It by Stephen King
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
***********Warning: Contains Spoilers**************
I feel like I have accomplished a rite of passage by finishing Stephen King’s It. I did it! It took me over a year to do so, with long breaks in between reading it, but I can honestly say that I have read it from beginning to end. I must apologize for this unusual review, which will contain spoilers. Normally, I refrain from discussing a book and strictly stick to only providing an opinion on it, but I pretty much spent a year of my life reading it, so much happens in it and it is so hugely popular that I just can’t help myself.
I will probably repeat myself a few times throughout this little blurb; this story hasn’t aged that well. Considering the characters I found that the author had his favourites and the rest of them were only there to cover all the bases, so to speak. We have one black boy, who doesn’t get enough pages dedicated to his part of the story and more or less becomes the token kid. There is one female character that appears consistently throughout, who at first gives the impression of being strong and independent, but turns out to be just a pair of boobs there were needed to provide some unnecessary pre-adolescent romance. As a girl, Bev, seems to have no problem losing her virginity in the pitch-black sewer pipes to six boys in an attempt to keep their “connection”. I don’t understand. She loves them all, but Bill she loves differently. So it’s ok that the reader just witnessed child porn on paper…? As an adult Bev has no problem sleeping with a married man, whilst being married herself. I know, her husband was an abusive pig, but I have a thing against infidelity, especially when the narrator makes it sound like it isn’t such a big deal. At the end Bill feels no remorse cheating on his wife, since he plays the part of the loving and caring husband so well while he tries to pull his wife out of her catatonic state. He did this one good thing, so the bad thing he did is canceled out, right?!
I wasn’t quite sure what the importance of the group of 7 kids had to do with defeating It, since at the end Bill took most of centre stage in that one anyway. The reader can see that Bill was not only the kids’ favourite of the group, but also the author’s, since he kept coming back to Bill’s point of view. It drove me a bit crazy, because the author took such care to introduce seven main characters, only to have most of them fade into the background.
The story, the monster and what it represented were scary and it was underlined by the author’s great skill in describing human thought and behaviour uncensored. But I had hoped for a more symbolic meaning to It, instead of the very abstract one the author chose to write.
The writing could be very wordy at times, although I really appreciated the general atmosphere and setting the author was able to create when he wrote about Derry.
Overall, as I said before, this story hasn’t aged very well, but it kept my interest for over a year. I kept coming back to it and wondered how the seven characters were doing and how the story would eventually turn out. I’m preaching to the choir when I say It is a must-read for every Stephen King fan, but I would also recommend it to anyone looking for a story that requires the commitment and dedication of the reader’s time for longer than the average book out there.
