I've just reading [b:It] for the second time. I gave it four stars the first time and still give it four stars now. I first read it over 20 years ago, so there were some bits I had forgotten.

After the second reading I felt rather sad -- I was going to miss the characters in the story. And that is one of the strong points. The characters are real and memorable. I found it rather sad that in the story the adult characters remembered so little about their childhood friends, though of course that was part of the plot. And it brought back memories of my own childhood -- going around with friends, building dams in streams, hiding from bullies and so on.

My reason for reading it a second time was that I had written a blog post for Stephen King's birthday and mentioned that I had found [b:It] disappointing, because in the end "It" turned out to be an extra-terrestrial monster, and I thought Stephen King's books that had extra-terrestrial monsters, like [b:The Tommyknockers|17660|The Tommyknockers|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1394210331s/17660.jpg|150226] were disappointing.

Brenton Dickieson wrote a comment, saying I had misinterpreted the ending of "It". He pointed out that It is a demonic power, not an alien civilization. So I began re-reading it.

At first I thought I would just re-read the end, which I had found most disappointing, but then I thought it was long enough since my first reading that I would read the whole thing, carefully.

I discovered things that anyone would miss on a first reading -- clues to the development of character, the foreshadowing of things that would happen later, when you know what happens later, things that the characters themselves were oblivious to because of their lapses of memory.

But I still found the ending disappointing, so I still give it four stars, not five. But to explain why will entail introducing spoilers, so I'll do that on my blog, rather than here, so if you have not read the book, and want to, you can give that a miss.