11/22/63

11/22/63 by Stephen King is a great book. It is about an english teacher that travels back to before JFK was shot to try to change the past. It made me wish that I had paid more attention to history class. It also plays upon the butterfly effect. No good deed goes unpunished in this book.

11/22/63 is the best Stephen King novel that I have read in years. I have been down on the master of horror in recent years. His latest work has made me think that he has lost a little off his fastball. Although this still isn't vintage King, it's still damn good.
11/22/63 is a time travel novel, which entirely leaves out any scientific explanation of how the time travel takes place. There is just a random wormhole located in the back of a restaurant in Maine. Going into the wormhole takes the traveler back to the same exact spot in 1958. The owner of the restaurant had been going there to get cheap food supplies for his restaurant, but he had a bigger mission planned, one he passed down to the novel's protagonist, Jake Epping, a school teacher from Maine -- and that is to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating JFK.
At over 750 pages, there is much more to the novel than just stopping the assassination. In the process Jake also tries to save a man before his father kills his family and badly injures him. He also settles into a town in Texas and works as a teacher, growing close to the people in the community and finding a love interest. Despite the length of this novel, there is no point where it feels like it's dragging, a testimony to King's writing skill. The novel has tension in the right spots, and King clearly did his research on the assassination of Kennedy. I also enjoyed seeing how he represents the past. It's almost like a living entity that is unwilling to change. The one drawback is that this novel is heavy handed with King's political beliefs. I don't read fiction to have the writer indulge me with his political agenda, something I frequently resented in this novel. Otherwise I found it thoroughly enjoyable and worth reading.
Carl Alves - author of Blood Street ( )

I absolutely love this book! I'm a big fan of time travel and alternate history, and if you are too then this is a book for you. It's long, but the story moves fast and is compelling. It's definitely worth the read. I really enjoyed hearing about the main character's adventures (and misadventures) in the past. I also found it interesting to see what small changes in the past caused to happen in the present. I also found it interesting to hear more about the culture of the 50's. An extremely interesting and engaging book! ( )

I hadn't read a Stephen King book since a few of his early classics, which I enjoyed. I suppose the glut of King production put me off a bit. But I enjoy time travel stories when they're done well, and the JFK assassination intrigues me. So I couldn't resist this tale of a man, Jake Epping, who inherits a mission from a dying man who owns the local diner, with a storeroom that is a portal to the past: specifically, a particular day in 1958. The mission is to travel back to that particular day, and wait to alter history on November 22, 1963. The path to Dallas, Texas and that fateful day is fraught with obstacles. Apparently history resists change, and the bigger the change the more it resists. It doesn't make it easier for Jake that he falls in love during his wait for 1963.

King has done a thorough research job, making the past real and credible. I even gave a copy of the book to my Dad, a JFK assassination buff. This is a big chewy book (842 pages), but I'm not sure it could have been easily edited down. And I never felt that it dragged. It concludes with a sweet, serendipitous ending that left me teary-eyed. If one thing can conquer time and change, it's love. ( )

First Line: I have never been what you'd call a crying man.

That's what high school English teacher Jake Epping will tell you, if you were to ask. But while grading essays, he's blown away by what GED student and janitor Harry Dunning has written. Somehow, some way, fifty years ago Harry survived his father's sledgehammer slaughter of his entire family. Jake is still thinking how life can turn on a dime when he learns of an even more bizarre secret: Al, owner of the local diner and Jake's friend, wants Jake to take over his obsession. Many years ago Al discovered a time portal in the diner's storeroom, and he's been trying ever since to prevent the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Jake allows himself to be persuaded, and when he steps through the portal, he finds himself in the era of Elvis, cheap gasoline, and almost universal cigarette smoking. Jake has plenty of time to start a new life in small town Texas, but each day draws him nearer to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald. Will he be able to accomplish what Al tried and failed to do? And if he does stop the assassination of the president, what sort of consequences will there be?

I have to admit that I held off reading this book for a long time. I was in third grade when JFK was assassinated. Yes, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard the news. For reasons that don't need to go into a book review, this event hit my mother and I hard, and I was reluctant to rip the Band-aid off that particular wound, even if it had healed long ago.

I should not have worried, and I should not have waited. This book has very little to do with JFK and everything to do with Jake Epping. Stephen King's main character takes us all on a nostalgic yet honest journey through America during the end of the Eisenhower administration. Everything is brought to life in vivid and loving detail. I enjoyed reliving the era of my childhood, but as I read, I found myself thinking more about recent American history, its might-have-beens... and about love.

Few writers can immerse me in their fictional worlds so completely as does Stephen King. No matter how strange, King creates characters and backdrops that are familiar and that I can trust-- which is a very good thing because I need someone/something trustworthy at my back while I'm reading to figure out how to escape his weirdness!

If you've been postponing reading this book for the same reasons I did, you can stop. When you read 11-22-63, you're going to read a lot more about love than you will about bullets and lone gunmen. ( )