Stephen King’s IT gets the 40th anniversary treatment from Overlook Connection Press

By Steve Newton

This September marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of IT, one of the Stephen King’s best-loved horror novels. Its tale of an ancient evil taking the form of a child-killing clown also won scores of fans through its small- and big-screen adaptations, which saw Tim Curry and Bill Skarsgård respectively portray the time-traveling and shape-shifting Pennywise.

The folks over at Hiram, Georgia’s Overlook Connection Press have just released their 2026 Stephen King Annual, which marks the coming milestone with a collection of essays and interviews that take a deep dive into King’s 1986 terror tale.

Writer and editor Dave Hinchberger contacted me last year because he wanted to include the 1990 interview I did with Curry on the Vancouver set of the original two-part ABC-TV movie. At the time I was the local correspondent for the prestigious New York City-based horror mag Fangoria, and managed to score the only interview with the celebrated British actor, who had shot to fame in 1975 with his debut role as transvestite mad-scientist Dr. Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Other items of interest to Stephen King’s “Constant Readers” and IT fanatics could be “The Making of a Monster”, Kansas author and pop-culture writer Andrew J. Rausch’s interview with makeup-FX artist Bart Mixon, who created and applied Tim Curry’s Pennywise makeup.

In “The Supreme Compliment of My Little Life”, artist Glenn Chadbourne–whose work is featured on the cover and throughout the book–recalls the time Stephen King invited him to the premiere of IT Chapter 2 in Bangor, Maine.

Then there’s “My Forty-Year Adventure with IT”, a piece by New England documentary filmmaker, writer, and producer John Campopiano, who co-directed Pennywise: The Story of IT, a 2002 doc that featured audio excerpts from my exclusive interview with Curry. Those priceless excerpts wound up being inadvertently uncredited in the finished film, unfortunately for me, but that didn’t stop it from winning a Fangoria Chainsaw Award for best documentary.

The second half of the 2026 Stephen King Annual is taken up by a monthly calendar, where you can pencil in important dates like when his next book is coming out (October 6 is the release date for Other Worlds Than These, the finale to the Talisman trilogy), or when his next screen adaptation will appear (director Mike Flanagan’s Carrie miniseries is scheduled for this fall on Amazon Prime).

If you just can’t get enough Pennywise the Dancing Clown these days, you can order the 2026 Stephen King Annual here.