| 11/22/63 | |
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First edition cover |
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| Author(s) | Stephen King |
| Country | USA |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction Alternate history |
| Publisher | Scribner |
| Publication date | November 8, 2011 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 849 |
| ISBN | 978-1451627282 |
| Preceded by | Blockade Billy |
| Followed by | Dr. Sleep |
11/22/63 is a novel by Stephen King about a time traveler who attempts to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy which occurred on November 22, 1963 (the date of the novel's title). The novel was officially announced on the author's official site on March 2, 2011.[1] A short excerpt was released online on June 1, 2011.[2] The novel was published on November 8, 2011,[3] and quickly became a number-one bestseller.[4]
Although the novel contains science fiction and alternate history elements, the majority of it is historical fiction dealing with real-life events and people between 1958 and 1963. The novel is a departure for King since it required deep research to accurately portray the late 1950s and early 1960s.[5] King commented on the amount of research it required, saying "I've never tried to write anything like this before. It was really strange at first, like breaking in a new pair of shoes."[5]
Contents |
According to King, the idea for the novel came to him in 1971,[6] eight years after the Kennedy assassination and just before the release of his first novel Carrie. He was going to title it Split Track. However at the time he felt a historical novel required too much research, and greater literary talent than he possessed.[5] Like his 2009 novel, Under the Dome, he abandoned the project, returning to the story later in life.[7]
King first talked publicly about the idea in Marvel Spotlight: The Dark Tower, an issue of Marvel Spotlight published on January 27, 2007, prior to the beginning of the ongoing comic book adaptation of King's Dark Tower series. In the magazine, in a piece entitled "An Open Letter From Stephen King", he writes about possible original ideas for comics:
I'd like to tell a time-travel story where this guy finds a diner that connects to 1958... you always go back to the same day. So one day he goes back and just stays. Leaves his 2007 life behind. His goal? To get up to November 22, 1963, and stop Lee Harvey Oswald. He does, and he's convinced he's just FIXED THE WORLD. But when he goes back to '07, the world's a nuclear slag-heap. Not good to fool with Father Time. So then he has to go back again and stop himself... only he's taken on a fatal dose of radiation, so it's a race against time.[8]
Commenting on the book as a historical fiction King said "This might be a book where we really have a chance to get an audience who's not my ordinary audience. Instead of people who read horror stories, people who read The Help or People of the Book might like this book".[5]
King and longtime researcher Russ Dorr prepared for the novel by reading many historical documents and newspaper archives from the period, looking at clothing and appliance ads, sports scores and television listings.[5] The book contains detailed minutia such as the 1958 price of a pint of root beer (10 cents) or a haircut (40 cents). King and Dorr traveled to Dallas where they visited Oswald's apartment building (now a private residence), found the home of Gen. Edwin Walker (one of Oswald's assassination targets), and had a private tour of the Sixth Floor Museum in the Texas School Book Depository.[5] King studied various conspiracy theories, ultimately coming to the conclusion that Oswald acted alone.[5] King met with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, an assistant to Lyndon B. Johnson and the author of the book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and King used some of her ideas in the novel on what a worst-case scenario would be like if history had changed.[5] In "The Langoliers",[9] one of the characters while speculating the nature of time travel wonders if it is really possible to interfere in events that have already happened in the past. There he briefly mentions JFK assassination, asking if Kennedy could have been saved. In his novel The Dead Zone, a character speculates upon whether, if you could go back in time, would you kill Hitler.
Jacob "Jake" Epping is a recently-divorced high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, earning extra money teaching a GED class. Epping gives an assignment to his adult students, asking them to write about a day that changed their lives. One of the students, a learning-impaired janitor named Harry Dunning, submits an assignment describing the night his alcoholic father murdered his mother and siblings with a hammer; the story emotionally affects Jake, and the two become friends after Harry earns his GED.
Two years later, Jake is summoned to a local diner by its owner, Al Templeton. Jake is shocked to discover that Al has become ill with terminal lung cancer, despite appearing perfectly healthy the night before. Al instructs Jake to step into the back of the diner's pantry, where Jake finds a time slip leading to Lisbon Falls as it existed on September 9, 1958, at 11:58 a.m. After exploring the town, Jake returns to 2011 and learns from Al that the portal leads to that same moment of that same day every time it is used, and that a visitor will always return to the present by a margin of two minutes. He also learns that if he changes an event in the past, the event will "reset" and change back the next time he uses the portal. There is one anomaly: a drunken, disheveled man rests by the time portal in 1958, and he seems to be aware in some sense of the time changes. Al calls him the "Yellow Card Man" because he has a grimy yellow card stuck in his hat.
Because the portal gives one the ability to alter the present, Al reveals that he concocted a plan to prevent John F. Kennedy's assassination, attributing the world's problems to events that would not have occurred had Kennedy lived. He spent four years in the past after entering the portal the previous night, travelling to Dallas, Texas, to kill Lee Harvey Oswald during his attempted assassination of General Edwin Walker. Al's delay was due to the fact that he wanted to be absolutely sure that Oswald was a killer and would act alone. Al has also learned that the past is "obdurate"—the more significant the event you want to change, the more the past throws up obstacles to prevent that change. It might have been because of this that Al developed cancer, so that he eventually had to give up his mission with not enough time to complete it. He recruits a reluctant Jake to continue the mission.
As an experiment, Jake travels back to 1958 to save Harry's family, who will be killed by his father on Halloween night. Using the alias "George Amberson", Jake buys a car and travels to Harry's hometown of Derry, Maine, immediately disliking the place. Jake is able to find Harry's father, Frank Dunning, and track his movements. After saving all but one of Harry's siblings from Frank's brutal assault, Jake returns to 2011 hopeful that he improved Harry's life, only to learn that his actions indirectly led to Harry being killed in the Vietnam War. While Jake is still trying to process this information, Al commits suicide. Jake is forced to act immediately before Al's death is known and the diner is demolished.
Jake re-enters the portal, discovering that the "Yellow Card Man" has killed himself; the yellow card is now black. He ignores this and travels back to Derry, where he kills Frank ahead of his rampage. Jake eventually makes his way to Texas to wait for Oswald's arrival; he settles in the small town of Jodie, located near Dallas. There, he is hired as a full-time English teacher for a local consolidated school, quickly becoming popular with the students and faculty. He also starts a relationship with Sadie Dunhill, the school's librarian. However, the courtship ends when Sadie becomes suspicious of Jake's anachronistic speech. Not long afterwards, Jake is forced to leave the school when his references are found to have been faked.
After leaving Jodie, Jake rents an apartment across the street from a house he knows Oswald is about to move into. Jake monitors Oswald's activities with bugs and an omnidirectional microphone, witnessing his abuse of his Soviet wife and his conflicts with his overbearing mother. This latter situation causes Jake to somewhat sympathize with the future assassin. Around this time, he reconnects with Sadie and reveals to her that he is from the future and plans to prevent Kennedy's assassination. Sadie is reluctant to believe him at first, but her love for him leads her to confide in him.
Jake begins to wonder if Oswald's only friend in Dallas, George de Mohrenschildt, may somehow be involved in the assassination, and it is for that reason that he hesitates to kill Oswald ahead of time. He thinks de Mohrenschildt is a CIA resource who is supposed to keep an eye on Oswald, but that he may also be egging Oswald on to kill first General Walker, then JFK. He resolves to wait until the Walker attempted assassination before killing Oswald. However, the obdurate past takes over, and he is unable to interfere with Walker's assassination attempt due to Sadie being disfigured by her emotionally abusive ex-husband. Jake is also savagely beaten by a bookie who lost a large amount of money due to Jake's knowledge of future sporting outcomes. Jake spends 3 months recovering from the beating. Finally, the situation comes down to November 22, 1963. With everything going wrong in order to prevent him from his date with destiny, he is only able to reach Oswald seconds before the fateful moment when Kennedy's motorcade drives through Dealey Plaza. Nevertheless, he successfully prevents Oswald from killing JFK. The noise of their confrontation draws the attention of the United States Secret Service and police, who fire through the window from the outside, killing Oswald. Sadie, who'd joined Jake in trying to stop Oswald, is mortally wounded and dies in the scuffle.
Jake immediately becomes a national hero, being personally thanked by President Kennedy and his wife, and is soon determined by the Dallas Police Department and FBI to not have been Oswald's accomplice. The FBI suggests that Jake disappear for a time until the situation dies down. Agonized over Sadie's death, Jake resolves to return to 2011 and back to 1958 in order to repeat the assassination prevention, but this time without Sadie dying. As he leaves Dallas, he learns that there has been a massive earthquake in California, in which thousands have died. He realizes that it is a direct result of his actions.
Returning to the portal, he finds that the Yellow Card Man has been replaced by a respectable looking man with a Green Card. He reveals himself to be a sort of time "guardian" who explains that many other time portals exist in the universe and that changes to the past are occurring all the time. The man explains that traveling through the portal not only changes the past, it also creates new strings of it. The larger the change, the more unstable reality becomes. The yellow/green card is shown to be a type of film badge dosimeter that measures exposure to time line changes rather than radiation; green resembles healthy, yellow is fair, and black is unstable. Guarding the portal is difficult since he has to keep myriad realities in his mind at all times. Eventually this drives the guardian to mental illness, and/or alcoholism, like the Yellow Card Man. He begs Jake to set things right again, otherwise reality itself could possibly be destroyed.
Jake steps back through the portal, eager to see what the world has become like. He discovers that it's a nuclear winter scarred landscape. He meets a familiar looking man, who turns out to be Harry Dunning, whose life he saved long ago. Not a brain-damaged janitor in this incarnation, he is a wheelchair bound survivor of the nuclear nightmare the world is currently experiencing. Furthermore, there are frequent, massive earthquakes everywhere. Harry tells Jake a concise history of the world between 1963 and 2011, involving nuclear war, domestic terrorism, general lawlessness and, of course, the earthquakes, which are slowly destroying the planet. Jake quickly returns to 1958, and finds the Green Card Man much worse for wear. He tells Jake he must now go back to 2011, and see that the portal is closed. Instead, Jake goes to a hotel and contemplates returning to Texas, to Sadie. Ultimately, he returns to his own time, having changed nothing, and history is restored to normal. Learning that Sadie survived the confrontation with her ex-husband without his interference, he goes back to Jodie, where Sadie is now an old woman. The two lovers from different timelines share a dance.
The trade hardcover edition features a faux-newspaper dust jacket, with the front featuring the story of Kennedy's death, the back, on the other hand, containing a story of Kennedy surviving an assassination attempt. The newspaper headlines were written by Stephen King.[10] In addition to the regular trade edition, Scribner produced a signed limited edition of 1,000 copies, 850 of which were made available for sale beginning on November 8, 2011 (ISBN 978-1-4516-6385-3).[11] This edition features a different dust jacket, exclusive chapter-heading photos, and a DVD. Due to a web site problem on November 8, most copies remained unsold and a drawing ran from November 10 to 11 to sell the remaining copies.[12]
There was also a limited edition of 700 published in the United Kingdom. It was a slipcased hardcover with deluxe binding, photographic endpapers, and a facsimile signature, and included a DVD.[13]
The reviews for 11/22/63 have been generally positive, with The New York Times selecting the novel as one of its top five fiction books of the year,[14] and the Las Vegas Review-Journal calling 11/22/63 King's "best novel in more than a decade".[15] The review aggregate site Metacritic judged 30 out of 36 reviews as positive, with four mixed and two negative.[16] NPR book critic Alan Cheuse found no fault with the structure, commenting "I wouldn't have [King] change a single page."[17] USA Today gave the novel four out of four stars noting the novel retains the suspenseful tension of King's earlier works but is not of the same genre. "[The novel] is not typical Stephen King."[18] Janet Maslin of The New York Times also commented on genre change and pacing but felt the writer has built the narrative tightly enough for the reader to suspend disbelief. "The pages of “11/22/63” fly by, filled with immediacy, pathos and suspense. It takes great brazenness to go anywhere near this subject matter. But it takes great skill to make this story even remotely credible. Mr. King makes it all look easy, which is surely his book’s fanciest trick."[19] The review in the Houston Chronicle called the novel "one of King’s best books in a long time" but also "overlong" noting "As is usually the case with King’s longer books, there’s a lot of self-indulgent fat in 11/22/63 that could have trimmed."[20] The review in the Bangor Daily News commented that the novel "[is] another winner",[21] but provided no critical review of the plot construction. Lev Grossman, in reviewing the novel for Time magazine called the novel "the work of a master craftsman" but also commented that "the wires go slack from time to time" and the book wanders from genre to genre, particularly in the middle.[22] More pointedly, Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin called the novel "a misguided effort in story and writing".[23] Ulin's primary criticism is the conceit of the story, which requires the reader to follow two plotlines simultaneously: historical fiction built upon the Kennedy assassination as well as the tale of a time traveling English teacher, adds a page load to the novel that Ulin finds excessive.
On August 12, 2011, well before the novel's release, it was announced that Jonathan Demme has attached himself to write, produce and direct a film adaptation of 11/22/63. King will serve as executive producer. Shooting should begin in the fall of 2012.[24]
As with most Stephen King novels, there are connections to his other works in 11/22/63: