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.