Like many of Stephen King's novels, 11/22/63 is a bit of a tome. While the page count can be a little daunting, like his previous epics, it's well worth every second spent reading.
Synopsis
From StephenKing.com: 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.
The Story
You learn the secret of time travel quite early on in this story through the eyes of Jake Epping as he travels back to 1958 for the first time. No matter how much time he spends in the past, only 2 minutes go by in the "real world", but every action he takes can affect the timeline. The only problem is that each time he goes back into the past, it resets itself, undoing anything he's done in a previous visit.
The first half of this book follows Jake - or George as he has now become - finding his place in this new world, and slowly falling in love. It's not until halfway through the book that the plan to save the President starts to fall into place. By then, we've already discovered a dozen co-incidences and ripples that are caused by Jake's time traveling exploits.
The Ending
Obviously I'm not going to ruin the ending for you, but I will say that I read through the final few hundred pages in less time than I would usually do, simply because I couldn't bear to put the book down at that point. Like every other Stephen King novel, each of the seemingly unrelated threads finally twist together into a climactic finale that sent shivers down my spine.
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Disclaimer time: I'm a huge fan of Stephen King's works and would read a shopping list if he published it, but this has quickly wormed its way into my top five of his novels (behind The Stand, Insomnia, Firestarter and The Talisman).
The size of the book can be daunting for many people - myself included - but it's well worth taking the time and effort to give it a go. While the story, on occasions, seems a little slow and almost plodding, there is a solid purpose for it. Stephen King is an author who makes every single word count and none of the narrative is pointless.
While I saw one aspect of the ending coming from a mile away, the rest of the twist was something I could never have imagined. Just when you think you have everything clear in your mind, there is a new shred of detail that you realize you missed.
The level of research that Stephen King did for this novel is evident and, while he admits that a few facts were altered to fit his story better, it makes for a stronger story from start to finish.
King, Stephen. 11.22.63. Hodder & Stoughton, 2011.
Kim McGreal - Kim McGreal is an aspiring British writer trapped in the mundane guise of an office worker with an unhealthy superhero obsession.
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