My Reveiw of Stephen King's Newest Book 11/22/63

A week ago, I finished reading Stephen King's new book, 11/22/63.  Jake Epping, the protagonist of this novel, is presented with a chance to travel back in time and save President Kennedy from Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet. Under the alias, George Amberson, Epping reluctantly slips out of his life in 2011 and enters 1958, where he plans to culminate his five year visit to the past by preventing John F. Kennedy assassination. Well meaning Epping, imagines that changing this single episode in history will eliminate much suffering and unhappiness, and as a result, the world, then onward, will be a better place.Although, he acknowledges at the beginning of his journey that the butterfly affect can have disastrous consequences on the present, Epping disregards this knowledge and interacts extensively with the past. He works, makes friends, and even falls in love.

The story Stephen King weaves in 11/22/63 is an unusual combination of sci-fi and history but Epping's human motivators and desires make this fantastical plot believable. Normally, I don't enjoy reading science-fiction, but I found myself drawn to the notion of time travel and the implications (not as positive as imagined) that changing history could have on the present.. In a clever twist that drives the plot, King creates an "obdurate" past resistant to alteration and in this way reinforces the aphorism that we cannot change the past but only learn from it. In fact, when Epping changes the past of Carolyn Poulin, a woman who lives to triumphantly overcome a handicap of a childhood accident, her life while unhampered by injury, becomes otherwise unspectacular. Through out the book, King stresses that "The multiple choices and possibilites of daily life are the music we dance to."

While I was captivated by the historical details of the novel(I learned more about Oswald from King's narrative than from any history teacher), and however tantalizing it was to discover King's hypothetical present created by changes in a documented past, what compelled me to keep turning the pages was the love story between Epping as Amberson and Sadie Dunhill.  Epping does not meet Sadie until page 338 of the 842 page tome but once she enters the story, she is a constant presence in Epping's life and therefore a pivotal character in the novel. Epping's unintentionally physical introduction to Sadie (he accidentally gropes her) is misleading and at first King had me believing that this initial closeness would lead to nothing more than friendship. Epping confirms this on page 346, when, shortly after this first encounter, he states "We didn't become lovers, but we became friends." Despite this assertion, Epping and Sadie do fall in love (the kind of love that transgresses the boundaries of time) and just as vehemently as he decries any possibility for romance at first, in one of my favorite quotes at the end of the book Epping states "But I believe in love, you know; love is uniquely portable magic, I don't think its in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind  and heart to heart." I never expected Stephen King, who I regarded as the R.L Steing of adult horror fiction, to be capable of creating such a poignant love story as the one between Epping and Sadie.

11/22/63 did not convert me into a diehard Stephen King fan but  I was well rewarded for the time I invested to reading this lengthy novel. From what I understand, 11/22/63  is a departure from Stephen King's usual style and themes. I imagine that this deviation could alienate some of his longtime followers but I believe that it can also broaden his fanbase, as readers who typically would not indulge in this genre of writing (Me!!) could really come to appreciate King's skillful storytelling.