I actually love Stephen King in early long-winded sprawling mode from his beer years. It's why The Stand is my favorite of his books and one of my favorite novels. For me, the problem with IT is the way it's too long. That's like he committed to this structure where you see each kid have their own individual confrontation with It, alone, each one in succession, and then the structure of the book is that this gets repeated over and over. It gets very repetitive and is a screwball way to structure a novel.