Play Book Tag discussion

11/22/63 –Stephen King
Audio book performed by Craig Wasson, with an afterword by the author.
4****

Jake Epping is a high-school English teacher, who also teaches adults seeking their GEDs. One of those adults is Harry Dunning, the school janitor, who is obviously “slow” and walks with a limp. The essay he writes describing the “The Day That Changed My Life” stuns Jake. So when his friend Al Templeton reveals that there is a portal to the past in his pantry – a “rabbit hole” that will take the traveler back to Sept 9, 1958 at 11:58 a.m. – Jake decides to try to change Harry Dunning’s history. But Al has a larger, more important, historical event in mind; he just has to convince Jake to take it on.

The cover art and the title really tell the reader up front that the focus of this novel will be the Kennedy assassination. But King takes his sweet time getting there. Jake will have to live in the past from Sept 9, 1958 to Fall 1963 if he’ll have any chance to stop Oswald (or whoever it was who pulled the trigger, or conspired to do so). Among other things, he’ll have to actually determine whether Oswald was acting alone, or was just the “patsy” he claimed to be. But in those intervening years, Jake will find work and will meet and come to care for a variety of people – students, fellow teachers, neighbors, and one very special librarian.

I’ll admit I was a bit frustrated that it took King so long to get to the critical events of November 1963. I knew he had to have a good reason for this, but I wasn’t seeing it and I grew impatient. This is NOT to say that the book is slow. Far from it. King is a master at pacing a thriller to keep the reader turning pages. But if he told me one more time that “the past is obdurate” … well I was going to have to throw something at the CD player. However, I grew to care about all the events Jake experienced long before he got to Dallas. From the slang used to the fashions of the day and on to the small details, such as the price of gasoline, King immerses the reader in the “land of ago” and gives us a chance to recognize how very different that time was from 2011. He forces us to think about “what might have been” and “where might we be today” if only …

However convoluted and long the journey, I’m glad I went along. I was in tears (yes, in a Stephen King novel!) at the end of Chapter 31. I really wish he had ended it there. This is a novel that cries out for an ambiguous ending. The last chapter – Citizen of the Century – seemed like an afterthought, and while it was nice to have some of the loose ends tied up, for this reader the impact of Chapter 31 was lessened.

Craig Wasson was superb performing this audio. He even did a fair impersonation of real figures (Walter Cronkite and President John F Kennedy specifically), and had reasonably good regional accents. I also really appreciated that King read the audio of his afterword. The story was a sort of personal one for him, having lived through the events of that fateful day, and wondered “what if…”

(Review updated on re-read: July 2025)


LINK to my review