My Favourite Books

Number 3 - It - Stephen King

From the highbrow of 'War and Peace' to the low-brow of one of the shortest-titled novels of recent years, Stephen King's 'It'. This book not only scared me out of my wits, but it also cured me of a certain literature snobbery. In the mid-eighties my reading generally consisted of 19th century classics and the like - 'proper' literature. I was persuaded to read a King book by my youngest brother who generally read nothing but 'pulp' fiction. I only picked this book up so that I could sneer at it. Instead, it instantly brought back to my mind all the 'creepy worlds' comics, all the ghost stories, all the Ray Bradbury type stuff, all the trivial, silly, exciting, thrilling, trashy stuff which I had read between the ages of 5 and 15. But....it was far superior to all of that. The writing wasn't Jane Austen to be sure, but it wasn't rubbish either. In fact, as I discovered over the next 20 years, Stephen King has a facility for communicating quickly, effectively and ..elegantly. The first chapter entitled 'After the Flood (1957)' pretty well hooked me straight away. How's this for an opening paragraph - The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end -began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

King constructs the New England town of Derry in such detail that you believe it entirely - but he does it so rapidly and with such economy of style that you are barely aware of the process, until after a hundred pages or so you can see the whole place and most of its residents in your mind's eye, just as they were in 1957.

The book is about children - even when these children become adults they have to revert to childhood to tackle the monstrous horror which confronts them. It is about children being terrorised - King is aware that each of us still has memories of our childish fears of strange things lurking in shadows - and he taps into these latent memories to maximise the fear which pervades this book.

There are so many brilliant scenes in the book that I can hardly bring myself to single any out. But may I mention that I was almost beside myself with agitation when the two boys looked at an old photograph of a street scene, and the scene began to move as though it were a video film, bringing the horror, bringing IT, right into their faces. Later, I was transfixed by the scene when all the children, now adults, open their fortune cookies in the Chinese restaurant - no-one who has read that has ever opened a fortune cookie ever again.

The book was made into a film. The film gets nowhere near the fibrillating shock of the book.

Read the book.

Do not read alone.

Do not read at night.

Do not read if you have a heart condition.

After you've finished, you WILL have a heart condition.