King has named Bradbury among the writers who formed him, and It is the book where it shows most. Both are about boys in a small American town where something ancient arrives wearing an attraction: a carnival in Bradbury, a circus balloon and a clown in King. Both make the town's adults unable to see it. Both turn on the idea that the thing feeds on fear and can be starved by refusing to supply it, and both treat the end of childhood as the real horror. Filed MEDIUM: an acknowledged formative influence rather than a specific borrowing.