It
I really do think Stephen King is a great author is a lot of ways. He sets a scene better than a lot of his contemporaries, so much so you feel it when reading a majority of his work. I have a lot of questions coming out of this, but most of all I’m pretty disappointed but did enjoy parts of it.
Pennywise was the first character to ever give me nightmares; I remember my mother having the television adaptation of the novel on TV one night and seeing It coming out of a drain, stretching it open and taunting his victims stayed with me until this day. I’m currently 28, and I was maybe 5 or 6 years old. I watched the later movie adaptations and enjoyed them, so I really did think the book should be even better. In some ways it was, and in a lot of ways it was not.
Again, the writing was top notch, engrossed in his environments is an understatement, at least for the first 400 or so pages. This book’s length speaks for itself. It begins to slog as some elements start to drag on, mostly with the language for me. I couldn’t get over just how much it felt necessary to have slurs as frequent as he wrote them, I don’t think they added much to the story. It felt forced at times and not relevant. There are times where it is and makes sense, but again those times don’t build anything we don’t already have or understand about Derry as a town.
The story was interesting. The switch between narratives flowed and it was a worthwhile journey for the most part. Until we got towards the end and a lot more elements didn’t get resolved or mentioned. At least the ones I theorized while reading along. Spoilers of course, but one big one was the one it seems like it was written out the Ben was going to have some sort of betrayal/connection to It? During his airplane scene, I got the feeling even after reading the page a few times that something very wrong was happening to Ben. That didn’t seem to come to fruition at all which to me was kind of a let down.
Speaking of, I don’t know why Bill ended up cheating on Audra, and doesn’t leave with Beverly/leave Audra behind? There doesn’t seem to be any reason why they got together, when all along they could have not and nothing would have changed? If anything, given what happens in the end, wouldn’t she have been with Ben? Maybe there’s a super obvious reason for it that I just don’t see, but to me it seemed silly after it was over.
Another complaint I read online was the unimportance of Stan’s death and it adding nothing to the story, which I agreed with given how little I cared about him at all during the story. I felt like King didn’t like him either, giving him such little exposition compared to the other Losers. I think the forgetting doesn’t line up with what was thought of to why they forgot in the first place, that being something so dramatic being naturally forgotten. You would think the triumph of something so tragic would make them feel united enough to remember each other if they loved each other so much, and given It was dead so any magic whatever shouldn’t affect them. But it’s King’s story.
The final scene with why the children are able to “move on” was just a lot. I don’t know why that had to be the case, and again, don’t know what it added to the story. Happening in the last 100 pages was really unfortunate, given had it happened earlier on I might have at least dropped it and saved a month or so of reading.