11-22-63

Stephen King published 11/22/63 in January 2012. Admittedly, I’ve never been a Stephen King fan as the result of his frequent departure to supernatural story lines. However, I’ve also been a lifelong fan of time travel stories, and my daughter recommended the book as one of her all-time favorites. I found it on Libby and listened to it’s beautiful narration by Craig Wasson. It’s a date that I clearly remember. I was 13 years old and in an eighth grade world history class with Mr. Williams who was interrupted for a brief private discussion with the school’s Vice-Principal, Mr. Bragg. Mr. Williams came back to the classroom to announce the news that President Kennedy had been shot. It was also my sister’s 16^th birthday. Hopefully, you know something of that day and the days that followed.

In King’s novel, an English teacher in a small town in Maine, Jake Epping, stumbled into a time warp that allowed him to go back to 1958, and then return to his private life inn 2011. Unlike other time travel stories, like H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine or the movie Back to the Future, Epping could not dial in any date he wanted, so it was 1958 or nothing. He was so disturbed by the Kennedy murder that it was his ambition to go back in time in order to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from this horrible act. Epping had to go back to this time five years before the assassination and figure out how to go about doing the deed, and then escaping back to 2011. In 1958, he created an identify for himself, and found a job teaching English on a substitute basis. He quickly became accepted in his small community, but he had to keep his actual reason for being there a secret. Epping did not expect to fall in love which added a significant wrinkle to his plans.

 

King did a beautiful job describing life in the US during the 1958 to 1963 period. He wrote about the awkwardness of Epping meeting Oswald and his family. Meanwhile, there were a number of unexpected roadblocks to interfering with Oswald, as if the past was working to defend itself and keep anyone for making any profound changes. I won’t be a spoiler and write if Epping was successful, but King did skillfully introduce the notion that changing history, even from the most grotesque of acts, might not always lead to a better outcome for mankind.

 

Like my daughter, I was entranced by the story that King spun, and this novel gets my strongest recommendation.

Holly

At MRB, we’ve reviewed a few Stephen King novels, but we’ve not shown much interest in this prolific author. I have not liked the books in which he strays into the occult world, but his most recent release, Holly, does not do that. This is a straightforward serial murder mystery with great characters mixed in with some bizarre, crazy college professors. There are several simultaneous family dramas all of which are believably presented. I listened to this one in audiobook format, and it was delightfully done. The plot is very well created which will keep you guessing until the very end. I did not want to put Holly down and I rate that as a 5/5.

On Writing by Stephen King

Although I’ve never been a fan of the horror genre, just does not grab me like a great thriller, a friend suggested I have a look at “On Writing by Stephen King – A Memoir of the Craft.” I don’t think I’ve ever finished a Stephen King novel, but I’m aware of his success as a writer, and some of his books that have become very successful movies (like Carrie and Misery). Given my aversion to horror movies, I can’t imagine going to see a movie titled Misery. I go to the movies to be entertained, not to be reminded of other people’s misery and horror. But, I was pleasantly surprised by this nonfiction work which is partly about his writing method and style, and partly a memoir. I can imagine that someone who is really a fan and has read most of his books would thoroughly enjoy this book.

For me, the most remarkable part of his writing experience is that he does not start with an outline of his books and characters, and where he wants the story to go. He starts with some event/situation and then develops the stories from where his characters lead him. He describes a sort of passive role in the story creation, just lets the story take him wherever the characters tell him. Actually, it's quite similar to what Anne Lamott describes in her own writing, as will be reviewed shortly.

 

In the memoir, King recounts his difficult childhood and his escape into literature, both reading voluminously and writing stories from an early age. Clearly he is obsessed with the written word and has spent a lifetime at being good at it. Notably, he is an alcoholic who was able to respond to his wife’s demands that he give it up. He has had one long marriage with a woman he deeply loves. He obviously thinks about and studies his craft, and he is able to quote his own literature as well as others for examples of good and bad prose. 

 

For me, this is a weird example of being impressed with a writer, but not liking the genre in which he has produced some of his most famous works. However, if you’re a King fan, then I think this is a must-read book.

 

WCD

11/22/63 by Stephen King

Jake Epping is a high school English teacher in Lisbon, Maine. In the summer, he taught a GED creative writing course where he rarely ran across a story that was moving, at least until he read janitor Harry Dunning’s response to an assignment to write about a day that changed his life. Harry, aka Hoptoad Harry, so named by the school kids because of his severe limp, used poor spelling and poor grammar, but he spun one hell of a tale – the night his father murdered his mother, three siblings, and permanently damaged Harry.

But, what does that have to do with the title “11/22/63,” which was the day John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas? Al Templeton owned Al’s Diner in Lisbon where Jake sometimes stopped to eat Al’s famed burgers. Jake was greatly surprised when Al called and asked Jake to come by, and it was then Jake learned that Al was close to death from cancer. He also learned Al’s dark secret, that there was a time travel portal hidden in the old diner. Al was fixated on the notion that the world would be a much better place in 2011 if Kennedy had remained alive. He assumed that the Vietnam War would never have happened, and that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy would not have been killed. But, he was dying and no longer had the strength to carry out his plan to save Kennedy, and he wanted Jake to do it.

Stephen King talks about the “butterfly effect,” something well known to physicists in the dialogue about time travel, the notion that if one were able to do time travel and made the most minimal of changes, like killing a butterfly, that there would be a cascade of events that followed that might change everything. Such a series of events might even prevent the birth of the person who was making the changes. Before Jake took on the task of saving Kennedy, he had to prove to himself that he could make changes that worked, that were lasting. So, he went back to the past and saved Hoptoad Harry and his family. However, upon Jakes return to the future, he learned that instead of Harry losing his family and being disabled for life, a very healthy Harry was inducted into the U.S. Army and was killed during the Vietnamese Tet offensive in 1968. Nonetheless, Jake took on the task of saving Kennedy.

I’m not normally a fan of Stephen King, but this book was recommended to me by my sister, who rarely gives me bad advice. (There must have been a time, but I don’t remember it.) The date of Kennedy’s death just happened to be her 16^th birthday, and I vividly remember learning of his death and the gloom that hung over the family’s planned birthday celebration. Also, I’m admittedly captured by stories about time travel, and while this book does not live up to the writing in “The Little Book” by Selden Edwards, it was a most enjoyable read. King captured what life was like in the 50s and 60s, a simpler time when trust among strangers was possible. King introduced a series of believable and well-developed characters to surround the protagonist and support the many subplots. The action was fast-paced, in part based on his premise that, “The past is obdurate. It doesn’t want to be changed.” This is a long book, nearly 900 pages, and I was sorry when it came to a close. I thought I knew what King would do in order to bring the main plot and subplots to a conclusion, but I was wrong – he disguised that to the end. Thanks to my sister for the recommendation. This book gets my recommendation, too.

Revival

Stephen King has written 54 novels, but he has been interestingly mostly ignored in this blog. ECD did one book review on a book called Dr. Sleep, but that’s it. His review was not particularly favorable. King has sold 350 million books, but for whatever reason, he’s not captured my attention. I decided to give this very prolific author a chance with a recent novel, Revival. This isn’t a crime novel, and it should probably be classified as a horror/fantasy book.

The story is about Jamie Morton, a boy in rural Maine, and Charles Jacobs, the new young minister of the church where Jamie’s family attends, and the story follows the two of them through their lives. Charles suffers the fate of having his wife and son killed in an auto accident, and then getting fired from the church when he unleashes the “Terrible Sermon” about there having been no God watching out for his family. Charles said, “But as I stood in the back room of [the funeral home] and looked down at the mangled remains of my boy, who wanted to go to Disneyland much more than he wanted to go to heaven, I had a revelation. Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so – pardon the pun – so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist.”

But Reverend Charlie was also an experimenter and he was fascinated by electricity. He spent his life trying to understand its power and its uses, especially to heal people of various maladies. He developed a sham ministry in order to collect money that would fund his experiments and provide him with willing subjects. King takes us through the twists and turns of the reverend’s lfie and Jamie’s struggles through life until they encounter one another again, far from Maine, now with both as adults. I thought the dialogue and the attraction that they had to one another was compelling, and at 80% of the way through the book, King still had me in his grips, but then it came apart with the fantasy/mystical ending which I thought was absurd. If the ending was intended to be horror, it was not – just stupid. But, 350 million books sold – they can’t be all bad. Still, I’m no more motivated to read King than I have in the past. Oh well, at least I gave it a try.

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Ever wondered what happened to Danny Torrance, the kid that the Overlook Hotel wanted in The Shining (The book, not the movie)?

Like father, like son; Danny grows up a drunk. Started drinking around age 14. Bounced from one menial job to the next, he was a mean drunk. Did his share of coke, too. Went home with this one coke-head, woke up with a world class hangover. Drags himself out of bed, steals her money, and just as he's about gone, a toddler in a droopy diaper appears, sees the remnants of their partying lined up on a table and mumbles, "Canny". Danny just leaves and tries to bury, unsuccessfully, that particular image. 

He heads north on a bus, knowing he'll be dead soon if his attempts to use alcohol and drugs to shake the nightmares of The Overlook and his father fail. Something about a small New Hampshire town beckons him where he is sort of taken in by a city employee working TeenyTown, the local summer tourist attraction. But a condition of employment is 90 in 90; 90 AA meetings in 90 days. 

Slowly, Danny gets sober, rents an apartment and starts working at the local hospice where, with time, his shining abilities become a bit more controllable. People dying are in need of someone to help them cross over and Danny's telepathic/empathic skills do just that, getting him the moniker of Doctor Sleep.

In the next town, however, Abra is born, and Abra's skills make Danny look like a sideshow barker. She reached out to Danny within hours of being born and by middle school, can leave messages on a blackboard where Danny lives. Think of her as Carrie on steroids. She and Danny can shine back and forth with each other even when separated by hundreds of miles.

Traveling around the country is a band of oldsters in motorhomes, going nowhere in particular. That's not quite accurate. This crowd, The True Knot, are a bunch of immortals, some date back over a millennia or more. The survive by sucking steam - that's the essence that leaves the body of someone with the shine when they die.

Their leader, Rose the Hat, can sense kids who can shine. The kid is tracked down, kidnapped, tortured (the more scared, the better the steam), killed, and their steam is captured in canisters for later use. After killing a kid in Nebraska, Rose starts to zero in on Abra, but not before returning to a campground they own up in the Colorado mountains. A camp that just happens to occupy the land of a former luxury mountain hotel by the name of The Overlook.

From here, we follow the Knot's attempts to find and grab Abra, Danny's attempts to block those attempts, finally leading up to the final confrontation between Danny and Rose on the still possessed grounds of the former Overlook hotel.

I've mentioned in passing here at MRB that I read a few early King books back in the late 70's, including The Shining (which scared the ever loving crap out of me). I tried The Stand, but couldn't get through that 1000 page monster and never went back to either the books or his supernatural movies (OK, I did see Shawshank and Stand By Me, both terrific, but never read either).

But this one intrigued me and decided to give it a go. And, for the most part, I liked it just fine. Yeah, it was a little heavy on the AA angle and came to find out from the 'about the author' segment that King wrote The Shining essentially in an alcoholic haze. Never quite got all that caught up in the Knot part of the plot triangle, but thoroughly enjoyed the Danny-Abra relationship with Danny working out the demons of his past while helping Abra and her family come to grips with just who Abra is and can be.

Monday or Tuesday night, I woke up around 3am for no reason so I started reading. Two hours later, I had finished the book - the final chase into the Rockies, setup, and eventual confrontation with Rose and the True Knot. Upon finishing, I went back to sleep for a couple hours.

In the morning, it struck me. There was no way I could've done the same thing reading The Shining - I would've been up for a couple days if I'd read that ending in the middle of the night. For that reason alone, I think I can say that, as good as the Danny-Abra story was, the overall book was just so-so for me. It just didn't have the soul or the shear terror of its predecessor. Maybe as a standalone, it might be better. But if, like me, you read The Shining, I'm going to bet you'll be thinking Doctor Sleep doesn't follow the same trail as that explored in The Shining.

East Coast Don