My favourite King book and has been since I was a kid, when sleepovers would consist of junk food and watching the mini-series over and over (cue a bunch of adolescent girls hiding behind their pillows and screeching their heads off). It's probably done more to make kids hate clowns than any other piece of story-telling, and it deserves credit for that, but it's a sprawling wonderful mass of neuroses and I love it. Truth be told the book's a bit too sprawling - it could probably lose several hundred pages without losing anything else - but the depiction of the seven kids themselves can hardly be beaten. Those kids always seemed so real to me (much more real than their adult counterparts), and the only sour note of the book is what knocks this down from five stars - that utterly ridiculous pre-teen gang-bang, which I thought was exceptionally stupid as a 14 year old girl and which has consistently evoked the same reaction over multiple decades and rereads. It never felt natural to me - more like the author was trying to be edgy and flummoxed a brain-dead editor into going along with it. Rarely do my eyes roll so hard when reading an otherwise wonderful book.

Even so, it remains a favourite.