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Summary
Summary
On November 22, 1963, three shots changed the world. What if it never happened? Jake Epping is a 35-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. Jake's friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane - and insanely impossible - mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination.
Summary
One of the Ten Best Books of The New York Times Book Review
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Now a miniseries from Hulu starring James Franco
ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, THREE SHOTS RANG OUT IN DALLAS, PRESIDENT KENNEDY DIED, AND THE WORLD CHANGED. WHAT IF YOU COULD CHANGE IT BACK?
In this brilliantly conceived tour de force, Stephen King--who has absorbed the social, political, and popular culture of his generation more imaginatively and thoroughly than any other writer--takes readers on an incredible journey into the past and the possibility of altering it.
It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away--a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning's father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer. Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life--like Harry's, like America's in 1963--turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession--to prevent the Kennedy assassination.
So begins Jake's new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there's Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore. Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying.
Author Notes
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. After graduating with a Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, he became a teacher. His spare time was spent writing short stories and novels.
King's first novel would never have been published if not for his wife. She removed the first few chapters from the garbage after King had thrown them away in frustration. Three months later, he received a $2,500 advance from Doubleday Publishing for the book that went on to sell a modest 13,000 hardcover copies. That book, Carrie, was about a girl with telekinetic powers who is tormented by bullies at school. She uses her power, in turn, to torment and eventually destroy her mean-spirited classmates. When United Artists released the film version in 1976, it was a critical and commercial success. The paperback version of the book, released after the movie, went on to sell more than two-and-a-half million copies.
Many of King's other horror novels have been adapted into movies, including The Shining, Firestarter, Pet Semetary, Cujo, Misery, The Stand, and The Tommyknockers. Under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, King has written the books The Running Man, The Regulators, Thinner, The Long Walk, Roadwork, Rage, and It. He is number 2 on the Hollywood Reporter's '25 Most Powerful Authors' 2016 list.
King is one of the world's most successful writers, with more than 100 million copies of his works in print. Many of his books have been translated into foreign languages, and he writes new books at a rate of about one per year. In 2003, he received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2012 his title, The Wind Through the Keyhole made The New York Times Best Seller List. King's title's Mr. Mercedes and Revival made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2014. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2015 for Best Novel with Mr. Mercedes. King's title Finders Keepers made the New York Times bestseller list in 2015. Sleeping Beauties is his latest 2017 New York Times bestseller.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this audio edition of King's latest novel, which uses time travel to re-examine the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, both the author and narrator Craig Wasson deliver the goods. In what proves to be an adventurous, thrilling, thought-provoking, and romantic story, English teacher Jake Epping travels back in time and works to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating Kennedy. Wasson embodies the good-natured and honorable Epping, while creating accents and speech patterns for the supporting cast, capturing the twang of smalltown Texas high school students, Marina Oswald's struggle with the English language, and Kennedy's Boston accent, which the narrator doesn't overdo. Wasson is even able to provide a credible voice for George de Mohrenschildt, a friend (and possible co-conspirator) of Oswald who speaks English and Russian with a German accent. The audiobook includes an afterword featuring King discussing the book and a little-known vignette his research turned up about Oswald's assassin, Jack Ruby. A Scribner hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Like the similarly sprawling Under the Dome (2009), this novel was abandoned by King decades ago before he took another shot, and perhaps that accounts for both novels' intoxicating, early-King bouquet of ambition and swagger. In this distant cousin to The Dead Zone (1979), Jake Epping is living a normal schoolteacher's life when a short-order cook named Al introduces him to a time warp hidden in a diner pantry leading directly to 11:58 a.m., September 9, 1958. Al's dying of cancer, which means he needs a successor to carry out his grand mission: kill Lee Harvey Oswald so that the 1963 JFK assassination never happens. Jake takes the plunge and finds two things he never expected: true love and the fact that the obdurate past doesn't want to change. The roadblocks King throws into Jake's path are fairly ingenious some of them are outright gut-punches while history buffs will dig the upside-down travelogue of Oswald's life. This doesn't loom as large as some King epics; on the other hand, did we appreciate It in 1986 as much as we do now? Leave it at this: fans will love it. High-Demand Backstory: King is his own backstory: demand for anything new will be loud.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN all of Stephen King's work there is an admixture of the ordinary and the supernatural - call it the weird quotidian. In his new novel, "11/22/63," it is a rabbit hole into the past that pops up in Lisbon Falls, a woebegone corner of Maine. On one end is 2011. An unpopular diner has finally been bought out by L. L. Bean. The diner - and the time portal inside it - may last a few more weeks in the footprint of a burned textile mill. On the other end is America under Eisenhowen. The mill churns out white smoke. "Vertigo" is showing at the outdoor movie theater - on its first run. The Kennebec Fruit Company isn't a curio for tourists; it sells oranges. And John Kennedy, the young senator from Massachusetts, is still alive. The rules of the rabbit hole into the past are outlined in the first pages of the novel. Al Templeton, the owner of the diner, explains them to Jake Epping, an English teacher at the local high school. Walk to the back of the pantry. Mind the 60-watt bulb overhead. Expect the smell of sulfur. And keep walking until you feel your foot fall. Suddenly you're back on Sept. 9, 1958. It's 11:58 am. There are, Al says, only two conditions. One, it's not a one-way trip. It doesn't have to be. But when you return, no matter how long you've stayed in the past - two days, five years, whatever - only two minutes have gone by in the present. Two, each time you go back to the past, there is a reset. Like a Magic Slate. It's 11:58 am, and everything you did on your previous trip has been erased. With that, King dispenses with many of the mechanics of time-travel - and thank God for it. There is no extended discussion of the "grandfather paradox." ("What if you killed your grandfather?" "Why on earth would you do that?") The rules are simple. There is a reason for this: King is after something bigger. "11/22/63" is a meditation on memory, love, loss, free will and necessity. It's a blunderbuss of a book, rife with answers to questions: Can one man make a difference? Can history be changed, or does it snap back on itself like a rubber band? Does love conquer all? (The big stuff.) Al - the scuttlebutt is that he is serving burgers made of dog, or cat - is dying of lung cancer. Coughing up blood into a pile of maxi-pads. He enlists Jake to do what he couldn't: stop Lee Harvey Oswald. It's a fabulous pitch. "Save Kennedy, save his brother. Save Martin Luther King. Stop the race riots. Stop Vietnam, maybe. ... Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives." Jake Epping is a burned-out teacher with a seriously alcoholic ex-wife and nothing better to do than disappear into the past. The guilt trip works. And Epping falls into the past with a new name, George T. Amberson - as if time-travel required a new identity - and a clear mission. Correct the past. Undo some of the evils of the 20th century. Once in 1958, however, Amberson is immediately confronted by a double mystery: the mystery of what really happened then, and the mystery of what might be otherwise. Before George/Jake can alter the course of history, he has to know what actually occurred. Was it Oswald, shooting from the depository? Was it a conspiracy? Another shooter on the grassy knoll? How about George de Mohrenschildt, one persistent minor character in conspiracy thinking? They are the nightmare uncertainties of an event that has been overexamined, and never understood. Jake is a good person. He cannot kill Oswald without first knowing whether he was the responsible party, and a good part of the adventure is the investigation. Once in Dallas, Amberson has years to get to know Oswald, but he can't just bust down the door. History is fragile; he has to peer around corners. He buys tape recorders and long-distance listening devices, moves into grubby neighborhoods, trails Oswald as he stashes his rifle. What he learns is no surprise. Oswald was unpleasant in ordinary ways. Emotional, violent with his wife, unsure of himself and desperate to change a broken world. Did he kill Kennedy? It's easy to see King, the writer and researcher, as a fellow time-traveler, hopelessly curious about what Oswald might say on tape or reveal while strolling around Fort Worth. But the past, the novel repeatedly reminds us, is obdurate. Under interrogation, it guards its darkest secrets. Weeks before the 22nd, Amberson is living below the Oswalds, and he still can't be sure: "I tried the distance mic, standing on a chair and holding the Tupperware bowl almost against the ceiling. With it I could hear Lee talking and de Mohrenschildt's occasional replies, but I couldn't make out what they were saying." In "11/22/63," we get glimpses of a nimbus of evil that surrounds the world. There are no single crimes. Each act of cruelty or violence is somehow associated - harmonized, King would suggest - with every other act. Inside the past, Amberson learns there are no accidents, no inadvertencies. Just an infernal machine. (Tick, tock.) He says: "Coincidences happen, but I've come to believe they are actually quite rare. Something is at work, O.K.? Somewhere in the universe (or behind it), a great machine is ticking and turning its fabulous gears." There is a darker what-if. What if history is too forceful to redirect? What if jiggering the engine produces no favorable outcome - merely a postponement of the inevitable? If he had lived, Kennedy might not have escalated the war in Vietnam, and might have kept America out of a bloody mire. But we don't know. What if we were headed there anyway? Then our tampering might only make things worse. It is not historical inevitability, but something close. YET Amberson's own story is poetic and moving. It's complicated by romance: he falls in love with Sadie, the new school librarian in Jodie, Tex., his new hometown. The real events aren't historical, they're very small - giving advice to a football player, staging the school play, doing the Lindy Hop with Sadie. We are brought back to the weird quotidian, endlessly surrounded by the detritus of civilization: Kresge's, Ban-Lon, Aqua Velva, Studebaker. At first I found myself mildly irritated by the endless swirl of products. But I came - honestly - to love it. The past is full: of slogans and fry cooks and beautiful cars. And King has an excellent feel for how all of that transpires within the forward roll of history. In my favorite passage, King writes: "For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. ... A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark." King has said that he struggled with the idea for this book for more than 30 years. One can see why. In fiction, we can decide who did or did not kill Kennedy. Writer's choice (and King chooses.) But he pays his debts to history in other ways - by showing the machine and, at the same time, the simplest human knots, the love stories behind history: Sadie and George, Jack and Jackie. It all adds up to one of the best timetravel stories since H. G. Wells. King has captured something wonderful. Could it be the bottomlessness of reality? The closer you get to history, the more mysterious it becomes. He has written a deeply romantic and pessimistic book. It's romantic about the real possibility of love, and pessimistic about everything else. In King's earlier, more overtly supernatural novels, the quotidian is interrupted by some unspeakable horror. In "11/22/63," the quotidian contains the horror, something real and familiar. It's indifferent to human lives, and it is inescapable. It is time. The past, this novel reminds us, is obdurate. Under interrogation, it guards its darkest secrets. ONLINE Errol Morris interviews Stephen King at nytimes.com/bookreview. Errol Morris is a filmmaker and the author, most recently, of "Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography." He is working on a documentary about the Kennedy assassination.
Guardian Review
Many people wish they had been in Dallas on 22 November 1963, where they might somehow have diverted the motorcade or prevented Lee Harvey Oswald from entering the Texas School Book Depository. The possibility of such an intervention must number among the principal fantasies of time travel. But many readers of a novel about thwarting Oswald will question whether the hero is going after the right man. This nagging doubt about the security of the history being altered is beautifully used by King, with the Wikipedia entries of the racist Governor George Wallace, Paul McCartney and Hillary Clinton among those intriguingly re-edited. In a thoughtful afterword King reveals that he first tried to write this book in 1972 but felt too close to the raw pain of the assassination. With some senior writers, the dusting out of bottom drawers indicates creative stasis. But King has waited until the right time for this novel; the reader feels the benefit of his 40 years of narrative craftsmanship and reflection on his nation's history. - Mark Lawson Many people wish they had been in Dallas on 22 November 1963, where they might somehow have diverted the motorcade or prevented Lee Harvey Oswald from entering the Texas School Book Depository. The possibility of such an intervention must number among the principal fantasies of time travel. - Mark Lawson.
Kirkus Review
Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations. Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn't Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here ("For the first time since I'd topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy"), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom--don't ask why there--and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: "I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by." A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed--or maybe not. King's vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been--that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we're all actually living. "If you want to know what political extremism can lead to," warns King in an afterword, "look at the Zapruder film." Though his scenarios aren't always plausible in strictest terms, King's imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In King's latest, his first full-length novel since 2009's Under the Dome, the horror master ventures into sf. Maine restaurant owner Al tells high school English teacher Jake Epping that there's a time portal to the year 1958 in his diner. Al has terminal cancer and asks Jake to grant his dying wish: go back in time and prevent the 1963 assassination of JFK. Jake's travels take him first to Derry, ME-the fictional (and creepy) setting of King's 1986 blockbuster It-to try to stop the horrific 1958 murder of a family. Later, he heads to Texas, where he bides his time-teaching in a small town, where he falls for school librarian Sadie Dunhill-and keeps tabs on the thuggish Lee Harvey Oswald. It all leads to an inevitable climax at the Book Depository and an outcome that changes American history. VERDICT Though this hefty novel starts strong, diving energetically into the story and savoring the possibilities of time travel, the middle drags a bit-particularly during Jake's small-town life in Texas. Still, King remains an excellent storyteller, and his evocation of mid-20th-century America is deft. Alternate-history buffs will especially enjoy the twist ending. Film rights have been optioned by Jonathan Demme (of Silence of the Lambs fame). [See Prepub Alert, 5/23/11.]-David Rapp, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
8 On Monday, March 25, Lee came walking up Neely Street carrying a long package wrapped in brown paper. Peering through a tiny crack in the curtains, I could see the words REGISTERED and INSURED stamped on it in big red letters. For the first time I thought he seemed furtive and nervous, actually looking around at his exterior surroundings instead of at the spooky furniture deep in his head. I knew what was in the package: a 6.5mm Carcano rifle--also known as a Mannlicher-Carcano--complete with scope, purchased from Klein's Sporting Goods in Chicago. Five minutes after he climbed the outside stairs to the second floor, the gun Lee would use to change history was in a closet above my head. Marina took the famous pictures of him holding it just outside my living room window six days later, but I didn't see it. That was a Sunday, and I was in Jodie. As the tenth grew closer, those weekends with Sadie had become the most important, the dearest, things in my life. 9 I came awake with a jerk, hearing someone mutter "Still not too late" under his breath. I realized it was me and shut up. Sadie murmured some thick protest and turned over in bed. The familiar squeak of the springs locked me in place and time: the Candlewood Bungalows, April 5, 1963. I fumbled my watch from the nightstand and peered at the luminous numbers. It was quarter past two in the morning, which meant it was actually the sixth of April. Still not too late. Not too late for what? To back off, to let well enough alone? Or bad enough, come to that? The idea of backing off was attractive, God knew. If I went ahead and things went wrong, this could be my last night with Sadie. Ever. Even if you do have to kill him, you don't have to do it right away. True enough. Oswald was going to relocate to New Orleans for awhile after the attempt on the general's life--another shitty apartment, one I'd already visited--but not for two weeks. That would give me plenty of time to stop his clock. But I sensed it would be a mistake to wait very long. I might find reasons to keep on waiting. The best one was beside me in this bed: long, lovely, and smoothly naked. Maybe she was just another trap laid by the obdurate past, but that didn't matter, because I loved her. And I could envision a scenario--all too clearly--where I'd have to run after killing Oswald. Run where? Back to Maine, of course. Hoping I could stay ahead of the cops just long enough to get to the rabbit-hole and escape into a future where Sadie Dunhill would be . . . well . . . about eighty years old. If she were alive at all. Given her cigarette habit, that would be like rolling six the hard way. I got up and went to the window. Only a few of the bungalows were occupied on this early-spring weekend. There was a mud- or manure-splattered pickup truck with a trailer full of what looked like farm implements behind it. An Indian motorcycle with a sidecar. A couple of station wagons. And a two-tone Plymouth Fury. The moon was sliding in and out of thin clouds and it wasn't possible to make out the color of the car's lower half by that stuttery light, but I was pretty sure I knew what it was, anyway. I pulled on my pants, undershirt, and shoes. Then I slipped out of the cabin and walked across the courtyard. The chilly air bit at my bed-warm skin, but I barely felt it. Yes, the car was a Fury, and yes, it was white over red, but this one wasn't from Maine or Arkansas; the plate was Oklahoma, and the decal in the rear window read GO, SOONERS. I peeked in and saw a scatter of textbooks. Some student, maybe headed south to visit his folks on spring break. Or a couple of horny teachers taking advantage of the Candlewood's liberal guest policy. Just another not-quite-on-key chime as the past harmonized with itself. I touched the trunk, as I had back in Lisbon Falls, then returned to the bungalow. Sadie had pushed the sheet down to her waist, and when I came in, the draft of cool air woke her up. She sat, holding the sheet over her breasts, then let it drop when she saw it was me. "Can't sleep, honey?" "I had a bad dream and went out for some air." "What was it?" I unbuttoned my jeans, kicked off my loafers. "Can't remember." "Try. My mother always used to say if you tell your dreams, they won't come true." I got into bed with her wearing nothing but my undershirt. " My mother used to say if you kiss your honey, they won't come true." "Did she actually say that?" "No." "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it sounds possible. Let's try it." We tried it. One thing led to another. 10 Afterward, she lit a cigarette. I lay watching the smoke drift up and turn blue in the occasional moonlight coming through the half-drawn curtains. I'd never leave the curtains that way at Neely Street, I thought. At Neely Street, in my other life, I'm always alone but still careful to close them all the way. Except when I'm peeking, that is. Lurking. Just then I didn't like myself very much. "George?" I sighed. "That's not my name." "I know." I looked at her. She inhaled deeply, enjoying her cigarette guiltlessly, as people do in the Land of Ago. "I don't have any inside information, if that's what you're thinking. But it stands to reason. The rest of your past is made up, after all. And I'm glad. I don't like George all that much. It's kind of . . . what's that word you use sometimes? . . . kind of dorky." "How does Jake suit you?" "As in Jacob?" "Yes." "I like it." She turned to me. "In the Bible, Jacob wrestled an angel. And you're wrestling, too. Aren't you?" "I suppose I am, but not with an angel." Although Lee Oswald didn't make much of a devil, either. I liked George de Mohren--schildt better for the devil role. In the Bible, Satan's a tempter who makes the offer and then stands aside. I hoped de Mohrenschildt was like that. Sadie snubbed her cigarette. Her voice was calm, but her eyes were dark. "Are you going to be hurt?" "I don't know." "Are you going away? Because if you have to go away, I'm not sure I can stand it. I would have died before I said it when I was there, but Reno was a nightmare. Losing you for good . . ." She shook her head slowly. "No, I'm not sure I could stand that." "I want to marry you," I said. "My God," she said softly. "Just when I'm ready to say it'll never happen, Jake-alias-George says right now." "Not right now, but if the next week goes the way I hope it does . . . will you?" "Of course. But I do have to ask one teensy question." "Am I single? Legally single? Is that what you want to know?" She nodded. "I am," I said. She let out a comic sigh and grinned like a kid. Then she sobered. "Can I help you? Let me help you." The thought turned me cold, and she must have seen it. Her lower lip crept into her mouth. She bit down on it with her teeth. "That bad, then," she said musingly. "Let's put it this way: I'm currently close to a big machine full of sharp teeth, and it's running full speed. I won't allow you next to me while I'm monkeying with it." "When is it?" she asked. "Your . . . I don't know . . . your date with destiny?" "Still to be determined." I had a feeling that I'd said too much already, but since I'd come this far, I decided to go a little farther. "Something's going to happen this Wednesday night. Something I have to witness. Then I'll decide." "Is there no way I can help you?" "I don't think so, honey." "If it turns out I can--" "Thanks," I said. "I appreciate that. And you really will marry me?" "Now that I know your name is Jake? Of course." Excerpted from 11. 22. 63 by Stephen King All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
