It

It is a horror novel by the American author Stephen King, published in 1986 and his seventeenth novel under his own name. Seven children are hunted by a creature called It, which takes the shape of whatever each victim fears most so that it can hide itself. The story moves between two time periods and is told largely in the third person.

Children keep dying in a small Maine town, and whatever is responsible wears the shape of whatever frightens its victim most, usually a clown called Pennywise. The seven friends work out as children that it is far older than the town, that it feeds on fear and that it wakes and sleeps on a long cycle. They make a promise to return if it ever comes back.

The book alternates between their childhood and their return as adults, so the reader knows what they faced before knowing whether they can face it again. King writes the town as a character, with its own history of violence and its own habit of not noticing what happens to its children. The two timelines converge, and the adult chapters are constrained by the promise made in the children's ones.

It is a standalone novel, and it was adapted into a television miniseries in 1990 and into two films in 2017 and 2019.