11/22/63 by Stephen King

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.

I finished 11/22/63 last night, but wanted to wait until I was fresh to write this review. I’m still not sure I can do the book justice. Those of you who have been following my reviews will notice that this isn’t my usual read. I’m not sure when I would have picked it up if I hadn’t won a copy. It’s not at all what I expected from a Stephen King novel, but it’s been a while since I’ve read Stephen King. I still don’t remember getting as lost (in a good way) in one of his books as I did in this one. It was just that good!

I’m not going to summarize 11/22/63, you can read that in the description I got from goodreads. What I will try to do in this review is let you know why I liked it so much.

A central, driving theme in 11/22/63 is ‘The past is obdurate. It doesn’t want to change.’ Throw in a healthy dose of ‘everything happens for a reason’ and you get the gist of the lesson King is trying to convey in this book. You can probably guess that from the premise. Every time travel book and show that I’ve ever seen or heard about warns us to be careful of what you change when you visit the past. Even the least little change can throw everything off. I guess in essence what I’m trying to get across is that the story is a great one, the lessons that are learned are important and life changing, but the real story and what made the telling of it so great was the journey the characters had to take to get there. It was a beautiful and heart breaking journey and King did a wonderful job of leading the reader through it.

There was so much to love about this story. You had to admire the need Jake felt to right wrongs from the past, regardless of how he had to do it. His love for Sadie was fierce and beautiful. Sadie’s love for Jake (George) was just as fierce. What I didn’t expect from this story was the emotion that all of these character evoked in me. The back stories of both Harry and Sadie were heart breaking. There were several moments that both tears of happiness and tears of sadness were shed and I never saw it coming. (Who expects to cry when reading Stephen King?) There were moments that I literally breathed a sigh of relief because what I was afraid was going to happen didn’t. I’m still feeling the emotion from this book and I finished it over 12 hours ago. I suppose that pretty much says it all. It was a great read and even though it was a long read – I could have read more.

If you are a fan of Stephen King, I know you will read this book. If you haven’t read King for a while and you want to revisit his writing, 11/22/63 is a great place to start. If you aren’t a fan of horror and that’s one of the reasons why you have avoided King and his works, don’t be afraid of this one. There are scarier things than monsters under the bed, however. Sometimes real life is scarier than the monsters in our dreams.