It - by Stephen King
I was pretty sure that I had this summary in mind for the latter half of the book, and I was even coming up with how I was going to phrase certain things. Then the plot took an unexpected left during the last 200-odd pages, and it leaves me a considerable bit more jumbled than I would have thought.
Also, I have a strange desire to be cagey with the spoilers, which is odd since I'm talking about a book that was published twenty-five years ago.
First I have to get most of the negative stuff out of the way:
-It starts with a gay-bashing. Now, I understand that it's a little more complicated than just having the author reveling in the gore of the scene, and further that it was inspired by an actual gay-bashing in King's native Bangor, but I am more than a little perturbed that in most of King's early works, any reference to homosexuality is negative and/or violent.
-The racial slurs. I understand that when such slurs are uttered, they are being uttered by racist characters and not by the author, and furthermore that part of their purpose is to make the reader uncomfortable. But I think there's a very fine line (call it the Tarantino Line) between using the slurs for verisimilitude and using them just for the sake of using them, and I feel that in places King toes the line, if he doesn't actually cross it.
Those out of the way.
I have to say, for about three quarters of the story, I was loving every second of it. I was even thinking it might eclipse The Stand as my favorite of his books. Then the story made a completely unexpected, and frankly completely unnecessary left turn into psychosexual weirdness, buttonhooking around Lovecraft. I understand that Evil has to come from somewhere, but the problem is that Evil is so much more scary and delicious when you don't know where it comes from. After spending so much time firmly grounded in the real world (to borrow from an Entertainment Weekly review of Hearts in Atlantis, King is at his best when describing the "soggy bowls of cereal" side of life), the climax goes a bit too far in the other direction. Also, I think the denouement was a bit of a cheat.
But to the lovely 3/4ths of the book, the phrase that kept coming up over and over in my mind was "To Kill A Mockingbird plus horror." I think I appreciated certain things that I might not have caught if I'd read this prior to Insomnia; if the latter novel is good at finding and exploring the hidden places known only to the old, then It revels in the places known only to the young. There is much to be said for reading certain things out of order. The atmosphere, especially in Derry of 1958, is so rich and think you could cut it with a knife. The stuff set in the then-present-day Derry of 1985 is a little thinner, but maybe because we don't seem to spend nearly as much time there.
So, would I recommend it? Not for young eyes, to be sure. The book is rich in details, but ultimately could quite easily have lost a good 300-400 pages and been a tighter story with fewer hiccups like that aforementioned sharp left.
It's a read, but tread cautiously.
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