It — The Evil Lurking Beneath Derry
From classic monster terror to an epic odyssey about childhood, friendship, and memory: my experience with King's massive tome.
I've never been someone who enjoyed horror movies or TV shows. To me, they always felt way too predictable and repetitive. Even when some stepped away from the cheap jumpscare playbook, their attempts at actual fear usually fell flat. I was always much more drawn to suspense than to media trying to force a scare down your throat.
When I picked up reading again after a long break, I stumbled upon a Brazilian YouTube channel called Navegando, whose host was Stephen King's number-one fan. That sparked my curiosity, and for some reason a thought stuck with me: "If horror movies and TV shows don't do it for me, would a literary work feel the same?".
It might sound a bit weird, but when I get immersed in a world, I go all in. I started noticing that it's way easier for me to dive deep into a book or video game universe than into a movie or TV show.
I was on an insane reading tear back in late 2021, and because I wanted a real challenge, I decided to grab the channel's top recommended book to see if "it was actually all that". Plus, I wanted to test whether I could handle an 1,100-page brick of a book.
When I picked up that massive tome, my expectation was a standard horror story about an evil clown haunting storm drains. But King delivered something on a completely different scale. Reading It, the feeling was that of embarking on a genuine epic odyssey. Yes, there's terror, suspense, and grotesque scenes, but at its heart it's a visceral, emotional tale about childhood, friendship, trauma, and the crushing weight of time.
It was the book that kicked open the doors to King's universe for me. The way he blends cosmic fantasy with raw, everyday human drama is unreal. Once you finish, you realize the clown is just the tip of the iceberg of something infinitely deeper.
Derry: Where Evil Takes Root
The first thing that hits you is that the town of Derry, Maine, isn't just a backdrop. It practically functions as a living — and rotting — character. The creature isn't just hiding out in the sewer; it has infected the water, the soil, and the minds of the townspeople across centuries.
The opening scene with little Georgie Denbrough chasing his paper boat through the pouring rain sets the tone immediately. He's lured into the storm drain by Pennywise and brutally has his arm torn off. But what shocks you most isn't just the monster's violence; it's the atmosphere that settles in afterward: the town's bizarre, chilling indifference.
Derry has a grim history of catastrophic tragedies every 27 years — like the Black Spot fire, the Bradley Gang shootout, or the ironworks explosion —, and the population has simply learned to look away. Adults pretend not to see, turning their heads while children vanish or get beaten in broad daylight on the street.
That adult indifference is easily one of the scariest parts of the book. It's that classic human horror: a supernatural monster is scary, but the moral apathy of ordinary people who actively choose not to intervene is far more unsettling.
The Losers' Club
Right in the center of all this chaos sit seven outcast kids brought together by pure chance — or by some higher cosmic force. The "Losers' Club" brings together:
- Bill Denbrough ("Stuttering Bill"): The reluctant leader, consumed by grief and guilt over losing his little brother, Georgie.
- Ben Hanscom: The chubby, shy kid with an innate gift for architecture and structural engineering.
- Beverly Marsh: The only girl in the group, dealing daily with crushing poverty and severe physical and emotional abuse from her father.
- Richie Tozier: The tireless class clown using compulsive humor and his repertoire of "Voices" as a defense shield to mask terror.
- Eddie Kaspbrak: A frail, asthmatic hypochondriac smothered by the suffocating paranoia of a Munchausen-by-proxy mother.
- Stan Uris: The pragmatic, methodical Jewish boy who needs the world to make orderly, logical sense.
- Mike Hanlon: The last to join, a Black boy carrying the town’s violent racism and the heavy legacy of his father’s memories.
King’s most brilliant stroke here is that before Pennywise even shows up, every single one of these kids was already living through their own personal hell at home and on the street. They get beaten by parents, neglected, and hunted daily by psychopathic bully Henry Bowers and his gang.
Their bond doesn’t just stem from shared dread; it comes from a visceral need for someone to trust. When they huddle together in the Barrens wasteland, their friendship casts a sort of magical shield that the entity struggles to crack.
Two Timelines and the Cost of Memory
The novel constantly weaves two distinct eras: the summer of 1958, when they're 11-year-olds facing evil for the first time, and 1985, when they're in their 40s and called upon to honor the blood oath they swore as kids.
It all restarts with a single phone call. Mike Hanlon was the only one who stayed behind in Derry, working as the town librarian and documenting its dark history. When children begin vanishing again 27 years later, he dials each of his old friends with three words: "It's back".
Their reactions to that call reveal just how fragile human memory is when trying to seal off unbearable trauma:
- All six who left Derry completely forgot their childhood, the bond they shared, and the creature’s existence. They found career success, yet carry an inexplicable, empty void inside.
- Hearing Mike's voice triggers those memories so violently that some collapse immediately — like Stan Uris, who cannot bear facing that disorder and horror again, slitting his wrists in the bathtub and scrawling "IT" in his own blood on the tile.
This psychological angle on forgetting is pure gold. King portrays childhood as an almost magical phase where pure faith and imagination grant the strength to face down monsters, while adulthood is defined by cynicism, deadened senses, and emotional numbness.
The Entity
The monster takes the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown because it's the ultimate lure for children, but its true nature is ancient and abstract. The entity is a primordial cosmic predator that fell from the void before Earth even existed, feeding on human fear — to it, terror acts like a seasoning that makes meat taste sweeter.
Each child perceives the creature projected as their worst individual nightmare: a mummy, a werewolf, leprosy, or blood gushing from the bathroom sink drain.
Yet the story stretches way beyond monster-movie tropes when King injects his cosmic lore. We discover Maturin, the ancient Macroverse Turtle that vomited out our universe, and the blinding terror of the Deadlights — the entity’s maddening, true form.
To bring down a creature of that magnitude, physical brawn is useless. They must enact the Ritual of Chüd, a battle of pure mental and spiritual will fueled by blind faith and their emotional bond.
Honestly, the grounded, human half of the book is far more compelling. While I enjoy fantasy, the contrast in quality here is so stark that the high-cosmic mythology loses punch for me. The clown as a shape-shifting embodiment of fear is brilliant; the multi-dimensional turtle vomiting galaxies felt like a bridge too far and took me out of it a bit.
The Final Descent and the Void of Forgetting
Heading down into the sewers, both in childhood and as adults, is claustrophobic to the extreme. It’s that slow, meticulous King prose where you can practically smell damp mildew, stagnant runoff, and sewage as the walls close in.
That slow, detailed buildup is probably my favorite trait of King’s writing. Reading The Fellowship of the Ring taught me the difference between an author being long-winded versus deeply detailed — Tolkien's sprawling detours unfortunately didn't hook me the same way King's atmospheric tension does.
The climax demands a devastating toll. Beyond losing Stan early on, Eddie Kaspbrak has his arm severed by the creature while saving Richie's life, bleeding out in the dark tunnels. Eddie’s death shatters the group, but it also sparks the raw fury they need to crush the entity's beating heart and bring Derry crashing down in an apocalyptic flood.
The conclusion is hauntingly bittersweet. With the entity slain, Derry's grip loosens, and their memories immediately begin slipping away again.
They say their goodbyes knowing that within weeks, they won't even remember each other’s names, nor what they lived through that fateful summer. Bill scribbles down his final fading thoughts before everything vanishes forever, taking one last ride on his old bicycle Silver to catch, for a fleeting second, the breeze of a childhood that will never return.
It’s a masterpiece that transcends standard horror. A book about how growing up hurts, about the cruelty of forgetting, and how certain bonds save your life even after you lose their memory. In a dead heat with Full Dark, No Stars for my favorite King book, it’s an absolute recommendation: an easy 5 out of 5.