It

Actual rating 3.5

Okay so I've digested this book enough that I can talk about it now.

I'm going to separate my review into two parts the first half and the second half of the book because it feels almost like two different books.

The first half of the book is the story many of us are familiar with. Seven fifth graders, or summer, and one terrible monster. The first half scared me so bad I would go outside at night by myself or walk past storm drains or hang out too close to any sinks for very long I was afraid I might hear IT.

It of course is a shapeshifter of sorts and comes to the kids all as different things and each iteration is a terrifying and fucked up rendition of a nightmare plus a clown. What makes these things so scary is when you remember that all the protagonists are children and how vividly children see things especially things that scare them, your bones will chill.

That being said, this book is bulky. It tops the list of longest book I've ever read. And it really doesn't need to be that long. Like really doesn't. You could cut the pages from 1400 to 700-800 and it would actually be better. There is a lot of repeating of thoughts and scenes and even more rambling like King didn't know where he wanted to go but he had a word count to meet so he just wrote a bunch of nonsense.

One of the other issues I have with the book is the character development. There are 7 protags and 1400 pages and at the end of it I feel like their still fairly generic, especially Beverly. Like there really didn't need to be a girl in the book if she was just going to be an abused love interest. She has so much potential to so much more she's spunky and playful and smart and I wanted more out of her but in the end her role is that of a convenience.
But more or less I enjoyed the first half of the book, it was scary and funny and all around fun.

It's the second half that got me. Plot holes and lack of climax and lack of resolve and just in general not enough.
Our protagonists are now adults and have returned to Derry to defeat It a final time. The first few chapters into this part of the book are some of the more horrifying in the whole story. But after and the further the story progresses the more jumbled and incoherent it becomes, at first you feel like you're in a rapid free fall towards an insane conclusion, and at first you're like “yeah okay cool this is getting crazy let's do this shit” but then it plateaus again and gets boring, but then picks up and is not longer scary because it's so insane and nothing makes sense. The climax of the story makes literally no sense. The author threw in bits and pieces from earlier in the book into the conclusion and none of it worked. It felt a lot like climbing Mount Everest but before you reach the summit you decide to BASE jump about 5,000 lower or to put it another way it's a long running joke with no punch line. King had too many things going at once and none of them got wrapped up properly so it's just chaos and leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth and overall disappointed.

I wanted so badly to love this book and some of it I did truly enjoy, but I would have enjoyed it more had it been shorter, with deeper characters, and a well thought out conclusion.