It

In the town of Derry, Maine, seven childhood outsiders, the stuttering Bill Denbrough, the overweight Ben Hanscom, the asthmatic Eddie Kaspbrak, the joke cracking Richie Tozier, the anxious Stan Uris, the only girl in the group Beverly Marsh, and Mike Hanlon, form what they call the Losers Club after each of them separately encounters a shape shifting entity that appears most often as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, and that killed Bill's younger brother Georgie in the novel's opening pages. Tracking the creature to its lair beneath the town's sewers, the children fight it in a ritual battle of wills that leaves It wounded but alive, and they swear a blood oath to return if the killings ever start again. Nearly thirty years later they do, and the six surviving Losers, now adults scattered across the country, come back to Derry as Mike, the only one who stayed, calls them in one by one; Stan, unable to face it, kills himself rather than return. The reunited group descends into the sewers again, finds It in a form closer to a giant spider than to any clown, and destroys it for good in a battle that costs Eddie his life, after which the surviving friends make their way home separately, their childhood scars fading from their palms and their memories of Derry and each other slipping away almost as soon as they leave the town behind.

King alternates constantly between the 1958 and 1985 timelines, so a single chapter can carry a reader from an adult's terror straight back to the child who first felt it, and the novel, more than a thousand pages long, reads with real momentum despite its length even as it asks patience for extended detours into Derry's own violent history and the particular fears each character carries.