It - Softcover

King, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501142976 ISBN 13: 9781501142970

Publisher: Scribner Book Company, 2016

Synopsis

It: Chapter Two--now a major motion picture!

Stephen King's terrifying, classic #1 New York Times bestseller, "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 twenty-eight 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).

About this title

Review:

Stephen King's idea for It came from a favorite childhood image: the entire cast of the Bugs Bunny Show coming on at the beginning. He thought of bringing on all the monsters, one last time: Dracula, Frankenstein's creature, the Werewolf, the Crawling Eye, Rodan, It Came from Outer Space.

It is about a group of adults who were once troubled children in the late '50s--"The Losers." One of them is a best selling horror writer much like Stephen King (or his friend and collaborator Peter Straub). In order to defeat the protean "It" that threatens their hometown, they have to go back- -not only to the town itself, but deep into their childhood memories, to regain the talent for magic they once had. King says It is for "the buried child in us, but I'm writing for the grown-up, too. I want grown-ups to look at the child long enough to be able to give him up."

This huge, baggy beast of a novel is a favorite of Stephen King fans--second in popularity only to The Stand. Perhaps longtime fans develop mental filters for King's sloppy storytelling to tune out the repetitions and silliness. King is like the pointillist painter Seurat: if you stand too close to the little dots, the picture falls apart, and it looks meaningless. That's why he makes the storyscape so big--to take you up to that macro-level where you like the book in spite of its flaws. --Fiona Webster

Review:

"A landmark in American literature."--Chicago Sun-Times

"It will overwhelm you...Characters so real you feel you are reading about yourself...scenes to be read in a well-lit room only."--Los Angeles Times

"The indisputable King of Horror."--Time Magazine

"A mesmerizing odyssey of terror...King writes like one possessed, never cheats the reader, always gives full measure...He is brilliant...dark and sinister."--The Washington Post Book World

"Vintage King...a magnum opus of terror...just a glance at the first few pages, and you can't put this novel aside."--St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"A great scary book...a nightmare roller-coaster...packed with more chills than a Frigidaire... 'It' turns out to be the monster-dread in us all, the one that refuses to go away."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Epic...gargantuan...breathlessly accelerating suspense... King is our great storyteller...I imagine him as a possessed figure rocking over a smoking word processor, hunting for a beat his sentences can dance to, pounding the shocks and scares like a rock organist laying down the power chords."--Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

"A ghoul's delight...a good old-fashioned chill and shiver fest...as creepy as the finest of that genre."--Kansas City Star

" King's most ambitious project...reads as if written in a white heat!"--San Jose Mercury News

"IT exhibits the potato chip syndrome - quite simply, you can't read just one page and stop...It is in this novel that King comes out of the closet, a closet jammed and crowded with his own monsters."--Houston Chronicle

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1501142976
• ISBN 13: 9781501142970
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1168