11/22/63 by Stephen King

I'm a sucker for Stephen King. When he is good, he is very, very good. He can tap into universal fears and convince readers that they are right to fear clowns, houses that appear "wrong" somehow, malevolent cats and dogs, and even inanimate machines (like cars) that seem to bear grudges. He can develop characters who come alive better than any living author I have read. He believes in an absolute evil that all must confront, both in themselves and outside themselves. (This last attribute--a belief in good and evil--is not an acceptable concept to some, I know.) When he is bad, he is not horrid, just hokey and formulaic. This novel leans toward the good side, but it is not among his very best.

The subject here is not things that go bump in the night, but time travel. Jake Epping is a 35-year-old, recently-divorced English teacher. When his friend Al shows him a portal to a past time, 1958, he decides to give it a try, mainly to see if he can save a particular family, that of a GED student who has written an essay about the slaying of his mother and siblings.

The hitch with this time travel is that when the traveler returns to his present and then goes through the portal again, back to 1958, time starts over, so that anything previously changed has reverted. When Al persuades Jake to go back in time to try to save President Kennedy from being killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, Jake first has to go back to re-save the student's family, before traveling to Texas to wait for 1963.

The remainder of the book concerns Jake's time in a small town in Texas, where he falls in love; and his shadowing of Oswald, to be sure that he alone was responsible for Kennedy's death. And, then of course, the race to stop the assassination.

This, then, is not so much an alternate history as it is an account of how Jake changes history. The conclusion is a bit surprising, and somewhat anticlimactic.

Good Things: The story is absorbing and mostly well paced. The portrayal of Oswald and his wife Marina is convincing. The plot is logical, once the basic suspension of disbelief about time travel has been overcome.

Bad Things: The level of character development is limited to only a few of the participants, thus failing to create total involvement. The novel is too long (831 pages)and should have been trimmed somewhat of details, particularly of the mechanics of the shadowing of Oswald.

The Main Bad Thing for me, though, would not be noted by a non-Texan. King got the geography and culture of Texas wrong! With his (obviously extensive) research about Oswald and Dallas, he should have included a look at the map of Texas. Three times he mentions the odor of oil and natural gas in Dallas, which supposedly comes from the Permian Basin and Midland/Odessa. That's 300+ miles. Really? His fictional small Texas town is near Killeen, which is characterized as being in South Central Texas. Really? A band of amateur teenage musicians from San Antonio comes to play at a party in this town. That's 100+ miles. Really? At the same party, with students in attendance, the high school faculty members are getting loaded on beer. Did King not know about the Bible Belt? Really? Businessmen in Dallas are portrayed as wearing holsters and handguns to work. (Open-carry has been prohibited in Texas since Reconstruction.) Really? I know this is picky, but if you have the money and resources of Stephen King, you should hire the people to do the research, even if you don't want to bother yourself.

I would give this novel a B+ in comparison with the rest of King's works. It is still a late-into-the-night, absorbing read.