For a number of years beginning when I was around 11 years old, I had a mild obsession with Stephen King’s horror opus “It,” to the extent that I could finish any quoted passage from any section of the book’s more than 1,000 pages—a feat so impressive that my older brother would sometimes trot it out as a parlor trick to show his friends. I read one copy to tatters: it fell apart, slowly at first then one day all at once, the pages exploding out of the paperback binding as if from a loose-leaf ledger book. I quickly bought another copy, which also disintegrated some years later.
“It” might be one of the most misunderstood books in all of King’s considerable canon. There is a widespread assumption that the story is primarily about a monster...