Book review It by Stephen King
Language: Swedish
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Pages: 1340
My overall rating for this book: 5 stars
The story and triggers warnings
The story revolves around the friendship of the Losers Club in Derry. The club is formed by Bill, Mike, Beverly, Ben, Eddie, Stan and Richie. They find each other and find comfort in the fact that they are all in some way social outcasts or losers. The story begins with Bills younger brother being found brutally murdered by the creature It. And Bill is determined to have his revenge on the creature.
And in some way all of the members of Losers Club have seen It, and they know they have to stop what’s haunting the town Derry. Because no one else will. We follow the kids on their journey, as well as adults when they return to finish what they started 27 years earlier.
The book contains heaps of racist and homophobic slurs, which in its way is disturbing and hard to read. However, King makes a good use of it. The point of it is to show that we, humans, are in a way the real monsters.
Other triggers one should be aware of before picking this book up is, child abuse, abuse in general, countless mentions of blood and gore and also graphic sex scenes.
What did I like/dislike about the book?
I liked the fact that the book revolved around the unlikely friendship of the Losers Club, and also the reunion of the gang 27 years later. And I loved the fact that a lot of the book centered around the evil of man as well as the evil created by It. It makes you think, who are the real monster?
Despite the book being 1300+ pages it was not dull, at times it fast paced which made me just keep turning the pages.But the last 200 pages of he book was sluggish and it felt at times like the story wasn’t moving forward at all. However, I don’t feel like I want to lower my rating for the book despite the slow paced end.
Since I read the translated version in Swedish, so I can’t really review Kings language use. But the translation work over all was good. Even though I was surprised that the Swedish translator hadn’t kept Pennywise as the name of the clown.