This book is gratefully dedicated to my children. My mother and my wife taught me how to be a man. My children taught me how to be free. NAOMI RACHEL KING, at fourteen; JOSEPH HILLSTROM KING, at twelve; OWEN PHILLIP KING, at seven. Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years -- if it ever did end -- began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
It's a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry the haunting is real....... They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they were grown-up men and women who had gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But none of them could withstand the force that drew them back to Derry to face the nightmare without an end, and the evil without a name.
Library Journal The amazingly prolific King returns to pure horror, pitting good against evil as in The Stand and The Shining. Moving back and forth between 1958 and 1985, the story tells of seven children in a small Maine town who discover the source of a series of horrifying murders. Having conquered the evil force once, they are summoned together 27 years later when the cycle begins again. As usual, the requisite thrills are in abundance, and King's depiction of youngsters is extraordinarily accurate and sympathetic. But there is enough material in this epic for several novels and stories, and the excessive length and numerous interrelated flashbacks eventually become wearying and annoying. Nevertheless, King is a born storyteller, and It will undoubtedly be in high demand among his fans. BOMC main selection. Eric W. Johnson, Univ. of Bridgeport Lib., Ct.
The New York Times Book Review - Walter Wager Where did Stephen King, the most experienced crown prince of darkness, go wrong with It? Almost everywhere. Casting aside discipline, which is as important to a writer as imagination and style, he has piled just about everything he could think of into this book and too much of each thing as well. . . .Determined to keep the shocks appearing every 20 pages or so, Mr. King has conscientiously spiced his story with deadly flying leeches, an awful eye slightly larger than a beer truck, a homicidal bird with the wingspan of a jet fighter and other lethal lollapaloozas created by the enormously powerful mind-bodyof It. The book is not merely a bizarre bestiary, however. This ambitious novel is a tale of the fundamental struggle between good and evil.
The Christian Science Monitor (Eastern edition) - Ron Burnett {This is} an impossibly long account of how a group of children in Derry,Maine, battled, in 1958, the monster ('IT') only to discover that, in 1985, IT had somehow returned. And so it seems must they for another grisly (in every sense of the word) encounter. It is to gruesomeness what the Sears Roebuck catalog is to things to buy. What's available in depravity and perverse sexuality? Flip through the Stephen King catalog and find out. The book has been praised for its local color. King has been praised as a Maine historian. Considering the color (red) and the history (it's gross), I suspect that some Maine locals will wish they had a different historian.
Newsweek Stephen King's apparent desire to be a literary heavy hitter weighs down his already elephantine new novel. . . . The exciting and absorbing parts of It are not the mechanical showdowns and shockeroos--and certainly not the 'ideas'--but the simple scenes in which King evokes childhood in the 1950s. If--fat chance--he ever takes a vow of poverty and tries for true literary sainthood, this intensely imagined world would be a good place to begin his pilgrimage.
