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. |
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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. |
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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.
|
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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.
Chicago Sun-Times
A great book |
