11/22/63

originally published on April 11, 2023

Book Review

Well, I finally did it. I read (to the very end) Stephen King’s massive novel, 11/22/63. I say finally, because I had checked this book out of the library before but had never gotten past reading the back cover, maybe out of fear of the time commitment involved in reading it.

How can I summarize this thing. It’s a very long (about 440 pages) time-travel story about a man in the present day (2011) who goes back in time (by means of a fantastical wormhole or time tunnel kind of thing) to 1958 and lives, works, and has other adventures there while waiting for November 22, 1963 to finally come so that he can prevent President John F. Kennedy from being murdered (ostensibly by Lee Harvey Oswald and him alone).

Now, I don’t believe the official narrative that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in this murderous crime, despite what the Warren Commission said or any of the books that support that view. But, for whatever reason, Stephen King does believe it or least the characters in his book do, and I think the reason is to simplify the story line of his novel, which desperately needed simplifying.

Regardless, the hero of the story Jake Epping acts in that belief and takes on the mission of saving President Kennedy at the request of his dying friend, the diner owner Al Tempelton. Jake travels to the past through the wormhole thing, which is accessed inside Al’s diner at the back of the pantry, and emerges on September 9, 1958 at about 11:00 am local time (I forget exactly the time). All such trips back in time always end up at that exact date and time and are, as we’re told, a complete reset; any changes made to history on a previous trip are erased with each new trip. More on that later. And when returning from the past (The Land of Ago), only two minutes will have elapsed in the present. Interesting.

So, Jake first makes some preliminary trips back to 1958 just to explore a little. When he is finally ready for the main event, to save President Kennedy, he goes through the wormhole thing again, ending up again on September 9, 1958. He has a few errands to accomplish that take up some time, but most of his time is spent waiting for 1963. It’s a long wait that gets him involved in all kinds of (extraneous) adventures to fill up the time.

Now to cut to the chase (sorry for the spoiler), Jake does prevent Kennedy from being shot, just barely, and manages to get back to the present, although pretty beaten up. He goes back through the wormhole, which is still there and emerges just two minutes past when he originally when in. But he finds, to his complete horror, that the world is now in total chaos. Natural disasters (earthquakes) and strange rumbling sounds are common. Atomic weapons have been used more than once and deadly radiation has caused a multitude of environmental crises. Many people are damaged by the effects of radiation. Society is at a near complete breakdown. Jake realizes that changing history has disrupted the entire stability of the planet, and he must undo his changes! He also comes to understand (through an enigmatic character called the Green Card Man), that each trip is not a true reset of the timeline, but in fact, a separate thread of time. These threads can vary a little or a lot from the primary timeline thread, but as more and more threads accumulate, the complexity becomes unmanageable and reality itself is endangered.

Threads of time is a very interesting time-travel, alternate worlds concept (and treated in many other places), because, of course, it’s the ideas that make science fiction great, after all. King doesn’t spend much time on it, though. He mentions it at the end of the book as a way of providing some Sci-Fi justification for what happened.

A lot of time-travel stories don’t dwell on the mechanism for getting into the past, and this one doesn’t much either. Authors are often more interested in telling their tale, and King is more interested in getting Jake to the past than explaining why this wormhole happened to be in Al’s diner and why it happens to open to 1958. Certainly to make this story possible, Jake has to go back before 1963, but 1958? Five years to live in the past is a lot of time to account for. And all this time means Jake has a lot of living to do. The novel contains tons of details about the past (good) and many characters that we meet only once (slightly confusing since many potential subplots are left dangling).

My opinion? Personally, I think the whole tale is overwrought: It’s too long, too elaborate, too grandiose, too sprawling in time and place, and too improbable to really be a great story. Several times I found myself stepping out of the fantasy of the book to imagine King slogging through another chapter, forcing the dialog.

The depiction of immoral situations, though not explicit, is not acceptable. The bad language is overdone, for sure, especially the misuse of God’s Holy Name, which should never be mentioned except in devout and sincere prayer. King claims to be an atheist, but his repeated mention of God (not always in a sacrilegious way) makes me wonder. I think there’s hope for his conversion!

Some questions, Mr. King:

• Why would Jake even take on this mission from Al Tempelton? Is Jake’s life that boring? Yes, he was a divorced English teacher and that might be boring, so, sure, go back into the past to see it. But why accept such an insane, dangerous (Jake did get beaten nearly to death), and long mission from a guy who is dying? Al’s dream is to save JFK, not Jake’s!
• Why 1958? That conveniently sets up the run to 1963, and it’s not so close as to seem contrived (though it is), but it’s a long time to fill with endless subplots and day-to-day living that we all know is not the main point of the story. With that much time to fill, the granularity of detail necessarily cannot be uniform. Some months are just waved away with a sentence, while other events are given pages and pages.
• Given that this time tunnel to 1958 was possible, wow! How is this even possible? What does our known physics have to say about this? Maybe contact the top physics professors in the world so they can attempt to explain this phenomenon and learn from it!
• Why the extreme amount of immorality and bad language? Unnecessary and not believable.

So, the bottom line is that I didn’t really enjoy the book overall. There were a few good ideas (that’s what we read Sci-Fi for!), and I did finish the book (King is a good story teller), but the plot felt forced, unnatural, and overwrought. I didn’t see the TV adaptation on Hulu because I’m not a subscriber, but I did watch the video clips and interviews on YouTube. That adaptation looks good, and I would like to see it someday. Any historical recreation has to invest in sets, and of course cars of the period to make it realistic, and I think the Hulu version did that. I’m not sure what the Hulu version changed in the plot, but I’d like to find out.

This book seemed to me to be King’s version of Time and Again by the master Jack Finney, except that it wasn’t nearly as good. King, to his credit, is stepping out of his preferred genre, which is horror, and he specifically acknowledged Jack Finney as the writer of the definitive time travel story. When I read this, I immediately liked 11/22/63 better and respected King more for his humility.