One of the most popular horror movies to recently come out in theatres has been IT. As of late the movie has scared, thrilled, and entertained audiences everywhere, but the source material has still gone unread by many. The movie stays for the most part accurate in the depiction of the children’s early lives, but the 1,138 page novel by Stephen King has even more to offer for fans of macabre stories. The book alternates between two timelines, focusing on the characters Billy Denbrough, Beverly Marsh, Ben Hanscom, Eddie Kaspbrak, Richie Tozier, and Stanley Uris, from their early lives in the 1950s to the mid 1980s. They all slowly become more entwined when Bills little brother George is killed by Pennywise the Dancing Clown. The children have to battle their own fears as well as the creature that haunts the sewers of their home town time after time even when it seems they may have finally escaped it and each other. Although the novel in its excessive length has a tendency to ramble on in places it doesn’t need to, as is the case with many Stephen King stories, for readers that are looking for an original and scary story, the vivid description and well thought out characters going through the exhaustive trials of childhood trauma and and somehow learning to trust one another time after time in an uplifting but nonetheless eerie way, still leave the reader sure to remember the story for long after they’re finished with it. No pun intended.