Thanks Echo Looper for putting into words some of the feelings and barely-grasped notions I've had about this book for decades.
I first read "IT" when (I think) I was fifteen - the year it was published - or near-as-dammit. I'd already cut my teeth on Mr. King's earlier work and had been completely absorbed by his storytelling and ability to scare me. I don't recall having any strong feelings - good or bad - about clowns prior to picking the Book Club edition of this up (I suspect my older Brother chose it for me from his SF & Horror Book Club membership package). I want to say that I spent a long, hot Summer school holiday reading it but unless it was published in the UK at a different time to the US - September 1986 - then that couldn't be the case as I would already have gone back to school after the summer. Maybe I'm remembering having read it during the summer break because that's when the 1958 portion of the story is set? Memory is a funny thing, as a lot of the book says...
What I'm certain I do remember accurately is how closely I identified with the protagonists in the Losers Club, and with Ben Hanscom in particular. I wasn't especially overweight, and certainly by the time I came to read the story I would have been getting into my teenage-beanpole phase, but there was something about the way Ben was portrayed that made me know he would have been my best friend had I ever met him. I identified with all the members of the Losers Club in one way or the other, and reading about them just going about their lives outside of the main thrust of the story of Pennywise and Derry were some of the most delightful aspects of the story for me - then and now. Recalling the building of the dam, or running from the bullies in the theatre, or any one of a thousand little insight into their lives in 1958 seemed more real to me than many of my own childhood memories. Even some of Richie's jokes managed to make me laugh! Not having a huge social circle of my own as a child, it definitely appealed to me the idea of a group of similar kids getting together almost because no one else would have them on their team. I fell in love with those kids, just as they fell in love with each other, and I never wanted that book (Summer) to end.
But end it did, and I remember vividly how utterly bereft and hollowed-out I felt at having to leave them, and Derry, behind. It was not - and is not - a book I read and then moved onto the next. I lived that story, as I still do when I come to revisit with my old friends from time to time. It remains the absolute favourite thing I have ever read, despite what with my more experienced adult readers eye I can see as flaws, just as It's a Wonderful Life remains my absolute favourite film. They don't matter - in no way do they detract from the story, from the feelings I continue to have about it, or the way in which I suspect (know) that no other story will ever touch me in the same way.
Even the scene which, with the jaded media-saturated eyes of the 21st Century everyone seems to have issues, I read and accepted as nothing more or less than the absolute truth of what needed to happen at that stage of the tale. I was not shocked, or horrified, or appalled that a grown man could conceive of such a thing. I simply understood that it was precisely what had to be done at that time, in that situation, for those children to find their way back into the light. And I wanted - needed - them all to escape that place, so they could get back to being kids again. The tragedy of it was, of course, that having experienced everything they had, their childhoods were already ending.
I so desperately wanted to know how things had turned out for them after the story ended (as children and as adults). It felt like a summer romance with someone who had then emigrated and not given a forwarding address. I ached to spend time with my friends again, but the only way I could would be to read the same story over again, which continues to leave me feeling just as empty and abandoned and comfortless each time I revisit with my old friends. The scene in 11/22/63 when my wishes came (partially) true literally had me sobbing. 27 years after I'd last spent time with my childhood friends, here were some of them again - ageless and just as I had remembered them.
Each time I read the book and inexorably approach the closing (magnificently beautiful) passages I feel a sense of dread stealing over me - much worse than any fear I experience during "the scary parts", because I know it is coming to an end, again. Like saying the final goodbye to my summer romance, never to be repeated, only remembered.
I know I had my own mental images of what each of the characters looked like when I read the book the first time around. Just like I had my own notion how the locations appeared - many of them spookily resembling many of my own childhood haunts and playgrounds. But then the film version came along, and now I can't remember the faces of my true childhood friends, I only see the actors who portrayed them. And although they are close, I know they aren't as they truly should be. With all respect to the actors, Beverley is nowhere near as beautiful as she was in my minds eye, Richie is nowhere near as nerdy and Ben is neither fat enough or heartbreakingly-sweet and lonely enough. Derry now looks remarkably like Bangor rather than my own corner of the world, but I can live with that - the standpipe or the Paul Bunyan statue never really suited these Welsh Valleys.
I know damn well IT is not a perfect book. Many complain that it is too long, but as far as I'm concerned it's not long enough. I wish there were more scenes that I could lose myself in. I wish some of the loose-ends were tied up in a neat (and therefore completely unrealistic) little package. I hate that Myra Kaspbrak would never know what became of Eddie, or that Patti Uris would never find out what drove her husband to suicide. Just as much as I hate not finding out how things worked out for Ben and Bev.
But all tales have to end somewhere, even if the story goes on.
This is just my own inadequate attempt at putting into words what I have felt but never articulated about this book for nearly thirty years. It continues to hold a magnetic fascination over me, like a photograph album of someone else's childhood which I have mis-remembered as my own. But real or imagined those kids were my best friends, albeit for a bitterly-sweet short space of time.
I'd love to hear what everyone else has felt reading this story. I'm also very eager to find as much contemporary material about its' writing and publication as possible. Being pre-Internet the only reviews I can find were written many years later, but equally I'd love to know more about the creation of the story, the time it took to write (four years?!? Seriously?!?), so if anyone has any links to stuff please feel free to forward them on.