11/22/63 by Stephen King

I have lost faith in Stephen King over the years. I know he is a great writer, and I did love him up to the last ten years or so, but I wanted to take a chance on Stephen's book 11/22/63. I did everything a skeptic does, they wait for the paperback version of the book and then even wait close to a year before you buy that.

The premise of the book is great: Innocent everyman is given the chance to change history in hopes the changes he makes are beneficial for all mankind. It reminds me of the question I have been asked and then asked myself to other people: If you could go back in time, would you kill Adolf Hitler, even if meant it would most assuredly be the end of your life? The answers vary.

Perhaps this is meant as a cautionary tale. I don't know. All I know is this book is a veritable train wreck. Where Stephen King lacks in story line that will make more of the time traveling story, he pulls in story lines and characters from his other more successful books and from the film The Butterfly Effect.

We begin the story with Jake, the high school teacher that during the summer of 2011 teaches a GED class. He reads the essay of an older man called Harry who tells about the night his father killed his mother and his two younger brothers and baby sister with a hammer in Derry, Maine (which Stephen King fans will remember was the locale for It). He is so impressed with the emotional earnestness of the story he gives the man an A and attends his graduation and even buys him supper at the local diner where we meet Al, the proprietor of one of those quaint Airliner trailer style diners.

As the story unfolds, Al reveals that A) he is dying and B) the back of his trailer has a rabbit hole where he can walk back to 1958, September 9, 1958, and it is always September 9, 1958, and he has been trying to do everything he can to keep President John F. Kennedy from being assassinated in Dallas, Texas on 11/22/63. You would think this would be simple enough. Not in the hands of Stephen King.

Basically, you learn the truth, that all things happen for a reason and you are not supposed to contravene time, but allow all those things to happen the way they are supposed to and you are not supposed to meddle with it. Jake's trip into 1958 America is great in some ways and terrible in others and where the plot seems weak and thin, Stephen King dips into his other novels, It and The Dead Zone most promiscuously and bogs down an already slow moving story without much in the way of relief.

There is of course a moral to the story, and if you have ever seen The Butterfly Effect, you know what that is.

Don't waste your hard earned books money. Books are expensive as it is...

I haven't read the book but after reading this review I went back and looked at not only Stephan King and his life and works, but also the wikipedia write up on the book. The book is not his normal genre, that is for certain. I also think that he probably over complicated it by including so many other charcters from other stories in periphial ways. I often have wondered if he isnt just tired of writing sometimes. It seems that after his accident in 1999 he changed alot. It's almost like, even tho he is dry he is compelled to continue to write. I may not waste my time to read the book, but I will be interested in seeing how future books turn out.

Well, Stephen would really like to write science fiction, but he just misses something essential in the story. Even It is something of a Science Fiction story. Stephen does his best work when he works with horror, which is a fine line anyway between Sci-Fy and Horror....I wished he would return to pure horror and tell me one more bedtime story sure to scare the shit out of me