11.22.63: Stephen King

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How about the late ‘50s red and white Plymouth Fury in the parking lot of the mill, the first car Jake sees when he steps back in time? Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. The most important, perhaps, is that each visit affects a reset, and any changes made during a previous visit will be lost. King really brings the humanity to Marina, his wife and their child and he even shows the humanity of Lee at moments with his daughter.

He has created his own brand of psychological suspense - with the brilliant and scary insight into the minds of average everyday people (who all have some darkness inside them and a skeleton or two in the closet - sometimes quite literally) superimposed onto the masterful description of small towns themselves (eerily resembling sentient living creatures, determined to hold on to their dark secrets).

In all that time, he runs across a white man who says racist things and consequently decides he doesn't like the guy. Once in the future, Jake discovers that Earth has become a wasteland after a nuclear war in 1974, and that natural disasters occur regularly. Now on my reread, I already knew what was coming - the same urgency wasn't there - so I was able to appreciate that storyline a bit more and it's actually really piqued an interest in learning more about this moment in American history.

I'm not a horror fan, but I love a good alternate history, and I figured that a story of a man who goes back in time to stop Kennedy's assassination could be one of those. Al's method of time travel is a time portal he discovered in his diner's pantry, which he used to transport himself to 1958. Fans of his story "It" may be excited to know he revisits the town of Derry, Maine, where "It" was located. He spent four years in the past after entering the portal the previous night, traveling to Dallas, Texas, to track Lee Harvey Oswald, plotting to kill the would-be assassin during his attempted murder of General Edwin Walker. and yet he never sees anything to complain about with regard to the way women are treated in that time.Leaving behind a world of computers and mobile phones, he goes back to a time of big American cars and diners, of Lindy Hopping, the sound of Elvis, and the taste of root beer. After that, you could try more King, or move on and at least be able to tell your friends, “yeah, I read a Stephen King book *accomplished grin on face*”.

King introduces some of the key players from It into the events of this novel, cementing the history of that fictional town in place. And yet even though there is no plausible reason whatsoever for this to be the case, I will nonetheless accept it as true and simply go back a-fucking-GAIN just to undo what I spent 800 pages doing. There were also several sighs of relief and a couple of cute moments involving Jake's romance that just made me say "aww".Characters [ edit ] Fictional [ edit ] Jacob "Jake" Epping An English teacher at Lisbon Falls High School in Maine. Jake arrives with Deke Simmons, the former principal of the high school and Mimi's widower, and saves Sadie from being killed, but Clayton cuts his throat in front of them. It’s still wonderful, still so well-written and engaging, and I am thankful to King for being able to bring me that happiness that reading a good book can give you. I'd like to thank Stephen King personally for perpetuating stereotypes that just need to freaking die already. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional.