"It" by Stephen King

I've been wanting to read Stephen King's "It" for a very long time, ever since completing "The Shining" in the late 1990s. The length of the book kept me at bay in my pre-Audible days, due largely to the fact I am a terrible reader. After a dozen or twenty pages, I lose all ability to concentrate and words fly passed my eyes without registering in my brain, or I fall asleep. Exactly how I managed to graduate college with a B.A. in English is a mystery.

Thankfully, veteran actor Steven Weber decided to read the book for me. Weber's performance is energetic, perhaps bordering on hammy from time to time, but that seems to have more to do with the writing than the reading. King can be subtle when he wants to be. When he was writing "It," subtlety clearly was not at the forefront of his interests. To his credit, Weber manages to maintain a consistency of volume, pacing and character representation throughout the entirety of more than forty-four hours of finished recording. God bless him. Someone give that man a lozenge.

There are many interesting and compelling aspects to "It." Obviously, Pennywise the clown pulls all the levers for anyone who has ever feared men in greasepaint. King's creation is perfectly creepy and disturbing, and it doesn't hurt to now have two iconic pop culture performances of the creature to bring Pennywise to vivid life in the mind of the reader. If you could somehow combine Tim Curry's delivery with Alexander Skarsgard's appearance, I doubt there would be a clean set of underpants in the screening room.

The heroes of the story, the seven kids who make up the Loser's Club and face down as both children and adults the evil creature at the malevolent heart of the town of Derry, are so well fleshed out they practically burst from the strain. In addition to throwing in an endless variety of potentially frightening imagery -- Pennywise is just one of many representations of evil It can assume -- King keeps piling on the early childhood traumas until each of the protagonists has enough emotional baggage to overwhelm Dr. Phil, Dr. Ruth, Jerry Springer and Oprah combined. Had a more vigorous editing of the book been carried out and some of these superfluous storylines been cut, the book might not seem such an endless slog at times. Weak or annoying characters become quite excessively weak and annoying, particularly when they return as adults to finish what they had left undone years earlier. And the convenience of the characters forgetting their experiences as they age and move away from Derry is just that: convenient.

Mostly, however, I take issue with the structure of the narrative. Putting aside my complaint about the convenience of the characters forgetting their childhoods, that device could have worked if, from the start, King chose to tell the story entirely from the perspective of these former friends reuniting and gradually remembering their pasts in a build up to the final battle with It. While there is a bit of this, the narrative voice ends up bouncing all over the place and King spills the beans on things that could have served as nice surprises for both the reader and the characters if introduced later in the book rather than in earlier chapters. By the time the Loser's Club actually does reunite as adults, we already know everything about them. All that remains for the adult characters is a rushed (if it's possible to even apply that descriptive to "It") and anti-climactic climax.

Hiding somewhere between its covers is a rich, dense and terrifying story that is buried under a pile of early draft ideas that struggle to coalesce. I found myself pulling for Pennywise long before Webber stopped reading, if only to allow the book to end so the man could rest his voice.

Book Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Audio Rating: 5 out of 5