• Author: Stephen King
• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Publishing year: 2011
• Pages: 740
• Coverdesign: Press Association Images
• ISBN: 978-1444727296

Review:

Rereading this in honour of a friend who passed away and this was his last current read. #112263forLuke

“If you had the chance to change history, would you? Would the consequences be worth it?”

Jake Epping is a divorced teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine. He teaches high school kids but also earns some extra money teaching in an adult education programme. One of his students, Harry Dunning, delivers a paper that tells the story about how his father killed his entire family and left him alive, but with a severe disability. But Jake’s life will not only change because of this paper but by a phone call from his friend, Al who is the owner of a local diner.

Al asks Jake to come to the diner one night. When Jake arrives he sees a withered away Al Templeton, who looked healthy and in good condition the day before. It looks like a lot of years caught up with him. Al is dying, of cancer. And then he comes with some news that will stun Jake and change his life and his entire view and perspective on life! A rabbit’s hole in Al’s diner leads to the past, to a day in september 1958 in Lisbon Falls…

Al had been going to the past for years now, ever since he discovered the rabbit’s hole. He also discovered that everytime you go through it, the past resets itself to the same time and date!

The last time he went, he stayed for a couple of years with a plan to change history. He wanted to stop Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. But the past fights back and the cancer caught Al before he could execute his plan. So he wants Jake to do it, because Jake is young, single and has no one to take care of and Jake is the only person he could trust with this plan.

Before Jake says yes he goes back with a trial run. By trying to stop Harry Dunning’s father killing his family. And when he comes back and Al commits suicide he doesn’t have a lot of options: he either goes back and changes history or he stays and the rabbit’s hole disappears.

Jake decides to go back, as George Amberson, and live a life in the past. He travels south and starts concocting a plan to stop Oswald. But the past has a way of trying to intervene. The past however tries to correct the wrongs, it fights back. (Reminds me of Inception where the dreamer’s mind fights back the ‘architect’ of the dream). Jake/George meets Sadie, a teacher in the school he starts teaching as well, and falls in love with her. But her ex-husband was a violent, impotent man who is not yet ready to get rid of Sadie. And George has secrets he must hide for her, secrets that make him live a double life, a life he can not share. And then there’s the guardian of the past, the Man waiting at the Rabbit’s hole, demanding money from whomever passes.

Will Jake stop Lee Harvey Oswald, will JFK survive? What impact will that have on the future and how will the past try to stop his medling?

As always with a SK novel, a lot happens, it’s very layered and eventful. You can’t write a review for a Stephen King book by just a short blurb. A lot of his books have a lot going on. This one is very elaborate, especially on the fifties and sixties bit in the novel. This makes for a book that has slower chapters and some of these could easily have been shorter. This was the second time I read the novel (first time was in 2012) and I noticed I forgot some parts in the book (I think they must have been those that I now feel were redundant for the entire story)

But I do like this story because of the question it poses: What if you could change the past? Would you? And what would you change? And I love stories about time travel and the consequences by branching off new timelines and parallel universes. (hence why I love Marvel’s Multiverse saga as well). I’ll confess something here… I believe there are parallel universes where our lives are different from the one we know at the moment… For this book, I though of another reason why Jake’s actions and King’s writing and the consequences of both are important to the idea of alternative timelines: by adding the towns Lisbon Falls and Derry, Maine (make sure you get the references to a few of King’s other novels as well when Jake’s in Maine), King already created an alternative timeline than the one we live in. So if you think of it, this story is already on a different timeline! So would things have been different if he wrote about towns that truly exist and are not made up in his mind?

11.22.63 is a chunky book, is a very interesting story that leaves us wondering. It has a huge fanbase, is considered as one of his best of the past decades. And I’m glad that I got to read it again, just to honour a man we all loved! Thank you, Luke. I hope you got to finish it with all of us, looking over each and every one of our shoulders.