I also joined just now specifically to comment on this.
I read IT on an international flight from Taipei to Tokyo to Houston - all 1,000+ pages. It was in perhaps my 13th hour of sitting in the Houston airport waiting on a standby that I reached the Beverly gang bang. Now look, I am no prig...lol...but I was like, WTF. It seemed to come out of nowhere, it made NO sense at all, and I still consider it a weird mistake and a flaw in the book. In general IT stands in need of some serious blue penciling; it's flabby and ponderous and would benefit by being shot of at least half of its bulk. King is an exuberant writer but something happened to his ability to self-edit, apparently.
But the gang bang...I mean, forget the fact that they were all 11 years old. They needed to "come together," so it dawned on Beverly that the best way to do that would be in the literal physical way, with them all taking turns screwing her right there in the sewer like she's Sasha Grey? And imagine being the last guy...
I'm not going to accuse people who have no problem with this scene of being into "child porn" or whatever, and nobody needs to defend it on grounds that "kids have sexual thoughts"...ugh. It just makes no sense in terms of the internal logic of the story, if you ask me. Sex creates a bond between the people having sex, but that would just mean they'd all bonded individually with Beverly, not with each other (except in the sense that, forgive me, it had to start getting pretty sloppy towards the end). And if anything that would tend to lead to jealousy and infighting. No, I just do not see how it "works" to make Beverly this apropos-of-nothing 11-year-old sexual initiatrix in the sewer, as a means of reestablishing group unity and getting them all unlost - it's a weird narrative choice that doesn't justify itself, period.
While i agree that some incidents should be removed or edited i still think that despite its size this is one of the books that deserves to be so big. For example when i first read this book i hated the interludes. I didnt saw a point there. Now i actually love them. King gives a historical background that makes the story far more epic. I loved the scenes in the end when the city was destroyed. Usually people say that this book is two stories(the story of the kids and the story of the adults). In fact its three(the story of the city too). King demonstrates how Derry has stuck in these endless cycles of violence caused by IT but also by people of Derry who have used to these atrocities. The children must not only escape IT but also the horrible things the adults do. When in the end they destroy IT they destroy the city too bringing a closure.
You have 6 chapters for the June 1958 section and 6 chapters for the July 1958 section. In every of these chapters a member of the seven is the "hero". So you have one+one chapter to learn more for the losers(Stanley deliberately never has a chapter). If i had a complaint that would be the third chapter(six phone calls) which is dangerously anti climatic. Perhaps it would be better to have chapter from Mikes perspective here. Being introduced to so many characters at once its a bit tedious and i frankly never really cared about what they did as adults. You could just mention it