11/22/63 — Book Review

Nobody warned me this would be a love story. I picked it up bracing for the usual King machinery, something with teeth in the dark, and instead spent most of it worried sick about a school librarian in a small Texas town. Not what I signed up for. Better than what I signed up for.

The setup is clean. Jake Epping, a divorced English teacher in Maine, gets shown a secret by his dying friend Al: a spot in the back of Al's diner where you can walk down into September of 1958. Every time. Same morning. Al's plan, which he's too sick now to finish, is to live in the past long enough to reach 1963 and stop Lee Harvey Oswald before Dallas. He hands the whole thing to Jake.

What follows is 850 pages, and I braced for that too, and there's not a dead chapter in it.

The part that got me first was the texture of the past. King builds late-fifties America so completely you can smell it, the root beer float that costs a nickel, the way strangers actually talk to each other, and also the casual cruelty of the era that nobody blinked at. He doesn't scrub it clean and he doesn't wag a finger from 2011. He just lets it exist. I felt nostalgic for a decade I never lived through, which is a strange trick to pull on a person.

And then Sadie. Sadie Dunhill, the librarian Jake meets in a town called Jodie, is one of the best characters King has ever written, full stop. The romance builds at the pace real ones do, and by the time things start going wrong you are frightened for them in a way that has nothing to do with anything supernatural. The love story could carry a book on its own. Bolting it onto a JFK thriller nearly tips the whole thing over, in the best way.

I read the last hundred and fifty pages in one sitting, two in the morning, because putting it down had stopped being an option. The ending took something out of me. I'll leave it there.

Nitpicking: the Jodie stretch in the middle wanders. There are chapters where you forget a president is supposed to die, because King has made small-town Texas so comfortable you'd rather just stay. For me that was the point. For someone waiting on the plot, it might read as slack.

This is the book I hand people who say they don't read King because "it's all horror." It isn't horror. It's the most complete thing he's written.