It

The story takes place in the small town of Derry, Maine. On a rainy day, William makes a paper boat for his younger brother George, who happily goes out to sail it but is killed at a storm drain. After that, children in the town continue to go missing or die young, and police searches never yield results; William's parents, sunk in grief over the loss of their son, neglect William entirely. That summer, the lonely William and six other children unpopular at school form the "Losers' Club." They discover that almost all of them have seen a strange figure—"It." "It" takes shifting forms: sometimes a clown holding balloons, sometimes a giant bird, sometimes a whisper and gurgling blood from a drainpipe; the only constant is that every time "It" appears in Derry, it takes the lives of many children. The Losers' Club decides to declare war on "It," and after wounding "It," the seven children make a vow: if "It" ever returns, they will come back to Derry. The children leave the town one after another; only Mike stays. Twenty-seven years later, the phone rings, as if fate were calling—only this time one of them is absent, and with his last strength he writes a blood-dripping word on the mirror: It. The book shuttles back and forth between the two timelines of 1958 and 1985, depicting both the children's courage in facing the monster and the difficulty of confronting childhood fears again as adults.