King Country: 11/23/63

or, the past never ends

More of King Country:

• Salem’s Lot

• The Shining

• Cujo

• It

There’s an interesting novel inside Stephen King’s massive 11/23/63 but it’s not really one for me, I’m afraid. Perhaps if I cared more about the JFK assassination this would have held more sway for me, but, honestly, I just don’t have many thoughts about it.

Structurally, this is a fascinating novel, though, and I think it plays to King’s strengths and obsessions. What’s most immediately apparent in this novel is that King struggles to capture the way people talk now (well, now being 2011 when this was published). This is a difficulty for him, I think, since he writes contemporary novels and has traditionally had a bit of an ear for how people talk. This is a great skill to have but, as we get older, we lose that touch for the simple reason that slang and colloquialisms of 20 year olds don’t fit well in the mouths of 70 year olds.

That’s life, baby.

But I think this is why King pulls us back to his childhood in the 1950s. So despite being technically set in 2011ish, the vast majority of the novel takes place in the late 50s and early 60s.

He’s definitely more comfortable back here in 1959 and 1962 than he is in 2011. He’s able to really fall into the world and build it meticulously, able to render the speech authentically as well as the motivations and cultural and political concerns of his characters. Also, not for nothing, he gets a little chance to bring us back to the kids from It.

And while I liked that Easter Egg, I also think it demonstrates something peculiar about King.

He’s very famous. He’s been very famous for a long time. Decades! And so he’s able to put in these extended sequences that kind of have nothing to do with anything but which serve as a reward for people who have been longtime readers.

That’s not a bad thing, mind, but it felt kind of odd to me. Like the whole sequence was put in there as a little wink at me.

I don’t especially like being winked at by authors. It’s a bit of a quirk, I suppose. And so though I enjoyed returning to Derry, Maine, it also sort of itched at me uncomfortably. I cannot really explain why, especially since I typically like this sort of thing, where an artist’s oeuvre offers little rewards for those who really dig into it.

Anyway, the time travel technique here is just a little bit of genius. Rather than get into the weeds, he just presents it as something possible and then throws us forward. And though this man is going back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination, what King is really doing is giving us an enormous slice of life novel about living in the early 60s but with foreknowledge of some things.

Because of the way time travel works, the narrator can’t just go back to a few days or weeks before Kennedy’s assassination but instead must begin five years before the assassination.

Five years.

This small choice is enormously important and adds much of the tension of the novel and the structure. Because it takes five years, you don’t just get to try again and again. No, each try means spending five years back in time. When you return to the present, nearly no time at all has passed, regardless of if it’s been 5 years or 5 minutes.

Stranger still, every time you go back in time, a big theoretical and temporal reset button is hit. So if you go back in time and stop the assassination, going back in time again will undo that work.

I love this kind of thing. It’s such a simple but ingenious trap to create.

King doesn’t get bogged down in the how but does fixate on the why. The how is just taken as the weather because how else should it be taken? How does it work? Doesn’t matter. How does time reset? It just does, nerd.

This allows us to get on with it.

And unfortunately, this novel lives and dies by your interest in this man’s life in the past. If the novel were 250 pages, the conceptual stuff would likely carry you through, but because it’s nearly 1,000, the novel rides on the narrator’s shoulder.

And he’s just not that interesting, I’m afraid. His quixotic journey into the past also just becomes rather dull for long stretches, which made me understand the critique of how wordy King can be. Now, I don’t think this needed to be a short novel, but I think it needed to be shorter than it is. Maybe 500 pages or 700 pages or 300 pages was the right length—I don’t know. Don’t even care.

But this is an exhaustive and exhausting novel for better or worse. And I can see some who would be fully into this, who would wish there were a few more hundred pages.

I am not that reader.

What really makes this novel worthwhile is its vision of the past. The lengths King went to rebuild America and envelope us in these long gone years that most of us weren’t alive to experience. In this way, it reminds me of It in very direct ways, so it’s oddly fitting that It echoes through parts of this novel. Both novels are about today while really being about yesterday, and though we always long for those halcyon days of our youth, we must also reckon with the terrors of youth, of life, the trauma of being alive at all in a world where brutality occurs sometimes right in front of our faces.

There’s a dangerous, seething kind of nostalgia to King’s work.

This is what I find fascinating about him, I’m discovering.

But this one just wasn’t really for me. There’s a lot to like about it and it’s an achievement in its own right, but I felt overburdened by its length and by the dull narrator.

There’s a lot I’d like to get into here, especially the reveals near the end, but that spoils much of the journey. I actually think these elevate the novel tremendously and make it a far more interesting work than it appears at first glance, or even than it appears when you’re 700 pages into it. The way it twists away and out of your hands will stick with me for a long time for reasons that I cannot really get into.

But King does one of my absolutely favorite things here. Something I find daring and provocative and wild.

Would I recommend it for that payoff?

That’s less clear. I’m glad this wasn’t the first King novel I picked up is how I’ll answer that.

While it’s shorter than It, 11/23/63 feels a whole lot longer.

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Many people have recommended other King novels to me while I begin this journey. I’ll probably include most of them, unless I end up abandoning this whole project early due to disinterest or disgust, but the ones listed below are the only ones I’ll promise on writing about.

Here’s the order I’ll be tackling King’s novels. I’d like to give you a reason why this is the order and not some other order or why only these books and not a bunch of other ones, but I’m trusting to Jayson Young as my guide.

1. Salem’s Lot

2. The Shining

3. Cujo

4. It

5. 11/22/63

6. From a Buick 8

7. Revival

8. Firestarter

9. The Eyes of the Dragon

10. Misery

11. Pet Sematary

12. The Long Walk

13. The Stand

14. The Dark Tower I-VII

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Free novels:

• Strong Female Characters

• The Hero’s Dilemma

• Book O’Clock

• The Occult and Supernatural

• My Bloody Valentine

• February Crime

• Free SFF

• Midwinter Fantasy Mayhem

• Free Science Fiction

• Things That Go Bump in the Night

• Free Fantasy

• Monsters and Mayhem