Stephen King’s ‘IT’ introduced readers to a one-of-a-kind creature that can take any form, the most common one being Pennywise the Dancing Clown, and as menacing as it is, this creature has one big enemy it’s truly scared of: Maturin, the turtle. Stephen King has told different types of horror stories in his novels, with villains that go from supernatural beings to humans who incarnate evil. In 1986, King explored some of the deepest and most common fears in the novel ‘IT’, through an evil, shapeshifting entity that was simply referred to as ‘IT’.
IT tells the story of a group of kids self-named ‘The Losers Club’ by alternating between 1957 and 1985, thus following the Losers when they were kids and as adults. Set in Derry, Maine (like many other stories by King), the Losers come across an evil entity living in the sewers which wakes up every 27 years to feed, and it can take any shape it desires. Referred to as ‘IT’, this creature takes the form of its victims' biggest fears as it feeds off their fear, but its preferred shape is that of Pennywise. At some point in the novel, King explained part of IT’s backstory but left enough of it untold to raise many questions about it, and everything about IT’s origins is a bit confusing, as it’s connected to the macroverse and the turtle Maturin, who turns out to be the only being IT is afraid of.
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Among the many concepts in the universe of Stephen King is the marcoverse, a void containing and surrounding the universe and where ‘IT’ and a turtle named Maturin live. IT’s true shape only exists in an inter-dimensional realm referred to as “deadlights”, and the closest to the real shape that the human mind can comprehend is a giant female spider, and those who have faced the deadlights go immediately insane, with only a few surviving such experience. Maturin, on the other hand, is a massive turtle who by nature is kind, wise, gentle, and compassionate, and who constantly withdraws into his shell. On one of the rare occasions that he came out, he had a stomach ache and vomited out the mainstream universe, and he returned to his shell immediately after. -Screen Rant
