It

It by Stephen King.   1156 pages

I almost feel like I don't need to add a summary here, considering 1) the book's been read by so many people and 2) the movie was out recently.   Here's the synopsis from Goodreads: "To the children, the town was their whole world. To the adults, knowing better, Derry, Maine was just their home town: familiar, well-ordered, a good place to live. It was the children who saw – and felt – what made Derry so horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, It lurked, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each person’s deepest dread. Sometimes It reached up, seizing, tearing, killing…

The adults, knowing better, knew nothing. Time passed and the children grew up, moved away. The horror of It was deep-buried, wrapped in forgetfulness. Until the grown-up children were called back, once more to confront It as It stirred and coiled in the sullen depths of their memories, reaching up again to make their past nightmares a terrible present reality."

Or, you could see it as pulling together some themes in other stories by Stephen King:  misfits drawn together into close friendship, a town which may seem ok on the surface but is nasty, nasty, nasty underneath, and the triumph (usually unlikely) of some kind of good over a definite evil.

I remember reading this around when it was published in 1986 and have re-read it, although not recently.  It was great to pick it up again and rediscover parts of it.  I found I had remembered some things but not that much, so it was like reading it for the first time, which was a lot of fun.  I'd list this book in the category of King books that I like, which tend to be ones written after Cujo, Christine and Pet Semetery. 

The one drawback to this book is not that it's so long -- it's that especially in this nice edition, it's heavy.  I probably would have read it more quickly if I hadn't always been reading before bed (which, yes, meant that I wasn't managing as many pages because I was tired) and my wrists got achy.  Next time, this will be one I get for my tablet in an e-version.