REVIEW: It (book) by Stephen King

It is horror originally published in 1986. I bought my copy new.

This review includes spoilers.

Review:

In 1985, six people receive a phone call from a childhood friend named Mike, asking them to come back to their hometown of Derry, Maine so that they can fulfill a promise they made. Until the moment of the phone call, none of them remembered either Mike or the promise they made, but most of them are able to overcome the shock of their gradually returning memories and make their way to Derry.

The seven members of the Losers Club first meet back in 1958, bound by their status as misfits and frequent targets of a bully named Henry Bowers. Bill, the leader of the group, has a bad stutter. His friend, Eddie, suffers from asthma and an overprotective mother. Ben is lonely and overweight, with a huge secret crush on Beverly. Beverly has an abusive father. Richie has a bad habit of letting his mouth run away with him. Stan is Jewish. The group is rounded out by Mike, who is Black.

One other thing binds the group together: they've all had terrifying unexplained experiences tied to some sort of malevolent being in Derry they call "It." It killed Bill's younger brother, George, as well as many other children in Derry, and there is evidence that It has been affecting Derry for a long time.

Somehow, in a way that none of the adult Losers Club members can quite remember until the time is right, they fought It. Unfortunately, they didn't quite manage to kill It. Now they need to make yet another attempt to defeat It, for good this time.

I really enjoyed the first half of this. The characters were great, and I enjoyed seeing how the Losers Club was gradually formed. The connections between their child and adult selves were fascinating and occasionally heartbreaking - both Eddie and Beverly, for example, essentially married people who were like their parents and locked themselves inside the same cycles that held them when they were children.

My patience started to waver during the second half. Every time I thought King was just about done with revealing what had happened in the past and finally ready to focus on the battle to come in 1985, some new scene came up. Occasionally there were brief interludes in which violent moments from Derry history were revealed. It wasn't necessarily uninteresting, but I was increasingly ready for the story to finally wrap up.

Then came that scene. This was my first time reading this book, and I've never even seen the adaptations (although, not unsurprisingly, apparently that scene didn't make it into any of those). I can sort of guess what King was going for, but it absolutely was not worth the inclusion of an orgy scene in which an 11-year-old girl encouraged each of her six male friends to have sex with her in order to strengthen their bond. The scene had no real impact on the story and could easily have been left out without affecting a single thing. It boggles my mind that King included it and that his editor let him do it.

Ok, trying to move on from that... Aspects of the ending were made even more tragic by whatever it was that affected the memories of the members of the Losers Club. In the first half of the book, I grew attached to the kids and worried which ones might die in the final battle in 1985. In reality, the real tragedy was in the forgetting - these people cared for each other enough that they were willing to face their worst fears and possibly die for each other, but not a single one of them would even be able to remember the last names, faces, or identifying characteristics of any of them even a few months later.

I wish the flow of the second half had been better. I wish that Stephen King hadn't decided that sex was the only and best way for a bunch of kids to strengthen their bond. So much of this book was really good, and yet here I am, with my skin still crawling for all the wrong reasons.