What Is Pennywise Really? Stephen King's It Explained
A Paper Boat, a Storm Drain and the 27-Year Promise Seven Kids Made in the Dark
Forty years ago, Stephen King published a 1,100-page horror novel about a shapeshifting monster, a small town in Maine and seven children who call themselves the Losers' Club. It became the best-selling hardcover novel in America that year and gave the world Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Its ending has divided readers ever since. With new 40th anniversary editions on both sides of the Atlantic, a UK deluxe edition shipping on 26 November 2026 and HBO's It: Welcome to Derry heading for a second season, this guide explains the book itself, not the films. It sets out the essentials first, then gives a clear spoiler warning, follows the story in both of its timelines and explains the ending: the Ritual of Chüd, the Turtle, what Pennywise really is and why the final chapters are so controversial.
The 40th Anniversary Editions
Stephen King's official website lists three anniversary editions. In the US, Scribner has published a 1,168-page hardcover with new cover art and stained edges. In the UK, Hodder & Stoughton published a 1,088-page cloth hardcover on 3 September 2026.
For collectors, Hodder & Stoughton is also releasing a UK deluxe limited edition of 1,010 hand-numbered copies, publishing and shipping on 26 November 2026. It includes a new introduction by the Duffer Brothers, the creators of Stranger Things, a slipcase and sprayed edges featuring Pennywise. It will not ship to the US, Canada or US territories.
It on Screen: Where to Watch
It: Welcome to Derry is HBO's prequel series to Andy Muschietti's two films, with Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise. It premiered on HBO Max in October 2025. In the UK, it streams on Sky and NOW, and is also listed on HBO Max. In the US, it streams on HBO Max.
On 31 October 2026, HBO Max released a surprise 30-minute Halloween special, A Story of Derry, set hundreds of years before Pennywise. Season 2 has been confirmed. Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane has said it will be set in 1935, during the Great Depression, around the Bradley Gang, a group of bank robbers whose massacre in Derry is part of the novel's town history. Filming is expected to start in summer 2027, and HBO has not announced a release date. Deadline reports that it is expected in late 2027 or 2028.
The films are It (2017), which tells the children's story, and It Chapter Two (2019), which covers the adults. Both moved the timeline forward by about 30 years. There was also a two-part 1990 television miniseries with Tim Curry as Pennywise. We have already explained It Chapter Two, so this guide focuses on how the book does it differently.
Key Terms for New Readers
Derry: a fictional town in Maine, in the north-east United States, built on a network of old sewers and storm drains.
The Barrens: a stretch of overgrown wasteland in Derry where the Losers play.
It: the creature's only name. Pennywise is just its favourite disguise.
The Losers' Club: the name the seven children give themselves, because everyone else already calls them losers.
The Ritual of Chüd: an ancient ritual, half-remembered from a library book, in which two minds battle by "biting" each other's tongues and the first one to laugh or let go loses.
The Deadlights: the swirling orange lights that are the nearest thing to It's true form. Looking into them drives people mad.
The Turtle: an ancient, enormous turtle that created the universe, and It's opposite.
Macroverse: King's word for the void beyond our universe, where It and the Turtle come from.
The Characters You Need to Know
Bill Denbrough: the leader, who stutters. In 1985 he is a successful horror novelist.
Georgie Denbrough: Bill's six-year-old brother.
Ben Hanscom: the new kid, overweight and lonely, who loves building things. Later an architect.
Beverly Marsh: the only girl in the group, with an abusive father. Later a fashion designer married to an abusive husband, Tom Rogan.
Richie Tozier: the joker with a thousand silly voices. Later a radio DJ in California.
Eddie Kaspbrak: a boy with asthma, smothered by his anxious mother. Later the owner of a limousine company.
Stan Uris: neat, logical and a keen birdwatcher. Later an accountant.
Mike Hanlon: the only Black boy in the group, the son of a farmer. Later Derry's librarian, the only one who stays.
Henry Bowers: a violent, racist bully who becomes It's tool.
Audra Phillips: Bill's wife, an actress.
Pennywise: the clown who calls himself Bob Gray, and It's face for children.
Spoiler warning: the following summary discusses the full plot and ending of It.
October 1957: Georgie
The novel opens in a rainstorm in October 1957. Six-year-old Georgie Denbrough is sailing a paper boat that his older brother Bill, ill in bed, has made for him. The boat races along the gutter and drops into a storm drain. Georgie looks in and sees a clown, holding his boat and a bunch of balloons, who introduces himself as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Georgie knows not to talk to strangers, but the clown is friendly, and funny, and has his boat. Georgie reaches in, and is killed. A neighbour runs to help, and arrives too late.
Bill never stops blaming himself for making the boat.
Summer 1958: The Losers' Club
The following summer, Ben Hanscom escapes Henry Bowers and his gang on the last day of school by running into the Barrens. There he meets Bill and Eddie, who are trying to build a dam across the stream. Over the next weeks, Richie, Stan and Beverly join them. They are all outsiders. And they slowly discover that they have all seen something.
Each has met It in a different form, shaped by their own fears. Ben sees a mummy on the frozen canal. Eddie meets a rotting leper. Stan finds drowned bodies. Mike, the son of a Black farmer who has faced racism in Derry for years, is attacked by a giant bird. Bill sees Georgie. Beverly's bathroom sink sprays blood that her father cannot see. Only children can.
Henry Bowers, meanwhile, is becoming more dangerous. When he chases Mike into the Barrens, the Losers drive Henry's gang away in a huge rock fight. Mike joins the group. There are now seven of them.
What Derry Is Hiding
Mike's research into Derry's past reveals a pattern. Roughly every 27 years, the town suffers a wave of disappearances and violent disasters, from a fire at the Black Spot, a club for Black soldiers, set by a white supremacist group, to the ambush of a gang of bank robbers. The adults never seem to notice, or they look away.
The children build a smoke hole in the Barrens, a dugout den filled with smoke. Richie and Mike, overcome by the fumes, have a vision of It arriving on Earth from the sky, long before there were people. It has been asleep under Derry ever since, waking every 27 years to feed.
The House on Neibolt Street
The attacks grow worse. Henry and his friends break Eddie's arm. Beverly sees one of Henry's gang, Patrick Hockstetter, killed by It. A message written in blood warns the Losers to stop.
They refuse. Ben makes silver slugs from a silver dollar, on the theory that silver kills monsters, and the seven go to an abandoned house on Neibolt Street where some of them have already met It, and where Bill and Richie barely escaped a werewolf. Beverly, the best shot, wounds It with Ben's slugs from a slingshot. It flees.
It then turns to Henry. Under It's influence, Henry kills his own abusive father and follows the Losers into the sewers with two friends, Belch Huggins and Victor Criss. It kills both friends. Henry escapes into a river, insane, and is later blamed for Derry's child murders and sent to an asylum.
The First Ritual of Chüd
Deep under Derry, the children find It's lair. Bill faces It using the Ritual of Chüd, which he has read about in a library book. In his mind, he is suddenly in the void, the Macroverse, where he meets the Turtle, an ancient being that says it made the universe when it had a bellyache. The Turtle takes no side. It only watches. Bill also senses something beyond both of them, the Other, which may have created them both.
The Turtle tells Bill to bite down. Bill bites It's tongue with his mind and holds on, repeating the tongue-twister that helps him control his stutter. It begs to be let go. When Bill releases it, It runs, badly wounded.
Lost in the Dark
On the way out, the children get lost in the tunnels. Their unity, the thing that made them strong, begins to fade. What happens next is the scene that has become the most controversial passage King ever wrote, involving the children. This guide does not describe it. In plot terms, it is the moment the group reconnects as one, and after it they find the way out.
Back in the daylight, standing in a circle, the seven make a blood oath at Stan's prompting, with cuts across their palms: if It ever comes back, they will come back too. Within weeks, as It sleeps, the details begin to fade from their memories.
1984–1985: The Calls Home
In July 1984, a young gay man, Adrian Mellon, is brutally beaten by three teenagers and thrown off a bridge in Derry. His partner, and one of the attackers, both see a clown under the bridge. Children start to disappear again.
Mike Hanlon is the only Loser who never left. Now the town librarian, he has been watching for 27 years. He calls the others. Each of them has almost completely forgotten their childhood in Derry, and as each picks up the phone, the memories begin to return. Five agree to come. Stan Uris, terrified, takes his own life.
The Reunion
The six meet for lunch at a Chinese restaurant, where a series of grotesque shocks in their fortune cookies shows them that It knows they are back. Mike reminds them that It wakes for about a year at a time, and that they swore an oath. They agree to kill It for good.
Mike sends them off to walk around Derry alone, to bring back their memories. Each meets It again. Bill finds his old bicycle, Silver, in a junk shop called Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes.
Meanwhile, three people who have nothing to do with the oath come to Derry. Tom Rogan, Beverly's violent husband, follows her there to punish her. Audra, Bill's wife, follows him because she is worried. And Henry Bowers, freed from the asylum by It, comes after Mike.
Henry's Last Attack
Henry attacks Mike in the library and leaves him badly injured. He then goes after the others, and is killed in the fight. It sends Tom to kidnap Audra and bring her underground. When Tom sees It's true form, he collapses in shock and never comes out. Audra is left in a trance, caught in the Deadlights.
Bill, Ben, Beverly, Richie and Eddie, the five who can still fight, go back into the sewers.
2:10 PMTaylor Tailored
How It Ends
In the lair, It appears in what is the closest it can come to a physical form: a giant spider. Bill and Richie enter the Ritual of Chüd together. This time It is ready. It tells Bill that the Turtle is dead, and for a moment Bill believes it. He loses faith and is drawn towards the Deadlights.
Richie saves him. Using his ridiculous voices, he makes It laugh, which breaks It's grip, and he pulls Bill back.
Eddie, the most frightened of them all, then attacks. He sprays his asthma inhaler down It's throat, believing as hard as he can that it is battery acid. Because It's power depends on belief, it works, and It is badly injured. It bites off Eddie's arm, and he dies.
The survivors follow the wounded creature's trail. They discover that It has laid eggs, and the eggs are destroyed. When Bill and Richie reach It, Bill plunges his hands into the creature, finds its heart and crushes it.
They carry Audra out, but they have to leave Eddie behind. Outside, the scars on their palms from the blood oath have vanished.
At the same time, the worst storm in the town's history hits Derry. The downtown area floods and collapses. The town's water tower, the Standpipe, falls. The glass corridor in the library that joins the children's library to the adult library shatters for no reason anyone can see. Derry, Mike thinks, is dying.
The Forgetting
In the final Interlude, Mike writes in his notebook from his hospital bed. Richie has gone back to California. Ben and Beverly are leaving together for Nebraska. Bill has stayed with Audra, who has still not woken.
Mike notices that the forgetting has started again. Small details are already slipping away. He suspects that even the words in his notebook will fade. And he thinks this may be for the best.
In the Epilogue, Bill takes Audra, still in her trance, out on Silver. He rides down the steep hill on Upper Main Street as fast as he can, as he did when he was a boy. She stirs, and wakes. In the last pages, Bill imagines himself in future years only half-remembering his childhood and the friends he had.
It Ending Explained
What Is Pennywise, Really?
Pennywise is not a clown. It is an ancient, near-immortal being from the Macroverse that arrived on Earth from space long before humans. It feeds on fear, which is why it prefers children, whose fears are simple and vivid. It shapes itself into whatever its victim fears most: a leper, a mummy, a werewolf, a clown. The giant spider in the lair is the nearest it gets to a body in our world. The Deadlights are closer to its real form, which no human mind can survive seeing.
It also has a gender in the book. In the final battle, the Losers realise It is female, which is why there are eggs.
What Is the Ritual of Chüd?
It is a battle of wills fought in the mind. Bill first reads about it in a library book. The two sides lock together by "biting" each other's tongues, and the human side tries to hold on, and break the creature's grip, with willpower, rhymes and jokes. That is why Bill chants his tongue-twister, and why Richie's silly voices matter so much. Its point is that It's power and the Losers' power come from the same place: belief and imagination.
Who Is the Turtle?
The Turtle is the creator of the universe, a kind and ancient being who represents good and creation, as It represents evil and destruction. It does not intervene in the fight, but it guides Bill. In 1985, It tells Bill the Turtle is dead, a blow aimed at his faith rather than his body. The Turtle, and the Other beyond it, link It to King's Dark Tower series, where the Turtle reappears as Maturin.
Why Does Eddie's Inhaler Work?
Because Eddie's asthma has never been real. Earlier in the book, the town pharmacist, Mr Keene, tells him that he does not really have asthma. His breathing problems are a product of his mother's anxiety. In the lair, Eddie turns that same power of belief against It. His aspirator works as a weapon for the same reason it once worked as medicine: because he believes in it.
Why Do the Losers Forget?
The forgetting is It's last effect and also the price of victory. Derry has always made people forget, which is how the town lived with It for centuries. When It dies, the Losers' bond to Derry ends too. Mike sees the forgetting as a kind of cleansing, a chance to live without the past. King's point is that childhood can never be fully carried into adult life.
Why Every 27 Years?
The book never gives a scientific reason. Mike's research simply shows the cycle: It wakes, feeds for around a year, often ending in a great disaster, then sleeps again. The number matters because it is roughly a generation. The children who survive one cycle become the adults who have forgotten it by the next, which is exactly what allows It to keep returning.
Why Does Stan Die?
Stan is the most rational of the Losers. He believes in birds, facts and order, and It is an insult to all of them. As a child he survives because the group carries him. As an adult, faced with the call, he cannot face it again. His death is the first sign of what the oath costs, and the reason only six of the seven can return.
What Happens to Beverly and Ben?
Beverly finally escapes Tom, who never comes out of the sewers. Ben, who has loved her since he was eleven, asks her to come home with him to Nebraska, and she agrees, at least for a while. Mike sees in their eyes that they are, or soon will be, lovers. It is the novel's one straightforwardly happy ending, and even it is shadowed by the forgetting.
Why Does Audra Wake Up?
Because Bill becomes a child again. To reach her, he has to stop calculating risks and ride Silver as recklessly as he did in 1958, shouting the same cry he used then. The book suggests that the belief that once let him fight It can also bring her back. It is a fairy-tale rescue, and King plays it as one.
Why Is the Ending So Controversial?
For two reasons. The first is the children's scene in the sewers. Critics have objected to it since 1986. In a 2017 statement reported by Vulture and IndieWire, King said he had not been thinking about the sexual aspect, and that he meant it as a link between childhood and adulthood, like the glass corridor between Derry's two libraries. The novelist Grady Hendrix has argued that the moment is, in a sense, the heart of the book. Many readers still find it deeply uncomfortable, and both film adaptations leave it out.
The second is the monster itself. After 1,000 pages of terror, some readers find the giant spider and the cosmic Turtle too strange, or too silly. Others think that is the point: It can only ever be as big as the children's imaginations.
Does Derry Survive?
Not as it was. The storm destroys downtown, kills dozens of people and breaks the glass corridor, which is never rebuilt. The town that hid the evil for centuries is left to rot.
The Book, the Interludes and Welcome to Derry
Some of the most unsettling pages of the novel are not about the Losers at all. The Interludes are written as extracts from Mike's private history of Derry, built from old newspapers and the memories of elderly residents. They describe the ambush of the Bradley Gang, in which ordinary townspeople joined in the killing, and the fire at the Black Spot, a club for Black soldiers, which Mike's father, Will Hanlon, then a young soldier, survived. In each case, the town afterwards seems to agree not to talk about it.
That is the material HBO has mined. Welcome to Derry's first season went back to 1962, and its second will go back to 1935 and the Bradley Gang, according to the showrunner. For readers, the point is that the series is not inventing a hidden history. It is dramatising the dark backstory King built into the margins of the novel, and the book remains the best guide to where the show is heading.
The Book vs the Films
The biggest change is structure. The book tells both timelines in parallel, moving back and forth between childhood and adulthood. The films split them, with the children in It (2017) and the adults in It Chapter Two (2019).
The films also moved the childhood story to 1988–89 and the adult story to 2016, which changed the cultural references. The sewer scene was cut, and the films replace it with other moments of togetherness. The Turtle appears only in hints. And in It Chapter Two, the Losers defeat It by making it feel small and pathetic, rather than through the Turtle's ritual. For a full breakdown of the second film, see our guide to It Chapter Two.
Themes and Meaning
Childhood and Memory
The novel's great subject is the difference between being a child and being an adult. As children, the Losers believe in monsters, and so they can fight them. As adults, they have forgotten what they once knew. Their return to Derry is a return to the part of themselves that could believe.
The Evil in the Town
It feeds on Derry, but Derry also feeds It. The racism faced by the Hanlons, the homophobic murder of Adrian Mellon, the abuse in Beverly's home and the violence of Henry Bowers all happen without It's help. The adults' blindness to the children's suffering is what lets It thrive.
Friendship
The Losers win because they are together. Each one is weak alone. Together, as Bill thinks, they are stronger than It. Stan's death, and Eddie's, are what the bond costs.
Fear
King shows fear as something learned. Eddie's mother teaches him to be afraid. Beverly's father and husband use fear to control her. It is the ultimate version of what the adults of Derry already do.
Final Thoughts
Forty years on, It is still King's most ambitious book and one of his most divisive. It is a horror novel, but it is also a long, tender book about friendship, childhood and the way adults forget what they once knew. Its ending is flawed, strange and in places very hard to defend, but its last image, a grown man riding a child's bicycle down a hill to bring the woman he loves back to life, is one of the most moving things King ever wrote.
Sources
IT Turns 40: Celebrate with Stunning New Special Editions, StephenKing.com, 14 August 2026 (Scribner and Hodder & Stoughton editions; UK deluxe limited edition shipping 26 November 2026)
It (novel), Wikipedia (publication details, plot, reception, adaptations)
It: Chapter Summaries and Analysis, LitCharts (chapter 22, chapter 23, the last Interlude and the Epilogue)
'It: Welcome to Derry' Surprise Halloween Episode Now Streaming On HBO Max, Deadline, 31 October 2026
It: Welcome to Derry Season 2 Gets Release Date Update, ComingSoon, 16 October 2026
IT: Welcome to Derry: Watch Online, JustWatch UK (UK streaming platforms, checked 13 November 2026)
Stephen King Statement On Child Sex In His Novel It, Vulture, September 2017
