11.22.63: Stephen King

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So you spend 800 pages wondering what King thinks this history would have looked like with more Kennedy in it, and.

Kennedy (and if the title fails to convey the message, then hopefully you - like yours truly - have Google-pedia'd it. At the wedding reception of the high school's librarian Mimi Corcoran (who is retiring), Jake meets Sadie Dunhill, the new librarian. Hosts of butterflies are always in the air, waiting to fly around like crazy ass future-changing bastards. 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. And so Jake Epping, an English teacher, sets out to spend half a decade in the past to prevent the assassination of JFK (and to figure out whether Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed the lone gunman that day, despite all the conspiracy theories).If you're an audiobook lover, I highly suggest listening to this book, or at least supplementing your hardcopy with it. I hear it's so much different than his other work, but I also haven't met a single person that didn't love it. We wanted to be absolutely sure he was acting alone, but then Al got really sick and knew he wouldn’t be able to stop Oswald. 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. Joe only told him that Jake had to meet Sadie again when she was an old lady but how that happened was completely Steve's idea so what we've read in the book was all Steve's writing based on Joe's suggestion to have Jake see Sadie one more time .

One of the students, a learning disabled 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. Al went through the rabbit hole over and over for years and discovered that no matter how long you stay, when you go back through the portal, only two minutes have elapsed since you left. The shift in his loyalties is instantaneous and unequivocal--no disorientation about the lack of seat belts or other now-familiar features in an older car, just a seamless love for all things vintage that feels too uncomplicated to be on-target. 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.

The Green Card Man says that he is part of a group of people who monitor time-slips, and who are often driven to insanity because of the many realities that are created when someone travels to the past. Oh, well, I guess we did think that saving JFK would make things much better, but we don’t think there’s a big conspiracy. King explores the well traveled road of the potential devastating effects of changing the past to influence the future. The structure of the novel is as follows: guy finds out he can easily go back in time to 1958, to the same minute of the same day each time he goes.

There are a lot of bells and whistles in this story and its draw is Lee Oswald and the shooting of JFK. Al explains that he is dying and that his appearance is attributable to his having time traveled and lived for years in the past. Edit - Actually, I realized later on that even this doesn't make sense since the Cowboys and Texans were both formed in 1960. This section of the novel is littered with real people, and King does his best to make them his own, a sometimes difficult proposition with people as infamous as these. It may take a person a moment or two to parse the significance (especially since it appears in the US format of month, day, year), but it will come to them eventually.

I know that doesn't sound traditionally horrific, but its manifestation is that when the main character is trying to do something that would result in immediately changing the outcome of a big event--such as an event in which someone originally got killed--this aspect of the past intervenes repeatedly and violently to keep him from doing it. the events that occur in the Dunning household are truly terrifying, with some of the most graphic and unforgettable descriptions King has ever written. I loved how Oswald was described as not a villain or a nutcase but a flawed broken little man who stumbled into the middle of events that changed history. The planet is on the verge of collapse, and many countries are involved in various recurring nuclear wars.