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written on November 5, 2026, read 1993

It is the Stephen King book I’ve owned the longest: “It”. Hmm. That sounds kind of strange. “It” – that works twice over here as well – is also the book that, when I picked it up again, showed me most clearly that I urgently need to buy glass doors for my bookshelf and then cover them with UV protection film. The once deep-red spine has since faded to a pale pink, as I’ve written before. Before all the books here end up with white spines, I’ll probably have to protect them.

By the way, I’m talking about the shorter German translation with 860 pages, not the considerably longer one from 2011 with around fifteen hundred pages. I never bought the later edition – when I held it in my hands in a bookshop, the additional pages just didn’t tempt me enough. By now, however, I know that rereading it in this version is probably worth it. So at some point I’ll reach for that edition after all.

The book is something of a classic eighties novel. I know quite a few people who, just like me, found their way to King through this book. Donnie Darko’s mother is reading it in the film, by the way. I don’t know why I noticed that.

I found the book really well written: the narrative on two timelines. The battle in childhood, the return as adults. It is as much a book about horror in a small town as it is about memories. I think the characters are very well developed, even if, of course, you find the usual archetypes there to some extent.¹ If you read the book at the end of your teens and were more of an outsider as a child yourself, you naturally hope that things will one day turn out for you the way they did for Ben Hanscom. And then, of course, there’s Pennywise as the villain.² Room 101 turned clown.³ The manifestation of your greatest fears. Tailor-made for everyone. I like this book. I consider it a nearly perfect novel of its genre. Nearly.

Because after all that praise, I have to come to a point I find extremely objectionable: the sex scene among children that King wrote there. To me, it is more than problematic. It’s not that there’s sex in the book. Sex is part of life and therefore also part of literature – a necessary part, even.⁴

But the participants are children, and that’s what I have a problem with. None of the adaptations included this scene, and nothing was missing. The films showed that there was no literary necessity for it and that the intended goal can also be achieved in other ways.

Stephen King himself has said that this scene is meant to symbolise the transition from childhood to adulthood. Yes, you can see it that way and also write it that way. But at this point the protagonists are only 11 years old. I believe that transition is still at least three or four years away. That’s easy to forget when a 13-year-old can already look down at the top of your head and towers over you completely at 16.⁵ At 11, I’m very sure of it, you’re still a child.

Consider, too, that Beverly comes from a home with a violent father. For me, that makes the scene even a bit more questionable.

I think nobody would write it that way today. An editor would probably throw the scene back in the author’s face – or at least start a long discussion about it. But would I remove the scene from the book today, 40 years after publication? No. Absolutely not. On principle. If you started doing that, you’d soon have to rewrite every book. The book came into being this way; the scene is out in the world. It’s like toothpaste: once it’s out of the tube, you can’t get it back in. And trying anyway would set a dangerous precedent.⁶

The scene is a failed and misplaced passage in an otherwise wonderful book. That’s a dilemma you have to endure as a reader.