An old wooden bridge in Colorado planted the seed for Stephen King's It
In 1978 Stephen King walked across a humped wooden bridge in Boulder to collect his car and thought of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. What if a troll lived under a real town? Eight years later that notion became It, the year's bestselling American hardback and the birth of Pennywise the Dancing Clown.
The idea gestated slowly. King was also struck by a line from the poet Marianne Moore about imaginary gardens with real toads in them, which he recast as real trolls in imaginary gardens. He returned to it two years later, deciding to braid together the stories of children and the adults they grow into, started writing in 1980 and finished five years on. The history and lore of the sewers of Bangor, Maine fed his invented town of Derry.
The book, published in 1986, was his 22nd and his 17th novel under his own name. It jumps between two eras. In the late 1950s seven misfit children, calling themselves the Losers Club, find that an ancient shapeshifting creature stalks Derry, waking roughly every 27 years to hunt children and taking the form of whatever frightens each victim most. After confronting it they swear a blood oath to return if it ever comes back. In the 1980s the killings resume, and Mike Hanlon, now the town librarian, summons his scattered friends, who have mostly forgotten what happened.
King's cosmology runs deep. The creature is revealed as an alien presence from beyond our universe, opposed by Maturin, an ancient turtle credited with creating everything. Its true nature, the Deadlights, cannot be looked at safely, and it can only be beaten through a contest of will and belief.
Critics praised the scale while arguing over its length, graphic violence and one notorious scene involving the child characters. The novel won the British Fantasy Award in 1987. Adaptations followed: a 1990 television miniseries, two films in 2017 and 2019, and a 2025 series, It: Welcome to Derry. Pennywise has become one of popular culture's most recognisable villains.
Source: It (novel)
