Stephen King - It: A Novel

Table of Contents

Its a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry, the haunting is real....

They were just kids 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 none of them can withstand the force that has drawn them back to Derry to face the nightmare without an end, and the evil without a name.

THE BACHMAN BOOKS
Fascinating.
-Philadelphia Inquirer

CARRIE
Horrifying.
Chicago Tribune

CHRISTINE
Riveting.
Playboy

CUJO
Gut-wrenching.
Newport News Daily Press

THE DARK HALF
Scary.
Kirkus Reviews

THE DARK TOWER: THE GUNSLINGER
Brilliant.
Booklist

THE DARK TOWER II: THE DRAWING OF THE THREE
Superb.
Chicago Herald-Wheaton

THE DARK TOWER III: THE WASTE LANDS
Gripping.
Chicago Sun-Times

THE DEAD ZONE
Frightening.
Cosmopolitan

DIFFERENT SEASONS
Hypnotic.
New York Times Book Review

DOLORES CLAIBORNE
Unforgettable:
San Francisco Chronicle

THE EYES OF THE DRAGON
Masterful.
Cincinnati Post

FIRESTARTER
Terrifying.
Miami Herald

FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT
Chilling.
Milwaukee Journal

GERALDS GAME
Terrific
USA Today

IT
Mesmerizing.
Washington Post Book World

MISERY
Wonderful.
Houston Chronicle

NEEDFUL THINGS
Demonic.
Kirkus Reviews

NIGHT SHIFT
Macabre.
Dallas Times-Herald

PET SEMATARY
Unrelenting.
Pittsburgh Press

SALEMS LOT
Tremendous.
Kirkus Reviews

THE SHINING
Spellbinding.
Pittsburgh Press

SKELETON CREW
Diabolical.
Associated Press

THE STAND
Great.
New York Times Book Review

THINNER
Extraordinary.
Booklist

THE TOMMYKNOCKERS
Marvelous.
Boston Globe

NOVELS

Carrie
Salems Lot
The Shining
The Stand
The Dead Zone
Firestarter
Cujo
THE DARK TOWER I:
The Gunslinger
Christine
Pet Sematary
Cycle of the Werewolf
The Talisman
(with Peter Straub)
It
The Eyes of the Dragon
Misery
The Tommyknockers
THE DARK TOWER II:
The Drawing
of the Three

THE DARK TOWER III:
The Waste Lands
The Dark Half
Needful Things
Geralds Game
Dolores Claiborne
Insomnia
Rose Madder
Desperation
The Green Mile

THE DARK TOWER IV:
Wizard and Glass
Bag of Bones
Hearts in Atlantis
The Girl Who Loved Tom
Gordon
Dreamcatcher
Black House
(with Peter Straub)
From a Buick 8

AS RICHARD BACHMAN
The Long Walk
Roadwork
The Running Man
Thinner
The Regulators

COLLECTIONS
Night Shift
Different Seasons
Skeleton Crew
Four Past Midnight
Nightmares and
Dreamscapes
Everythings Eventual

NONFICTION
Danse Macabre
On Writing

SCREENPLAYS
Creepshow
Cats Eye
Silver Bullet
Maximum Overdrive
Pet Sematary
Golden Years
Sleepwalkers
The Stand
The Shining
Storm of the Century
Rose Red

This book is gratefully dedicated to my children. My mother and my wife taught me how to be a man. My children taught me how to be free.

NAOMI RACHEL KING, at fourteen;
JOSEPH HILLSTROM KING, at twelve;
OWEN PHILIP KING, at seven.

Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.

S. K.

This old town been home long as I remember
This town gonna be here long after Im gone.
East side west side take a close look round her
You been down but youre still in my bones.

The Michael Stanley Band

Old friend, what are you looking for?
After those many years abroad you come
With images you tended
Under foreign skies
Far away from your own land.

George Seferis

Out of the blue and into the black.

Neil Young

They begin!
The perfections are sharpened
The flower spreads its colored petals
wide in the sun
But the tongue of the bee
misses them
They sink back into the loam
crying out
you may call it a cry
that creeps over them, a shiver
as they wilt and disappear....

William Carlos Williams, Paterson

Born down in a dead mans town.

Bruce Springsteen

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight yearsif it ever did endbegan, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

The boat bobbed, listed, righted itself again, dived bravely through treacherous whirlpools, and continued on its way down Witcham Street toward the traffic light which marked the intersection of Witcham and Jackson. The three vertical lenses on all sides of the traffic light were dark this afternoon in the fall of 1957, and the houses were all dark, too. There had been steady rain for a week now, and two days ago the winds had come as well. Most sections of Derry had lost their power then, and it was not back on yet.

A small boy in a yellow slicker and red galoshes ran cheerfully along beside the newspaper boat. The rain had not stopped, but it was finally slackening. It tapped on the yellow hood of the boys slicker, sounding to his ears like rain on a shed roof... a comfortable, almost cozy sound. The boy in the yellow slicker was George Denbrough. He was six. His brother, William, known to most of the kids at Derry Elementary School (and even to the teachers, who would never have used the nickname to his face) as Stuttering Bill, was at home, hacking out the last of a nasty case of influenza. In that autumn of 1957, eight months before the real horrors began and twenty-eight years before the final showdown, Stuttering Bill was ten years old.

Bill had made the boat beside which George now ran. He had made it sitting up in bed, his back propped against a pile of pillows, while their mother played Fr Elise on the piano in the parlor and rain swept restlessly against his bedroom window.

About three-quarters of the way down the block as one headed toward the intersection and the dead traffic light, Witcham Street was blocked to motor traffic by smudgepots and four orange sawhorses. Stencilled across each of the horses was DERRY DEPT. OF PUBLIC WORKS. Beyond them, the rain had spilled out of gutters clogged with branches and rocks and big sticky piles of autumn leaves. The water had first pried fingerholds in the paving and then snatched whole greedy handfulsall of this by the third day of the rains. By noon of the fourth day, big chunks of the streets surface were boating through the intersection of Jackson and Witcham like miniature white-water rafts. By that time, many people in Derry had begun to make nervous jokes about arks. The Public Works Department had managed to keep Jackson Street open, but Witcham was impassable from the sawhorses all the way to the center of town.