11/22/63: A Novel

By Stephen King
2011
849 pages. Audio: 30 hours and 40 minutes
Fiction

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I have quite the conundrum. What shall I do with Stephen King? He is so widely read that it might be a waste of time to write one more review. And people have sort of made up their minds one way or the other. But then if I decide to review a King book, which of the dozens that he is written shall I pick? Or maybe that was a dozen written in the last two years.

There are few well-known authors who have written as many mediocre or poor books as King, but that should not obscure the fact that he has written some excellent ones as well. Neither should we pigeonhole him as strictly a horror writer although that still seems to be his most natural home.

Now, before I try to sell you on this particular book, let me engage in that most entertaining game of asking which is King’s best book? In my estimation he has written two superb novels: the one I am reviewing now and Misery. This is not the place to go into all the merits of Misery but, even with nothing supernatural happening at all, it is a very creepy book with some of the most superb passages on writing you will find in a book of fiction. His very good books also include the dark comedy about desire, Needful Things; the apocalyptic thriller, The Stand; and that terrifying book of childhood angst, It. Nobody does the fears of children better than King. There are also about 100 others.

But 11/22/63 is a truly excellent novel by any standard. The supernatural does not play a prominent role in this novel, aside from the fact that it is a time travel novel. Many people have attempted the time travel theme, which presents all sorts of problems, but of all those attempts this is surely the best.

And so our intrepid hero, who in good King fashion is a very ordinary man, goes back in time in an attempt to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing JFK. This presents us with a couple of intriguing questions. First, will he succeed? Second, would it be a good thing if he did? Ah, that pesky butterfly effect.

Because of all the horror pyrotechnics often appearing in King’s books, it is easy to overlook what a superb storyteller he actually is. This one is almost 850 pages long but I assure you that the pages turn very quickly. King has a remarkable ability to build up tension in his novels. You can almost feel your anxiety rise as you near the end. My complaint about many of his novels is that he is much better with the buildup than he is with the conclusion. The books often have a way of flattening out at the end. And there are some special problems with the time travel novel where you have to figure out how to straighten out what you might have disarranged.

But this book is difficult to put down once you’ve started. He has taken an iconic event of American history and found a way to tell a compelling and original story. If you’ve never read a King book give this one a try. I’ll bet it’s not what you expected.