It
Stephen King, 1986
A Maine town, a childhood summer, and the shape-shifting thing that hunts its children — a horror novel about memory as much as monsters. A slow-burning Maine childhood summer thick with friendship and nostalgia, shadowed by a plain, relentless dread.
Feels like dread, nostalgia and tenderness. About friendship, memory and death.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy horror that lingers on memory, small-town friendships and the unease of childhood. The novel is long and its dread is steady, so it can feel heavy if you want a quicker, lighter read.
Why read it
Read it for how King ties a monster hunt to the way memory distorts and preserves childhood, giving you a horror story that stays human.
A page from the book
The crack that opens in your thinking when you glimpse something impossible.
It’s offense you maybe can’t live with because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are evil things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don’t blink, and there’s a stink down there in that dark and after a while you think maybe there’s a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that I’d scream and scream and scream. Stephen King.King has said the idea came to him while walking past a storm drain in Bangor, Maine, and imagining a clown looking up at him from the dark.
Books that feel like this
More by Stephen King
The Stand
Stephen King, 1978
A flu escapes a lab and empties America; survivors choose between a saintly old woman and a smiling dark man. King's big, bleak, compulsive plague epic.
Pet Sematary
Stephen King, 1983
A doctor moves his family to a Maine town where the local pet cemetery sits beside something older, and grief becomes a door that should stay shut.
Misery
Stephen King, 1987
A novelist wakes from a crash in a stranger's house, nursed by his number-one fan — who has read his new book and wants him to take it back.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is It for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy horror that lingers on memory, small-town friendships and the unease of childhood. The novel is long and its dread is steady, so it can feel heavy if you want a quicker, lighter read.
- What is It like?
- A slow-burning Maine childhood summer thick with friendship and nostalgia, shadowed by a plain, relentless dread. Feels like dread, nostalgia and tenderness. About friendship, memory and death.
- What should I read after It?
- If you liked It, try The Hunting Party (Lucy Foley), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J. K. Rowling) and Sunrise on the Reaping (Suzanne Collins).
A taste of the feed
How little pressure it takes to find out what someone really is.
Some people, given just the right amount of pressure, taken out of their usual, comfortable environments, don’t need much encouragement at all to become monsters. And sometimes you just get a strong sense about people, and you can’t explain it; you simply know it, in some deeper part of yourself.
The Hunting Party · Lucy Foley
What a friend paints on her ceiling when she misses you.
Luna had decorated her bedroom ceiling with five beautifully painted faces: Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and Neville. They were not moving as the portraits at Hogwarts moved, but there was a certain magic about them all the same; Harry thought they breathed. What appeared to be fine golden chains wove around the pictures, linking them together, but after examining them for a minute or so, Harry realized that the chains were actually one word, repeated a thousand times in golden ink: friends...friends...friends...friends... Harry felt a great rush of affection for Luna.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows · J. K. Rowling
What survives of a people after the roads between them are closed
Her people were great travelers once, going from district to district to perform their music. Tam Amber remembers it, as he was about my age when the war ended and the Peacekeepers rounded up the Covey, killing all the adults and confining the kids to our district.
Sunrise on the Reaping · Suzanne Collins
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