It
- British Fantasy Award, August Derleth Award for Best Novel — Winner (1987)
- World Fantasy Award, Best Novel — Nominee (1987)
- Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel — Runner-up (1987)
Classic
Coming-of-Age
Epic
Horror
Dark
Long CommitmentThe review
King's novel is widely regarded as one of the towering achievements of his career — a genuinely epic horror novel whose scale is both its greatest strength and its most debated feature. Critics consistently praise the book's sweeping structure, which interweaves two time periods to explore how childhood trauma echoes across a lifetime, and the deep affection with which it renders its band of outsider protagonists. The villain — most memorably embodied in a dancing-clown form — has become one of the most iconic figures in modern horror, and reviewers regularly single out the small-town atmosphere, which makes the setting itself feel like a character. The prose is generous, digressive, and intimate by turns, and most critics agree the sheer accumulation of detail is what gives the horror its power.
The most common criticism is the one the page count invites: at well over a thousand pages, many reviewers find the middle stretches baggy, with detours into local history and interlude material that some readers treasure and others find self-indulgent. Critics have also raised concerns about the handling of female characters, the casual use of slurs and bigotry as shorthand for small-town ugliness, and one notorious sexually explicit scene involving the child protagonists — a passage that remains the book's most contested element and one many readers wish had been cut. The ending divides opinion more quietly: some find its metaphysical resolution a fitting mythic payoff, while others feel the cosmic reveal is less frightening than the grounded small-town evil that precedes it.
Thematically, the book is about memory, friendship, the loss of innocence, and the way adult life asks people to forget what they once knew. The disagreement among reviewers is largely about pacing and proportion — whether the book's sprawl is the point or the price — rather than about whether the central story delivers. On the question that matters most for a horror novel, there is little dispute: the scares land, the characters earn their stakes, and the emotional core is stronger than the genre typically demands.
By the same author
Carrie (1974)- 'Salem's Lot (1975)
- The Shining (1977)
- The Stand (1978)
- The Dead Zone (1979)
- Firestarter (1980)
- Cujo (1981)
- The Gunslinger (1982)
- Different Seasons (1982)
- Pet Sematary (1983)
- Christine (1983)
- Misery (1987)
- Needful Things (1991)
- Gerald's Game (1992)
- The Green Mile (1996)
- Under the Dome (2009)
- 11/22/63 (2011)
- Doctor Sleep (2013)
- The Outsider (2018)
Who it's for
Readers who love horror on a grand scale — long, immersive novels where character development and town mythology get as much attention as the scares. Fans of King's other long works, coming-of-age stories with a dark undercurrent, and readers who enjoy 1950s/1980s Americana will find a great deal to love. It rewards patience and a tolerance for digression.
Who it's not for
Readers wanting a lean, fast-moving horror novel will find this a serious time commitment — it's one of the longest books in the genre. Those sensitive to graphic violence, disturbing content involving children, the infamous explicit scene, or period-accurate bigotry and slurs should know what they're getting into. Readers who prefer grounded horror to metaphysical/cosmic resolutions may also be disappointed by how the mythology resolves. — graphic violence, including against children · child death · disturbing imagery · sexually explicit scene involving minors · racial slurs and bigotry · child abuse · heavy/bleak themes
Birds of a feather...
- FilmIt (2017)
The source novel itself: the same Losers' Club, the same Derry rendered as a character with its own buried history, and the same fusion of coming-of-age friendship with supernatural terror — only with vastly deeper dives into the town's past and each kid's inner life. Readers who connected with the film's themes will find them fully realized here, though the book is far denser, darker, and slower-burning.
98% - FilmIt Chapter Two (2019)
King's source novel is the fullest version of the same story, with the dual-timeline structure that the films adapt split across volumes. It offers far deeper interiority into each character's adult life, the history of Derry as a character in itself, and the same core ideas about trauma, memory, and childhood bonds enduring into adulthood. For anyone moved by the film's emotional dimensions, the novel is the deepest dive available.
94% - Book'Salem's Lot (1975)
Derry functions exactly like the source's town: a place whose haunted history and embedded evil make the location itself the true monster. The deep local-history digressions, large ensemble, and insistence that supernatural horror is inseparable from everyday community cruelties make this King's nearest companion piece.
90% - TVStranger Things (2016)
The most direct spiritual descendant of It outside King's own pages: a band of small-town kids confronting a monster that embodies their community's buried darkness, steeped in 1980s nostalgia and the loss of innocence. The show explicitly channels King's coming-of-age horror as its storytelling framework.
88% - FilmStand by Me (1986)
King's novel shares the same emotional architecture: childhood friendship as a formative, almost sacred bond, a small town with dark undercurrents, and adult memory reaching back to reclaim what was lost. The horror is the vehicle; the boyhood bonds are the engine, much as the journey itself is in Stand by Me.
85% - BookPet Sematary (1983)
King's other great Maine horror epic shares the small town as a haunted character, the threat hanging over childhood innocence, and evil that moves in cycles across generations, though It leans toward friendship and resilience where Pet Sematary stays bleak.
78% - BookDoctor Sleep (2013)
King's grandest statement on childhood trauma resurfacing in adulthood, with psychic bonds linking vulnerable people against cyclical evil — the same dual-timeline meditation on memory, damage, and resilience at epic scale.
78% - BookDifferent Seasons (1982)
The emotional heart of The Body — childhood friendship, memory, and the loss of innocence in a small town — amplified to epic scale; the supernatural frame never fully displaces the grounded, nostalgic bond among the kids.
78% - BookChristine (1983)
Shares Christine's preoccupation with growing up in a specific postwar American moment, where bullies, outcasts, and the loss of innocence carry as much dread as the supernatural. The long, patient narrative and town-as-character texture will feel intimately familiar.
76% - BookThe Shining (1977)
King's other study of a household dynamic curdling into horror, with an abusive home as the true pressure vessel and supernatural power functioning as an extension of repressed rage rather than an external threat. The psychological realism grounding the phenomena is exactly the appeal of the source novel.
74% - BookCarrie (1974)
Bullied outcasts, childhood cruelty, and small-town evil are central, with the supernatural externalizing real social brutality and trauma—strong thematic kinship with Carrie's schoolyard horrors.
74% - BookUnder the Dome (2009)
Derry works like a mythic放大 of the same idea: a small town whose history of rot and complicity is rendered through a huge ensemble cast. Shares the sense that the deepest horror is a community's willingness to look away and turn on itself, with the town itself as a character.
72%