I missed this. "Important" is a difficult one to justify, and I had no idea I would ever be called to account as regards my importance.
The point is that you would not be called to account if you had supported your critique (which I still don't think you have done). All you have said, over and over again, is the book's ending was lame, a let down to me, and/or it wasn't scary to "me." Do you see where I'm going with this? If your only actual critique of the book keys on how "you" feel about it personally, then it behooves you make us understand why we should care.
I suppose I'm not important at all, although my family, friends, work colleagues and various others might disagree to greater or lesser extents.
The family, friends, of and peers of everyone on the planet "might" disagree to greater or lesser extents. I'm not letting you off the hook. You have, once again, managed to state absolutely nothing with the sentence above. It is a rhetorical evasion, nothing more and nothing less.
How do you measure importance?
I measure it in context to either the strength of the arguments (of which yours have none) or by the context of the person giving them. If someone volunteers a critique or advice about my car (and they do not explain the reasons or support for it) I will naturally give more weight to the commentary if the person giving it is an mechanic or car designer. Consider the following example:
"Yo, mack! You should always shift down to neutral early and let the car slow down as you ease on the breaks."
*No reason is given for the unsolicited advice, so I ask why? You are going to put more weight on it if someone tells you the exact mechanical reason, and even more weight if they reveal they are a mechanic or a race card driver of international acclaim. However, if someone just says, "It just feels right to me," you are going to be dubious and even more distrustful when you find out they don't know anything about cars.
If you measure it by what you leave behind, I will leave 2 kids who have grown up into fine adults, assorted fiction (none published), assorted plays (3 performed), assorted paintings and drawings (some of which hang on walls), assorted songs (some of which are tolerable demos). The paintings are amateurish, the writing and songs (though not my performance of the latter) are sometimes quite good. I've done a bit of charitable work here and there - both work-wise (audit/accounts for various local charities on a pro-bono basis) and on stage (fund raisers for local theatre, medical charity etc.) Oh - and, I hope, I will leave happy memories with those who know me. But I haven't affected global economies or committed mass murders or sold out worldwide concert tours or discovered a cure for the common cold so I guess, in the overall scheme of things, I'm forced to admit that I am, indeed, not important at all. Any more than any of us is. But thank you for raising the matter so gracefully.
You appear to have missed the entire point. I wasn't graceful (which your sarcasm correctly implies). I am merely someone who decided to take your critique apart, another nameless, faceless person on the internet. Why did I do it? Good question. Why did you offer your critique? Clearly you felt it mattered. What you appear to be missing or purposefully ignoring is that you began the thread with the same kind of ungraceful commentary. When I asked you for specifics you stated the following:
It is perhaps easier to explain what I mean by saying what it isn't (or what it appeared to me that it wasn't). It never struck me as horrifying. It was malicious, murderous, and generally ill-disposed to us ordinary folks, but I never found it even slightly horrifying (as opposed to the horrific drain-dwelling manifestation as embodied on screen by Tim Curry) perhaps because, as delivered on the page, it was altogether too alien and remote for me to identify with it as a threat. There seemed to be an absence of physicality in the final manifestation, which meant that it wan't visceral.
This is tantamount to repeating "I" didn't find it scary. It wasn't horrifying enough for "me." It didn't live up to "my" standards as set by the actor Tim Curry. The last part was particularly interesting to me because you appear to admit that the written word isn't as real for you as watching a movie. It doesn't seem as visceral to you. That is, at least, how I'm interpreting what you said. If you mean something else altogether, you might want to clarify that. The medium of a story's delivery has never been a problem for me (or most readers) as the camera and projection screen in the mind's eye still remains far better than anything Hollywood can do. That is, at least, true for me. While I enjoyed Tim Curry's performance well-enough, he has absolutely nothing on the Pennywise I see when I read the book. All of that is kind of a tangent, however, as we are led back to the fact that you just didn't like the ending. For some weird reason you tell the rest of us that you don't like the ending and INVITE the critique I gave back to you by asking if we feel the same. Don't ask a question if you don't really want an answer. You also did not answer my question. You never told us how you thought Mr. King should have written the end.