KING WRITES WELL ABOUT TIME TRAVEL

Book: 11/22/63

Author: Stephen King

Pages: 842

Published: 2011 (Scribner)

Whatever else there is to say about him, Stephen King can tell a damn fine story when he concentrates and somebody gets brave enough to remind him that he still needs an editor. This book on time travel used to stop JFK’s assassination is proof I will drop upon his head if he ever lets something like Under the Dome out of his writing drawer again.

This one’s giant, meaty, compelling, and straightforward. Straightforward! In over 800 pages, he doesn’t make any unnecessary side trips, physical or philosophical, and the only reason I’m not calling that a miracle is because it didn’t feel miraculous. It felt—simple.

I won’t give away the whole plot since this is a brand-new book (for once), but basic outline: protagonist discovers a time travel portal in the back of his friend’s diner. It always leads to the same September morning in 1958. Diner owner uses it to buy meat super cheap and bring it back to the future. (One of my favorite details.) Diner guy is dying and wants protagonist to go prevent JFK’s assassination. Protagonist does and comes back to see how that’s affected 2011. Now between those last two sentences, add massive piles of well-intentioned lies, skipping towns, sporting bets, runs from the mob, using money to solve problems, murders, notes from the diner guy, shitty apartments, falling in love, sacrifices, consequences, Russian ex-pats, cigarette smoke, the Cuban Missile Crisis, blood, broken bones, and a past that DOES NOT want to be changed. Bam. You got yourself a long satisfying glut of Stephen King plotting.

His writing ticks (repetition, heavy reliance on exposition-tastic and unhumanly “hip” dialogue, overextended use of metaphor, defanged climax) are kept at a minimum, but he does do that thing where the protagonist is a bland everyman hero and the girl he falls in love with is even less sketched out. WHY AND HOW DO THEY LOVE EACH OTHER? I DON’T KNOW, and it’s the driving force for the novel’s full back half. Her major trait is she’s tall and clumsy and although she gets upset about the protagonist’s lies, she eventually just accepts him without any further explanation. I don’t know why she changed her mind. SHE doesn’t know why she changed her mind. Manic Pixie King Girl, right there.

And I so, so wish he would’ve written more deeply into a villain. He’s absolute best when he’s describing a psychopath unraveling. But from a characterization perspective, I do appreciate his ability to keep Lee Harvey Oswald a fully rounded human and not a cardboard holder of evil and guns.

It didn’t take me nearly as long as it should have to read this book because I kept wanting to know what happened, and the ending paid off my ignoring other things to read for a couple more hours. Which was awesome.    

Attack of the shit-weasels

Book: Dreamcatcher

Author: Stephen King

Publication: 2001 (Scribner)

Pages: 617

Over the past few summers, I’ve made it a soft, unofficial goal to read all of King’s non-Dark Tower books. Dreamcatcher is one that I’ve put off a couple times for stories that looked more interesting. I wasn’t terribly eager to slough through bastardized Native American mythology or another The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. (That book was good. Let a good thing stand on its own, King.)

But this book isn’t like either of my expectations, and that was enough to keep me reading. 

Aliens and weasel-larvae who chew through humans’ intestines to spread a reddish-gold virus that grows worse than kudzu should be really, really interesting. Except the aliens have been here doing diddly-shit since the 1940s, the weasels provide way too many excuses for fart jokes, and the virus can’t survive Maine winter so it dies out without anyone’s help.

Hear that “wamp-wahhh” sound? That’s what an anticlimax sounds like.

My two main problems with this book as a writer: 

1. The dreamcatcher. It’s unnecessary. It feels like King thought he needed something specific and physical to hang all the metaphysical  stuff on, but he already had that in Duddits. Saying “This is all in the Dreamcatcher” Is actually way more confusing than just admitting, “Okay, dudes, we’re in Duddit’s mind and have to finish this quickly so shit gets done before he dies. 
2.  The women. I’m only complaining about this because I know King can write good women characters but doesn’t do it enough. In this book, every single woman is either stupid or mean. Sigh. 

There was still good stuff in here. King can write buddies like he’s taking dictation from bull sessions; he’s particularly great at getting the casual but still newly obscene rhythms of young teenage speech. I’ve gotten a few of my favorite swears from him: “Jesus Christ in a chariot-driven sidecar” is one, and “bitch-kitty” always seems to sum up a pounding headache. I love his leaders gone crazy, who always pump their deranged messages like evangelical showmen. I liked that the ending to this book is both hard-earned and neatly sewn up. That’s a really difficult balance, especially for a full science fiction showdown.

I also found this quote: “Pride was the belt you could use to hold up your pants even after your pants were gone.” It has nothing to do with any of the major themes or plot threads, but it’s great, and true, and therefore I can’t hate this book.  

Comfort reading

This is what my copy of Stephen King’s novel The Green Mile looks like.

I bought it at a flea market as a new paperback for half off the cover price when I was in eighth grade. Since then, I’ve gone through almost all of the rest of King’s non-Dark Tower repertoire, yet I keep going back to Paul Edgecombe’s story about Old Sparky and John Coffey and Melinda Moores’s brain tumor and how they all collide with each other in the unholy heat of a 1932 late summer.


I know its rhythm and plot beats and tone enough to recreate them in my head without really trying. So why do I still feel compelled to read the spine a little more tattered every six or eight months?


Because it’s become a 536-page talk with a good friend. I don’t know if thinking of certain books like that makes me incurable unsocial, but it’s extremely comforting. It’s like talking to a friend who just needs someone to nod and say “really?” in all the right places; it takes the pressure off you to do anything except listen to their amazing story.


It’s been with me as I’ve grown up, from when I first started reading it during middle school standardized testing time and showed off the cover as conspicuously as possible to the boy who wore Converse and was rumored to also like Stephen King; through high school while I learned what the crude parts really meant and blushed like a boiled tomato over the f word as I started scribbling my own stories; into college as I clung to something that felt like the best part of home in a strange new world. As I’ve gotten more serious about my own writing, I read it for the story structure, and as I read more things that are suppose to give me new ideas and ways of talking about them but mostly just make my head hurt, I read it for a palate cleanser. It’s my comfort brain food.


King, I think, is good at that because he’s good at writing conversationally. Everything else ignored, he writes well because his stories read effortlessly. He wrote in one intro or another of his that if you as a reader are looking for ol’ Uncle Stevie to come tell you a bedtime story, you’re barking up the wrong stack of dead trees, but that’s kind of exactly how I think of him. A big chunk of his pages curled up with a cold diet Coke calm me down every time.


It’s just great to have something reliable in the middle of the unknown. Does anyone else feel like that about specific books or authors?