11/22/63

I have a love/hate relationship with Stephen King. I loved him when I was in junior high and high school because his books are just so, well, scary! Pet Sematary scared me so much I had to sleep with the light on for weeks. I was so scared my Dad wouldn't let me see the movie (I saw it anyway and the book is so much better).  I love every one of his early books (Carrie, The Stand, The Dead Zone, and The Shining are my favorites) and I even got into a heated discussion with one of my literature professors about King's literary merit.  Then came The Tommyknockers. I seriously hated this book. In my opinion, it went on and on and on...I felt like King didn't know how to end the book so he just kept going on and on with all of these strange tangents. I finally gave up in frustration. While I didn't necessarily hate his subsequent books as much as Tommyknockers, they didn't seem to have the same spark as his earlier works and I was invariably disappointed.  After Dreamcatcher, I basically stopped reading his books. Fast forward more than ten years: my Dad recommended 11/22/63 (he highly recommended it) and I was intrigued by the notion of time travel so I started reading it during my spring break trip. I couldn't put it down! I read into the early morning hours every day in my hotel room because I had to know what happened!  It is almost excruciatingly suspenseful with a final confrontation that had me reeling.  Al Templeton tells Jake Epping about a portal to the year 1958 found in his diner.  Al had tried to prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating JFK, believing that doing so would reduce America's involvement in the Vietnam war and would prevent the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He only made it to 1962 before developing lung cancer, thus forcing his return to 2011. His dying wish is that Jake carry out his plan. Jake travels to 1958 and settles into a life as a teacher and starts a relationship with Sadie, the school's librarian. He contemplates abandoning the mission so he can stay in the past with her but eventually continues because he knows the world will be better off if Kennedy lives. Or will it?  What I enjoyed most about this story was the idea of fate and the obduracy of the past.  The more Jake tries to change the future the more the past struggles to reassert itself.  He realizes that things happen for a reason, something I have long believed.  This novel is meticulously researched and King does a brilliant job of portraying the late 1950s and early 1960s.  All of the historical characters are believable and the fictional characters are sympathetic. Even though the novel is over 800 pages long, everything builds and builds to the aforementioned conclusion which just about blew my mind.  I highly recommend this novel.  In my opinion, it is Stephen King's best work, certainly the best thing he has written in a decade.

Note:  I am now re-reading all of my favorite King books.  I have been reading It during silent reading time in my classes the past few weeks.  I keep telling my students how scary it is and I've noticed that several of them have picked it up.  This makes me happier than I can tell you!