Book Review / IT by Stephen King

To the children, the town was their whole world. To the adults, knowing better, Derry, Maine was just their home town: familiar, well-ordered for the most part. A good place to live.

It was the children who saw - and felt - what made Derry so horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, IT lurked, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each one's deepest dread. Sometimes IT reached up, seizing, tearing, killing . . .

The adults, knowing better, knew nothing.

Time passed and the children grew up, moved away. The horror of IT was deep-buried, wrapped in forgetfulness. Until they were called back, once more to confront IT as IT stirred and coiled in the sullen depths of their memories, reaching up again to make their past nightmares a terrible present reality.




Published:     15th September 1986
Publisher:  Hodder & Stoughton
Goodreads :  Click here
Series or Stand-Alone:  Stand-Alone
Source:  Owned
 

MY REVIEW

What I loved about this story...   IT has been a story that I have loved for years but have only followed it by watching the movie.  I cannot tell you the amount of times I have watched it, it must be going into triple digits now.  The one thing I realised that I hadn't done is actually read the book and I know exactly why I haven't.  At 912 pages long, with the font smaller and closer together than usual, I found this book to be very daunting to read; not to mention heavy to hold for long periods of time.  I decided to pick this up as an audio book and I am so happy that I did.   The audio book was narrated by Steven Weber and although I am not an expert in audio books, Steven Weber by far was the best narrator I have ever listened to.

What I love and have loved since the very first time I watched the movie is the main characters, watching them form a bond when they were children and watching them coming back together after nearly 30 years apart but seeming like time has never flown by.  Friendship conquers all, including evil...

What I didn't like about this story...   What I didn't like is probably the very thing that stopped me from wanting to pick up the book to read it in the first place - the length of the book.  This story is incredibly long with masses of description in every scene.  I don't know whether the fact that I watched the movie first has affected by perspective on this but I just felt that a lot of the descriptions were really unnecessary.  If this book was cut down to a 500 page book, losing some of the description, it would still be fantastic, in my opinion.