Stephen King’s terrifying, classic number one New York Times best seller, “a landmark in American literature” (Chicago Sun-Times) - about seven adults who return to their hometown to confront a nightmare they had first stumbled on as teenagers…an evil without a name: It.

Welcome to Derry, Maine. It’s a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry the haunting is real.

They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they are grown-up men and women who have gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But the promise they made 28 years ago calls them reunite in the same place where, as teenagers, they battled an evil creature that preyed on the city’s children. Now, children are being murdered again, and their repressed memories of that terrifying summer return as they prepare to once again battle the monster lurking in Derry’s sewers.

Readers of Stephen King know that Derry, Maine, is a place with a deep, dark hold on the author. It reappears in many of his books, including Bag of Bones, Hearts in Atlantis, and 11/22/63. But it all starts with It.

“Stephen King’s most mature work.” (St. Petersburg Times)

“It will overwhelm you…to be read in a well-lit room only.” (Los Angeles Times).

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Listening Length	44 hours and 55 minutes
Author	Stephen King
Narrator	Steven Weber
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	January 01, 2016
Publisher	Simon & Schuster Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B019PHYQG2
Best Sellers Rank	#262 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #2 in Supernatural Thrillers (Audible Books & Originals) #4 in Horror Fiction #5 in Coming of Age Fiction (Audible Books & Originals)

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3 star		4%
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1 star		2%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Adam John Zimmerman

Even better the second time...a quarter of a century later.

Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2016

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When I was on a school field trip in the seventh grade, I took Stephen King's "IT" with me to read. The trip was going to be two days in Virginia, and was an example of staying overnight on a school trip. It should have been an adventure. The trip was frankly a waste, but the book was sublime.

I'd gotten into reading Stephen King two years before by way of a trip over the previous summer to my uncle's house. He had a collection of Stephen King novels and I'd started reading them with Pet Sematary, which had been adapted to the big screen two years before. In the intervening time, I'd devoured Salem's Lot, Carrie, Firestarter, and Misery, and The Shining. I found a copy of the 1990 TV movie adaptation and watched it. I recognized just how much I figured it had to have been toned down, but it was a decent primer (or so I thought). I felt warmed up and ready for the brick-like tome I'd acquired. I was wrong.

Reading the book was like a marathon, and I was prepared for a sprint. I easily identified with the younger versions of the characters, but had trouble with identifying with their adult incarnations. I appreciated the story and the implications of both eras, but entirely missed out on how well crafted the story was. In the end it took three weeks, but I completed the book, considered myself proud for conquering the nearly 1200 page tome, put it on the shelf, and...proceeded to put it out of my mind for nearly twenty five years. Almost, and entirely unintentionally, like the characters in the book...

Twenty five years later, I was on a kick of re-reading books I'd read as a kid, and then I approached Stephen King again. In the interim I'd devoured his books and probably thousands of other books by many dozens of different writers of differing skill levels, and when I thought "I should re-read some Stephen King" I thought about it, and it came down to either reading "IT" or "The Stand" and to be honest I felt "IT" was the better book. I remember it being a mountain for an adolescent. I wondered how I'd do this time.

It was SO MUCH better than I ever thought it would be!

I felt ACHINGLY nostalgic in the sections with the characters as kids. Whereas as a kid I identified with those elements as mapping directly onto my friends and setting, I did it unconsciously. Now I was (at times painfully) aware of it. I longed for the good times and friends of my youth. I appreciated how well King encapsulated the distance between childhood and adulthood and all the roads we travel in between. I reveled in how little we remember accurately about the past and how mutable it can be. I realized that IT was in fact two predators...both the eponymous monster who will kill and devour you, and the predator that robs us of our memories and the clarity we remember having as a kid.

The prose is wonderful. King doesn't use mere words to tell stories, he uses meanings themselves, woven seemingly seamlessly into shades of context and pigments of innuendo and occasionally bright, obvious splashes of unobfuscated emotion that jar you because...hey...in real life that's how it works. And in getting that right, King manages to make the impossible elements like the supernatural nature of IT and the relationship IT has with the town of Derry and the inhabitants there...normal. This could have happened. It could be happening. And it's that esoteric dread that King wields masterfully. The implications. The possibilities. Even in the fact that both eras are now, as of 2016, dated (the earlier phase was in the 50's, and the later phase was in the 80's...eerily we would be neck deep in the middle of the next cycle were it coming) was delightful. It was an added layer of nostalgia woven over the rest of the tapestry.

If you haven't read this book, read it now. Enjoy it. If you have read it, by all means read it again. It will thrill and delight and horrify and frighten you all over again.

1,101 people found this helpful

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Dean Butler

Is this child pornography?

Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2018

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Can you go to jail for having this in your Kindle library? A long, multi-page description of a pre-teen girl pulling a train with a "blow by blow" description of how it feels is something that I wouldn't want to get caught with. I'm deleting this book from my library.

78 people found this helpful

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noguri

A novel about shape-shifting, change, memory and forgetting

Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2018

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This book is really gorgeous. This novel gave me more than just pleasure. It gave me hope, made me feel more optimistic about life. Of course the "horror" scenes are truly disgusting and horrible and can inspire nightmares. But the main point of the book is about the special abilities and powers that children have and that adults do not have, and how we need to heal the rift, or close the rift that separates the child (each one of us used to be) from the adult (that we have become). To battle the evil of "It," the adults must recall their childhoods to "staple the present to the past," and rediscover who they used to be. It is about memory and about transformation and what makes each of us a "person" in spite of our constant transformations...for each human who grows to adulthood is a shape-shifter, just as "It" is a shape-shifter, and part of our power comes from this, but also from our twin abilities to remember, and to forget and obliterate what we were... I read this novel after my teenage daughter read it, but as a middle-aged man it meant something special to me. It made me feel better about hitting middle age, it made me feel more whole, and more in touch with who I used to be.

82 people found this helpful

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DerryCitizen2409

We all float down here....and so will you!

Reviewed in the United States on January 25, 2017

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My favorite book of all time. I've read 14 times and who knows how many more times I'll read it again! King creates a world where you feel the eyes of a being of unimaginable horror on you as you follow the lives of a group of childeren who come together to face a creature that has haunted their town and hunted it's children for years upon years. You will not find a better book that creates such a electric tingling atmosphere that you will catch yourself reading way past the hour you said you would put it down at.

140 people found this helpful

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Aud~Mom

Extremely disgusting!

Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2018

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Very sick and twisted. I don't know they were going to have 10 year olds having an orgie. I'm so disgusted! I think Stephen king needs a mental evaluation if he is thinking of these things.

66 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Georgi Lvs Books

You’ll float too!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 6, 2018

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Wow! What a book!

I will admit I was completely taken aback by the SIZE of this... 1376 pages!!! I began this book back in September 2017 and read about 200 pages before I stopped for a while. I kept picking it up and stopping again over the next few months.

But over the last month I have just been constantly reading this and it enthralled me.

This story creeped me the hell out but I loved it.

I’m sad this story is over.

This is my favourite book by Stephen King.

46 people found this helpful

Michael J Richardson

To label this book would be an injustice, to label it horror would be plain wrong.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 15, 2018

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O! M! G!
This book is hard for me to review objectively because IT and I have history. (See what I just did there?). I've read it before you see, twice in fact. The first time, when I was young, closer in age to the kids in the book, I saw things from their perspective, and then, as I got older, I related to the adults more, and now, on my third visit, well, I just feel for them all.
This epic book runs to one thousand one hundred and sixty-six pages and has such depth, not just in the characters, but in the history of the town in which they live, that in spite of its length, it has pace, firing you out from one chapter to the next.
You read the first fifty pages and you're hooked, the next two hundred pass in a blur, of excitement, of reunion, of horror, and then, before you know it, you're half way through, but still, new things are happening. Like the shootout in front of the pharmacy in broad daylight, where half the town came armed and ready to kill. The explosion of 1906 that killed 88 kids on an Easter egg hunt. The great flood that washed half the town away decades before, and of course, the realisation that every twenty-seven years, kids go missing, die, left, right and centre, but with no one seeming to noticing, seeming to care. And why don't they notice, why don't they care?
IT . . . that's why.
IT has a hold over the town of Derry. People turn a blind eye, forget, dismiss, delude themselves that the missing and the dead left town, were trouble makers, fell out with their families, anything but admit the truth, but in the summer of '58', just as they break for summer vacation, seven kids become friends, become The Losers, and one of them, stuttering Bill, who lost his brother in the fall of '57', has a score to settle, a score that may well take him twenty-seven years to fulfil.
To label this book would be an injustice, to label it horror would be plain wrong, because it's a, coming of age, thriller, horror, murder mystery, sci-fi, history book, all rolled into one, and I bet you can’t say that very often, and the other thing, the worst thing about this book, (there always has to be a 'but' it seems), is that once you've raced through the first nine hundred or so pages and the end is nigh, you want it to slow down, because deep down you know, that when you turn that last page, read that last paragraph, you're gonna be left with a massive hole where those Losers where and the biggest book hangover you've ever had.
To give this book a star rating any less than six out of five would be a travesty, but as we're governed by convention I will have to settle for five.
If you haven't yet taken a journey to Derry, never been to the Barrens and met Henry Bowers, been in the thick of an apocalyptic rock fight, smelt the scorched remains of the Black Spot, been chased from 29 Neibolt street by a leper, a werewolf or Pennywise the dancing clown, you’ve never really lived.
Put simply, one of the greatest books I have ever read.

28 people found this helpful

Antony Simpson

Book Review: It by Stephen King (by AntonySimpson.com)

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 7, 2018

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In Derry a dark force has awoken, named It.

Seven children battled It twenty seven years before and almost beat it. This monster wakes every twenty seven years and murder, dismember and feed on children. It has the ability to change its form, to become the things that individual children fear and likes to take the form of Pennywise the clown.

Then following a big event were It reaches its peak of activity, then the monster sleeps. This cycle has been repeating since before records began, but nobody likes to talk about it or write about it. It’s like all the citizens of Derry have willful blindness.

It tells the story of Bill (Big Bill), Eddie, Richie, Bev, Ben, Stan and Mike. Their battle with It as children and their return to Derry as adults to face It again.

As adults will they have the same magic that they had as children to beat It? And this time, will they be able to finish what they started twenty seven years ago?

This book is way too long. It has 1,166 pages and the reader will find themselves counting down the pages. The plot is simple, most of the book is character development, rather than storytelling. Whole sections of this book could be cut without any interfering with the plot and would still have give the reader a good sense of each individual character. The description was overly wordy at times.

There are some iconic horror scenes that will stay with the reader long after they have read the book. These scenes would lend themselves brilliantly to film, which is why it is no surprise that it was recently made into a film.

Overall what made It mildly enjoyable was getting to know the characters. The plot lacked any captivating moments, twists or turns. This story could easily have been told in a standard novel size, rather than this massive book. Inadequate editing and seemingly no harsh cutting let this book down.

It is available to buy on Amazon and at all good book shops.

Review soon,

Antony

16 people found this helpful

Alessi Lover

IT - Stephen King - The Book Saved Others Eardrums From My Screams At Cinema

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 3, 2018

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Love Stephen King films but in the safety of my own home (more the sake for other people’s ear drums than mine when I scream in fear). So seeing his latest film offering in book form had to buy it and give my family the chance to not be deafened by my screams. For me the book gave it an eerie feeling the balloons at the start made my imagination run riot. That and the yellow raincoat. So right from the very first page I was watching and waiting for something to happen and happen it did. No spoilers but if you’ve read any of his works then you know what a good and slightly terrorizing read you are letting yourself in for. I was holding my breath at times waiting for It other times thinking best choice the book and not the cinema as jumped and shouted quite a few times.. yes blamed it on the dog making noises to make me jump. At least reading the book at home I could get away with dog as an excuse. A big thick chunk of a read but so worth it for the chill factor.

17 people found this helpful

ThatBookGal

Phenomenally crafted story.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 28, 2018

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*** This review will contain spoilers ***

My overwhelming thoughts as I exit the world of Derry, Maine, is what an incredibly well crafted story King wrote with It. The characters are so heavily developed, the town itself is described in minute deal, by the end of the 1300+ pages, you feel like you’ve been a resident of Derry for years. There were passages where It dragged, especially the ‘interludes’ that didn’t hugely add to the story, but for the most part, I have huge admiration for this novel.

The seven kids who form the losers, were all loveable and likeable, and you genuinely cared what happened to them. Ben, Bill and Bev were all special favourites of mine, with Eddie and Mike close behind too. Their backstories were all heartwarming and breaking all at once, with each of them having some element that made you want to scoop them up and protect them. Even as grownups, you are left wanting to protect the seven, their lives all taking at least some tragic path. I loved the split of the novel, with the seamless integration between the modern day and the past day, especially towards the end of the novel.

The villains in the story were all superb. Henry especially was just enough crazy that you were left feeling utterly terrified whenever he was near our heroes. His friends ranging from blind follower to bat shit crazy, also added an extra level of terror. Moving in to the adult world, Tom was so easy to hate, and again, was just the right level of crazy, keeping it slightly realistic. Of course the main villain of the story is It, the idea of a shape shifting creature that favours the face of a clown is terrifying enough, but it’s obvious and complete control of everything in Derry just sends shivers down your spine. Every incarnation of It we see is increasingly spookier, with the worst possibly being the hobo under the porch, and the crone in the flat.

Not everything is a positive here, although I stand firmly by the five stars I’ve given it. A particular bug bare of mine is Kings seeming fascination with child rape and sex. There are several points in the story where I cringed at the seriously detailed passages about various sex acts on the kids. And this is not the first King novel that’s left me feeling that way. The ‘orgy’ as my friend aptly refered to it, was the particular low point here, and made absolutely no sense or addition to the novel. I won’t ever understand the need to add that in.

All in all, this was a great read, and if you have a spare week or two, well worth it!

7 people found this helpful

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