Author: Stephen King
Genre: Historical Fiction
Subgenre: Alternative History, Time Travel
Length: 753 pages
On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King’s heart-stoppingly dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination—a thousand page tour de force.
Following his massively successful novel Under the Dome, King sweeps readers back in time to another moment—a real life moment—when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a character who has the power to change the course of history.
Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.
Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life – a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.
A tribute to a simpler era and a devastating exercise in escalating suspense, 11/22/63 is Stephen King at his epic best.
Time travel mechanism: Stairs in the back of a closet in a dinner. There is no explanation of how the stairs work but there are some interesting ideas about the ability to change the past.
Review:
This was my first Stephen King novel. I had mixed feeling about it. The trip down memory lane with all the late 50s/early 60s stuff was fun. There were some interesting ideas about time travel such as the past has a resistance to change and events harmonize (reminds me of the quote, "history doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme"). As in many time travel books, the actual time travel mechanism is very simple but not explained. Having recently watched several movies on the JFK assassination, Olive Stone's JFK and History Channel's The Men Who Killed Kennedy, I was very surprised that King is so convinced that Oswald was the lone assassin (98%-99% sure by his own admission), given that the book was written in late 2009 when both these movies were available. But that may just be my bias. If King had thought there was a conspiracy, it would certainly have made the book plot much more difficult to write. Never the less, the plot did keep me engaged, if only to see how the assassination would unfold. So, why did I only give it 2 stars? Because it was fairly slow most of the time (except for a few spots and the day of the assassination) and I don't really like the writing style, extremely verbose is putting it mildly. The story could have been half as long. It was like it was written for someone sitting on the beach with nothing better to do than read this book - so what if it has tons of description and witty banter that goes on and on and on? Being written in first person point of view may have contributed to that writing style, but I don't think I'll be reading any other King novels to find out (I'm reminded of the movie The Storm of the Century which also was twice as long as it should have been). For a time travel story there was very little about the the impact of changing the past relative to how much of the book's plot focused on other aspects of the story. What little there was, mostly at the end of the book, was interesting whoever.
I checked the paperback version of the book out from my local library which also has an ebook version available.
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