The most important things are the hardest things to say, because words diminish them...

Some time ago the wise bald (or white) heads stationed at various universities came to an agreement that a literary form, commonly known as the novel, is dead - fewer and fewer works of any significance are written each year. Of course, one must understand the requirements the wise gentlemen expect of a novel of worth: it would be good if the writer would include some "aesthetic dignity" by including as much allusions and connections to other previous works of literature - consciously, that is. The language must also be exquisite; preferably obsure and as incomprehensible as possible, drawing from earlier works of worth and including metaphors and allusions to them. If the author by any chance happens to include a plot in his work, there is a good percentage of possibility that his work will be deemed unworthy, and forever excluded by the adacemia.
Or at least as long as these wise gentlemen live.
Of course, the reader is not expected to understand, not to mention enjoy the work of worth - no one reads anymore, the wise men would say; people read rubbish Danielle Steel when Bold & Beautiful is not on the TV. And, by God, no such novel of worth can ever be popular - after all, the intelligence level required to appreciate it is apparently not met by the 90% of world population.
A literary figure who is as popular and appreciated The Beatles? Whose work is admired by thousands of people? And the possibility that these people might learn something from it? That is simply not possible - the wise heads mutter in unison - that is simply not possible! Ask people who know!
Ask us!

History, as we know it, has a nasty habit of repeating itself - though in this case something good might actually come out of it. Writers have been criticized before - most notably Twain and Dickens - and yet, their work is still read and loved by whole generations of readers. Their fiction is taught in schools. Huckleberry Finn has been deemed as vulgar and impropable, much od Dickens's work was described as overtly sentimental, but it prevailed - which can't be said about those who concerned themselved with being the so-called "Arbiters of Literature". In the end, they couldn't grind the knives because they weren't theirs to wield.
The bones of those who tried to define "literature" perished; the works they so often tried to banish did not. No one remembers (or cares) about those who tried to defy the power of Twain or Dickens; they are immortal through their works.
People perish; books do not. No one cares about the boy's club of the literati, who cry out words of rage from the ivory tower, instead of helping people understand the joy of reading, understanding and believing. The main principle of art is to evoke; the problem is, not many of the educated seem to understand that even simple things can evoke great emotions. But they too will go down in history without leaving any mark on it, forgotten and alone; and I believe that there will be a lot of bodies turning in their graves when some titles enter the school curriculum.

"IT" by all means, is not a simple novel. To classify it as a "horror" story is the same as saying that "Moby Dick" is a very long manual on whaling. To say that it is all about the monster is to say that the whale is the villain of the piece.

We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest
fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.
-Robert McCammon

Although vulnerable and physically weak, two factors that make them perfect victims, children posess strenght that most adults had lost in the painful process of maturing - the strenght of imagination. A child feels and experiences emotions much more intensely than an adult, but their unique imaginative capacity allows it to cope with the seemingly impropable much more efficiently. Hence when in 'Salem's Lot an adult faces a vampire, he fells down dead from a heart attack. When a child faces one, he is able to go to sleep ten minutes later. As King puts it, "Such is the difference between men and boys".

King has been depicting children throughout his whole career, and his child characters have subsequently grown older, along with his own children. "IT" is in my opinion his best novel with child protagonists; his most elaborate, complex one. It's also one of his longest, if not the longest.
The lenght is appropriate, because of the theme: After all, it deals with childhood. Childhood defies Time; a day can last forever, and the summers are endless. And then we grow up, all these years pass, just a blink.

Kids are bent. They think around corners. But starting at roughly age eight, when childhood's second great era begins, the kinks begin to straighten out, one by one. The boundaries of thought and vision begin to close down to a tunnel as we gear up to get along.
-Stephen King, Danse Macabre

Children also posess another one of the invaluable assets that most adults strive to grasp, and it still seeps through their fingers, sand: Time. Children experience the passing of time differently not because time actually slows down for them (that would be a neat thing indeed) but because they occupy a vastly different social position than that of an average adult. Most adults are forced to work and take care of their families, offspring included. Their imagination is dimmed by the countless hours spent on labor, and for most it never really comes back...the disilusions of experience push it farther abd farther down in the dungeons of the mind, until we finally forget that it was even there in the first place.
Until we forget what we are possible of...what adventures we can create, what worlds and realms, completely out of the whole cloth.
When you are a child the hours lazily pass by, the only important matter is to get home from school and after throwing the backpack in a corner going to get your friends and hanging out with them till dinner...and then go hang out with them some more.

The imagination is an eye, a marvelous third eye that floats free. As children, that eye sees with 20/20 clarity. As we grow older, its vision begins to dim . . . and one day the guy at the door lets you into the bar without asking to see any ID and that's it for you, Cholly; your hat is over the windmill. It's in your eyes. Something in your eyes. Check them out in the mirror and tell me if I'm wrong.
The job of the fantasy writer, or the horror writer, is to bust the walls of that tunnel vision wide for a little while; to provide a single powerful spectacle for that third eye. The job of the fantasy-horror writer is to make you, for a little while, a child again.

Most children experience more during one summer vacation than some adults throughout their whole life; They have their precious innocence, they haven't been spoiled by work, by taxes, by bills and other things that each of us has to face at some point in life. There is always food in the fridge, and there is always roof over the head; and if there is not, there is always hope that there eventually will be, and friends that help to keep it.
Children do more and see more because they can; when school ends, the day is theirs. Their schedule is not as strict as that of an adult; their duties not as responsible. Therefore, they do not have to trouble themselves with money and shelter, and even if they do they are easily able to push these matters away and concentrate completely on what they are doing right here and now.
With little breaks for homework and chores children can spend the whole day playing make-believe with their precious friends, and sometimes the boundaries between the real and the imagined become thin, and sometimes they vanish altogether.
Sometimes their thoughts take shapes...and sometimes their fears do too. Sometimes they joy is almost tangible...and sometimes the boogeymen come out of the closet.
And sometimes they are real.

"IT" is a story of a group of children who are not among the most popular, strongest or smartest; a tale about the group of seven friends living in Derry, Maine in 1958. They form the self-called "losers" club and encounter a horrible, awesome force lurking in their hometown...a force feeding on fear and devouring young children. A force that adults do not seem to see; a force that appears as a clown, holding a hand full of baloons.
The seven children all have one thing in common: they encountered IT. They had all escaped...and that one summer of 58, the seven friends have confronted and defeated IT.
Or so they had thought.
28 years later a young homosexual is thrown off a bridge in Derry...it seems a classic, clear case of homophobia, but the testimony of one of the witnesses changes everything.
He claims he has seen a clown under the bridge...a clown and a cloud of balloons.

Mike Hanlon, the sole member of the losers who remained in Derry calls the others and reminds them of the promise they had made all these years ago...a promise sealed in blood. A vow to return if IT wasn't dead. If IT will come back. And apparently, IT has.
Can they face IT again? Can they go back to the horror they have long forgotten?
They faced the terror as children. It was their time to take action, and they managed to fight it. Now they are all grown-up...but it is their time,too.
Will the monster be bested...or will IT FEED?

"IT" is composed of two nonlinear narratives. The first is the story of 1958, where we meet the children and they first encounter IT; King effortlesly interleaves this timeline with the story of 1985, where the adults return to Derry to fight IT, basing on research that has been done on the subject and their returning memories. IT avoids the problems of most other lenghty books: plot threads that go nowhere. Each of them is important, and only adds to the suspense and builds up to the shattering climax.

If there is a thing which places King above most other writers, it certainly is his great understandning of adolescence. Few others manage to write so vividly and convinclingly about childhood and coming of age.
The unquestionably hard time of growing up - school, bullies, parents, first crushes - they are all here, and the reader feels as if he himself was experiencing them. King allowed me to re-live my past again; I wasn't around in 1958, but if I were I would undoubtedly be one of the boys. It is truly an impressive experience to read how King builds his characters and the world they live in.
Which of course includes stormdrains...which might be empty, but then they might be not.

IT also manages to adress important social topics: racism, prejudice, domestic abuse. But most importantly it is a story about friendship and childhood: How it irrevocably binds people together and affect their lives. About the power of memory and imagination; about the terror of the familiar world which hides many secrets around the corners and down in the sewers. It's a study of children facing the uncanny, and overcoming their greatest fear: the fear of being alone in fright.
IT is a story of seven friends, each different, each indispensable and irreplaceable.
stuttering Bill Denbrough, the unly group leader;
Ben Hansocom, an overweight boy, with a talent for architecture;
Riche Tozier, the brilliant witty boy of many voices;
Mike Hanlon, the black kid who comes to the group to find acceptance and finds it;
Eddie Kaspbrak, the asthmatic and fragile boy who finds within the group a thing he has never dreamed of - courage;
Stan Uris, a sensible boy who brings understanding;
and Beverly March, the sole girl in the group, an redhead who is both sweet and tough, and helps the boys in most dire of moments.

King has proven himself earlier to be capable of producing an epic narrative (The Stand in 1978), but I think that IT is equal to - or even surpasses - the story of the plague.
This is a brilliant novel, beautifully told in crisp, clear prose, with truly unforgettable characters and situations. It is the essence of good fiction; the truth inside the lie. King knows his way around the corners; and has that undefiniable look in the eye, the dreamy look of a child. His words are the best set of toys he ever had; and he's generous enough to share them with us. And when he's showing us how his trains travel along the tracks of his imagination and where they go to, we won't dare to blink because we could miss a minute of the experience...even when the carriage passes through some dark tunnels.

And if it is the work of an "inadequate writer", a producer of "penny dreadfuls", without any "aesthetic value" or other high-flown pretentious gibberish babbled by people who would most ly want to cast Stephen King and his readers to hell for destroying the image of "Literary Reader"?
Huck Finn, I'd shout loud "All right, then, I'll GO to hell!"
Literary Heaven might have a better climate; but Literary Hell sure has better company.
big-tomes classic-horror coming-of-age ...more1,357 s6 comments Jeffrey KeetenAuthor 6 books250k

”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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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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I also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeetenhorror708 s2 comments Jennifer45 75

Some parts were truly creepy at first and initially, as often happens with King, I couldn't put it down. But then, as often happens with King, it hits a brick wall and becomes so over-long and has so many unnecessary elements that get in the way of the main story that it becomes a bloated, endless chore to finish. People often say they hate the ending of this book...I did not hate it or love it. I had checked out at that point and simply wanted it to be over no matter who lived or died or whether they defeated It or not.

This book is at least 300 pages too long and that is the least that could have been completely cut out without hurting the story in the slightest. Included in those 300+ pages are some particularly disturbing sequences and elements which were just sickening, unnecessary and, to me, actually took away from the main story.

The events and elements that killed "It" for me:

1. A bizarre, out-of-nowhere scene portraying sex play between two male pre-teen, would-be murderous bullies--which had nothing to do with the story and led nowhere.

2. An extended description of animal torture/killing--which stemmed from the bully in the sex-play, which had nothing to do with the story and ultimately, again, was pointless and unnecessary.

3. A detailed description of a kid murdering a baby sibling. No point, nothing to do with the story. Again.

4. The use of the "N" word more in one place than I have ever read or heard in my life combined. Not necessary, nothing to do with the main part of the story.

5. And, the scene which blew me away and pretty much made me feel I had wasted time getting that far in: a gang-bang consisting of nothing but 11 and 12-year-olds. What the F***? And when I say "gang bang" I mean it--six boys banging the girl back-to-back. Only abnormal people do not raise an eyebrow at this scene and try to defend it as being "natural" and "normal." It's neither and most decent people would be bothered by this segment.

So, aside from those main awful things the other annoying elements: the character of Richie. I skipped a lot of his dialogue. I wanted to punch him in the face just for being annoying. And every time he did his "Mexican" voice I just cringed and skipped the next couple lines. Never has a character in a BOOK annoyed me so, so much. I was hoping he would die. Their stupid inside joke of "Beep-beep, Richie." By the twelve thousandth time one of them said this I wanted to just throw the book across the room. Painful to read.

In the end King took a super creepy story and concept which he could have effectively told in probably 500 pages and blew it up to over 1,000 with too much detail in certain parts, too much back story in others and too many subplots which didn't matter. All of which pretty much wiped out any fear or creepiness for me. By the time I got 700 or so pages in I simply was not scared, not creeped out, no longer interested and didn't care how it ended as long as it ended soon.

I am aware that some people will feel that I "just don't get it" with my review and complaints. I am totally fine with that. I am totally fine not "getting it" when it comes to this type of thing. :)

Too bad. Started off as five stars for me and crumbled onto itself into two stars.

own2,374 s18 comments Teodora 404 2,152

5/5 ?

Full review on my Blog: The Dacian She-Wolf
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