Darker Than You Think
The classic rationalised-werewolf novel, bridging pulp horror and SF; its 'witch-gene among us' premise echoes through urban fantasy's entire hidden-species tradition.
Book Entry · Horror
What is It about?
Derry, Maine, where the adults look away and something in the sewers wakes every twenty-seven years to eat children, wearing their fears — most famously the clown, Pennywise, with its boat and its balloons in the storm drain. Seven eleven-year-olds — the Losers' Club — hurt It in 1958 and swear the oath; the novel braids that summer with 1985, when the call comes and six of them (memory has been merciful) return as successful, hollowed adults to finish the job. King's thousand-page thesis on childhood, memory and the price of forgetting contains his best ensemble writing; it also contains one notorious sewer scene the field has argued about since publication.
Why it matters
The summit of King's 1980s — a #1 bestseller that made Pennywise a global archetype, renewed by the record-breaking 2017 film — and the fullest statement of his great subject: what childhood knows that adulthood survives by forgetting.
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The great American dark fantasy of childhood and the founding text of 'October country' horror; its fingerprints are all over Stephen King, who says as much.