians believe that the spirit of the manitou could sometimes enter them�� The Himalayans called it a tallus or taelus, which meant an evil magic being that could read your mind and then assume the shape of the thing you were most afraid of. In Central Europe it had been called eylak, brother of the vurderlak, or vampire. In France it was le loup-garou, or skin-changer, a concept that had been crudely translated as the werewolf, but, Bill told them, le loup-garou could do anything, anything at all: a wolf, a hawk, a sheep, even a bug.��



The glamour creature who haunts Derry prefers the image of Pennywise the Clown because it is primarily interested in attracting and attacking small children. The first victim we are introduced to, at the very beginning of the novel, is Bill’s younger brother George, who is pulled apart by IT while reaching for his paper boat which had fallen into the drain. Only Stephen King can begin a novel with such a horrific murder and keep readers glued to the pages.

We have to know what the hell is going on?

Our band of seven, or as they proclaim themselves The Losers Club, have watched plenty of horror films, so the things they fear have been manifested from the silver screen. Pennywise might morph into a mummy, Frankenstein, a large bird, a werewolf, a leper, a hideous spider, or a large crawling eyeball. Once one of the kids tells the others what he sees, they can see it, too. The creature must adhere to the rules of the game: if IT is a werewolf, for instance, then IT is susceptible to a silver bullet. Adults are incapable of seeing what the kids see. If blood spouts out of a sink and coats the walls and floor, only the kids know it is there. Once the “Losers�� leave Derry to pursue their adult lives, they start to forget what happened. It is only when Mike calls them and asks them to come back in 1985 to stop the creature once again that they start to regain their memories.

This time they won’t give up until this hideous evil is vanquished...forever.

”Got to become a child again, he thought incoherently. That’s the only way I can keep IT from driving me crazy. Got to become a kid again...got to stop it. Somehow.��



Sometimes we have to crawl back into our inner child to survive the onslaught of visual overstimulation that can crack an adult brain like a rotten walnut. A young elastic brain does better with a world gone mad. At the end of the final battle, Derry will never be the same, nor will this reader. I, too, hope some of my memories fade as I travel further away from the pages of IT. If you are a fan of the horror genre, you have to read this book. There is no time like the present with the new, highly acclaimed movie out in theaters. Read the book. Watch the movie. Mind wipe. Begin again.

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