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This evening I decided I needed to reread It for the first time in maybe ten years. Possibly longer! So far I'm 293 pages down, out of 1090. There's a lot of awful stuff in this book--and I don't mean the violence, I mean the stuff that makes me embarrassed to be a fan, the stuff that only started getting better as his writing started to decline--but there are also so many of my primal moments. I first read this book when I was the same age as the protagonists or maybe I was even 10? I know I was 10 when I read The Shining, which was my first Stephen King book, and I went on a nonstop spree of reading all the ones I could enjoy at that age for the next couple years. Which was most of them, even if some of them I enjoyed a lot more rereading them a few years later. And I know I wrote a book report on It in fifth grade about how it was literally the best book ever written, so clearly I'd been a few rounds with it by then.

Anyway, so, that's what I've been doing all night. It is giving me many feelings. Hell, just reading the chapter headings in the table of contents gave me the most intense breathless nostalgia for a minute. "Bill Denbrough Beats the Devil", if you've read the book and that doesn't give you a chill I don't even know what to say to you. Not to mention every recurrence of the phrase "the house on Neibolt Street," and all the Derry geography rushing back to me with each page. I formed vivid mental images of stuff like the Canal and the library seventeen years ago, and it's all reforming clear as day.