It

Image credit: Angus & Robertson

In this modern world where there is no time, and endless streams of distractions, and a need to get everything finished sooner rather than later, it’s rare that we commit to reading a book over 700 pages let alone over 1000! One looks at a tome of that length and either flinches, groans, or flees never even allowing themselves to chance the thought that it may be worth it. Of course, we’ll do it for a handful of writers. Our favourites, most celebrated, and those that have a talent for making the pages fly past so speedily that they blend. Stephen King is definitely one of those writers and it’s with great satisfaction that I say that I have just finished reading the massive tome that is It. 

Chronicling two stories happening with a gap of nearly three decades between them, It tells the story of a town plagued by an unearthly monster that resurfaces every twenty-seven years to feed on the town’s children and fear. During Its feeding in the 1950s, a group of kids somehow found the power to stand up to it, vowing to rid the town of It once and for all. They failed, but their promise was not forgotten and twenty-seven years later they all come back to their hometown of Derry to fulfil that childhood pledge. 

Aside from being a book of immense volume, It proves to be a very complex novel. The book’s bulk comes from it being a rich and wholly full story: the story of entire town, its people, and its history. It’s told in a non-linear way from multiple perspectives travelling back and forth in time. The chapters are many, but -thanks to diary-esque dates and headings- they are easy to navigate and King’s refusal to close a chapter or subchapter through punctuation gives the story this calm and seamless flow that eases you into a new time frame as oppose to jaggedly picking you up and dropping you off. As segmented as it is, it’s actually quite incredible that it reads as smoothly as it does. 

In terms of horror, everything you could want is here from classic movie monsters to the Uncanny, the killer clown, abjection, the taboo of abducted children, the gear change into adolescence, the mindset of wife-beaters and other psychos, and of course raw sewage. 
The monster is probably one of the most interesting in literature because it has no real shape, at least none that the human mind can fathom and amazingly, King manages to write it that way: giving it a shape that we’ve never seen but one that our mind can sort of picture. Its one thing to describe something strange, but quite another to impart that sense of strangeness to the reader, which is what King does. 

Image credit: Stephen King Wiki

Then alongside the horror story we have this rather adult coming-of-age tale about kids. It is the book that fuses together the two things that King does well: horror and bildungsroman. The story of these seven pre-pubescent friends trying to find their way in the world between childhood and adulthood is both gorgeous and horrifying, and something that we can all relate to, which immediately invests us further in the book. Indeed some of the non-supernatural parts are worse than the clown with razor teeth, or the decaying leper, or the giant oozing eyeball because there’s a realism to it that almost threatens the voyeuristic escape and brings us back to earth with a thud. 

Any fan of horror and King must have It under their belt and for those that are new to the genre, it my be intimidating but it’s not the worst book to start with as there is so much time chronicled in it that it balances the horrific episodes really well.

Author: Stephen King

Published: 1986, Hodder and Stoughton