Cure your fear of Pennywise the clown!

[Kitsa]

I have an IT story.

When that damned movie first came out on TV (and don't get me wrong, except for the stupid ending it is an EXCELLENT movie and scary as all hell), my mom bought me a special edition of the paperback.

It had this glowering Tim Curry on the cover in this dead-white facepaint that glowed. I was just a kid, it freaked me the hell out, and I buried it in the back of a bookcase in our finished basement. My plan was to never look at it again, since Pennywise was on the spine of the book too and I had buried it behind a row. I should have thrown it away but my mom is really touchy about gifts.

So it was the stereotypical Dark and Stormy Night and I was home alone, doing laundry in the basement. Thunder, lightning, the whole deal. And just as there was this giant thunderclap, that fucking book fell out of the bookcase and landed, facing me, with that damned Pennywise face glowing in the dark looking straight at me with these luminous white eyes.

Except I KNOW I had that book hidden behind a tightly packed row of books, and I don't know of anyone messing with the bookcase since I did that. And I was home alone that night. I can't think of any way that book could have been nudged that far forward to fall out of the bookcase like that.

It was like a scene from the movie, and that was just too fucking weird for me. I nearly shit myself fleeing from the basement, leaving the basket of laundry behind, refusing to go back down there for several days.

When I did, it was to rip off the cover and laboriously peel the spine-paper off the book, tear them to shreds, and bury them at the bottom of the wastebasket. And even then I felt like that particular paperback was evil. As soon as humanly possible, I ditched it for an innocuous hardcover version that just said IT on the spine.

Great book, terrifying Pennywise.