The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
I’m still convinced 11/22/63 is Stephen King’s best novel. I read it with a little more scrutiny this time and I knew the twists and turns before they came, but I firmly believe a first-time reader would enjoy this novel the best of all his works. The greatness of this novel is layered through all the phases of the story. It’s a top-notch time travel novel.
The book was dedicated to a new grand daughter in Stephen King’s family come 2011. “For Zelda, hey, honey.”
King through his characters speculates that conspiracy theories around the Kennedy assassination come from a lack of balance between JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald as men. Oswald shouldn’t have been able to win based on moral weight. It just wasn’t right.
In the afterword, he also speculates that the series of coincidences that led to Jack Ruby being there to assassinate Oswald, eliminating the possibility of a trial with Oswald’s last words being that he was a patsy for the crime, set up the conspiracy theory fodder for all time. King agrees with the lone gunman theory from the Warren Commission’s conclusions. His wife believes there was a conspiracy.
We return to Derry in 1958 to right a wrong. But the whole town is wrong. Readers of It know there is a dark murderous force below the city and a veil of forgetfulness and selective blindness over most of the people who live there at this point in the town’s history. You can tell right from the start this won’t be good.
Our main character gets a similar feeling upon entering 1960s Dallas and King explains that Dallas wasn’t a very nice place at the time that Kennedy made his fateful visit. King did exhaustive research for this including tours of a number of locations. He paid to enter a few places not typically on the usual maps and used these in his story. This research led to rich detail that fills out the world of this story very, very well.
Our character in his searches of the past talks about being “crippled by the Internet.” Hunting down a person or information in 1958 is a much tougher proposition than in 2011 and beyond.
King uses the word “obdurate” a lot in this novel to describe the resistance of history to being changed. The presence and actions of a time traveler trying to change things creates harmonics that cause echoes of events and people. A soft doubling of sorts that warns of bigger troubles to come. King used “obdurate” on occasion in a number of past novels.
The Yellow Card Man is an interesting figure that hints at mysterious forces that are set to try to protect the past and the portals between time periods, but what powers do these boogeymen have?
How many chances do you get? The fixed nature of the doorway between times adds urgency to each attempt to change the past in a really powerful way.
King talks about “easy credit terms” as an analogy for the nature of life. He’s used that phrase in more than one story.
I forgot about the Florida stint of his journey to the past.
“Explanations are such cheap poetry.” Great line.
He stays at the Hotel Monteleon in New Orleans. I was there for the World Horror Convention in 2013 shortly after I quit teaching to write full-time.
The character writes a novel as a cover story and then there is some confusion over when exactly he is writing the narrative that we are reading. Substitute teaching allows him some time off to visit Dallas as he settles into life in a small town outside of the big city. Things get darker as he has to move closer to the action.
Then, there is a girl. There’s always a girl, but this gives the story depth and personal stakes. It’s a lovely relationship. The confrontation with her ex-husband is well written, but a bit anti-climactic in a confrontational sense. Still, the course that encounter takes is surprising and therefore a good story choice, in my opinion. He was robbed of his monstrous power and it was a good turn. It gives our main character something to lose, something to fight for, something bigger than history alone.
There is a great danger in honesty when you are a time traveler. Be careful not to sing songs not yet written, to use slang outside of the time period, or to predict things too accurately.
The character talks to his dead friend in the long months alone to give him a foil to essentially argue with himself about some tough choices.
King presents Lee Oswald’s arc as sort of being wound up into the dangerous man he becomes. All the pieces are there for him to be trouble all along though.
The Cuban Missile Crisis hits everyone hard. With Cold War fears of nuclear war at their height, King compares the atmosphere to the psychological aftermath of 911. To the people in the dark valley of the present, it looks different than it did in history.
“Never underestimate America’s ability to accept fascism disguised as populism” is a really powerful and prophetic line.
The Texas School Book Depository is treated like a haunted house or a cursed graveyard with a palpable presence and power. It is surrounded by dark magic in a sense without coming right out and saying that it is.
The changes to history as a result of our character’s actions are interesting. There are consequences beyond the normal butterfly effect that cause all historic alterations, even ones meant for the good, to come at a very high cost.
The Takuro Spirit is the car of alternate realities in Stephen King’s universe. One appears at a thin point between worlds in the narrative of Wizard and Glass from the Dark Tower series.
Apparently, it was his son Joe Hill who suggested a better ending to the book, and I believe Joe was right about this one. It’s one of King’s best endings for his best novel.
Jimla!
My next post in this series will be Before A Face in the Crowd which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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