However, Derry is only haunted for children, by ‘It’, which appears in many different forms depending on your fears. Obviously no book is perfect, but this is an epic horror novel worth reading/listening to! The story For those who don’t know, It by Stephen King follows the lives of Bill Denbrough, Ben Hanscom, Richie Tozier, Beverly Marsh, Eddie Kaspbrak, Mike Hanlon, and Stanley Uris as adults and children growing up in the haunted town of Derry. The story is just brilliant, with excellent setting, plotting and characterisation. Would I recommend listening to this as an audiobook rather than reading it? YES! With incredible narration and long chapters, this is the perfect listen for a long plane journey, while you’re inputting data at work, or to accompany you when you’re doing mundane every day tasks by yourself. I have just finished listening to the entire 44 hour, 53 minute long audiobook of It by Stephen King and loved nearly every second. In a way that parallel to the story made me feel in some small way a part of It. This is a long journey and a dark path to tread but I am so glad I walked it again thirty years on. In all though, regardless of those things this is one of the absolute horror classics and the way that King ends it for this group of grown-up children is incredibly poignant. Coupling that with the lack of editorial censure King was subjected to and I do suspect some might not find it as entertaining as I have. Clowns weren’t exactly new in horror when King wrote the book in 1986 but in the intervening years we’ve had a lot of horror clowns and they have become a quite hackneyed aspect of horror. Listening to King’s other classics like The Stand and The Dead Zone, stories I am re-visiting decades later, I have been delighted by how vibrant and fresh they’ve felt after all this time. The only question in my mind is for anyone coming to this fresh. By the end of the book you will feel like a regular Derry old-timer able to recount tails of its history to any young ‘uns that might happen along. The adults have equally compelling tales, as does the town of Derry itself. As you read through the book what’s impressive is that King holds the attention both to the coming of age tale of the children including their experience of bullying, parental situations and the like as he does with the outright horror of It.
The combination of writer and narrator is stunningly powerful at times and the tension ratchets up to extreme levels during the most important encounters. Where he scores highly is the way he almost literally throws himself into the emotion of each of King’s carefully realised situations. I was somehow expecting creepy but Steven Weber is bright and breezy, particularly well-suited to the childhood parts and moves things along at a refreshing pace.
AUDIO BOOK IT DRIVER
He doesn’t seem to believe in extras either with even bit part characters like bar men and a taxi driver who only appear fleetingly being given detail and personality of their own. King imbues each of his characters with real depth and personality. Each of them suffers a form of abuse and of course with it being King are not spared from more supernatural horrors. The book follows the stories of a group of children and how they find each other through the debris of their dysfunctional childhoods and then into their adult lives using a non-linear dual timeline to cover both. King didn’t throw everything but the kitchen sink at it he threw that first and then started ripping up the floor tiles and threw them and everything else besides at it too. More to the point I doubt such a book as this would survive a modern editor’s attentions intact. It really is something special and one of my personal all-time favourite books though I wonder how people coming fresh to it now might see it. It, the simplest of titles for probably one of the deepest and multi-layered horror books in existence. It, the shortest of titles for probably one of the longest books most of us will ever read in this genre.
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