It by Stephen King
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I wanted to say how good this is. It started off amazing even if one scene was way more explicit than I wanted it to be. (Stephen King does not know the meaning of TMI). The narration of childhood and the attempt to grapple with suppressed memories of horror makes for an amazing novel.
And I wanted to mention that I think King bit off more than he could chew in this one. He created an unearthly, magical, super-powerful monster. So he had to come up with a way to explain how eleven-year-olds could fight It. The contrivances of magic and symbolism got to the edge of how much I could suspend my sense of disbelief.
But none of that really matters now. In King’s attempt to create a sense of primal magic, he inserted a scene in which the one female of the seven child friends does something totally wrong with all of them in a row (trying to avoid showing up in the wrong kind of searches here). It isn’t just evil and senseless, it actually makes the paranoid and perverse accusations of one of the villains in the story come true.
And I’ve just lost interest. I’m not reading about these characters anymore because they aren’t understandable persons anymore.
I’m not bothered as much by the fact that King wrote the story this way as that he did so after he had kicked his drug abuse and didn’t re-think the concept in the review process. And neither did anyone who saw the manuscript. And the reviewers all gave high marks to it.
Ugh. I’m done. Over and out.
When I read that you were reading this, I wondered what your reaction to the end would be… glad to see it written like this.
It is almost like King just gave up at then end and threw out a cliche to wrap up a truly terrifying story. I was as disturbed by this girl’s actions as I was to anything else in the sewer.
al sends