{read: time travel fiction} 11/22/63 by Stephen King

The 1950s and early 1960s are as much a character in 11/22/63 as Jake Epping/George Amerberson, and Stephen King brings the time period to life. Who knew that the 1950s stank of cigarette smoke and air pollution from factories? It reminded me of the way Pat Conroy evokes the sense of place in The Prince of Tides, and it's been a while since I've read anything in which the setting was such an important part of the story.

To make a long (800+ pages) story short, Jake finds a time travel hole and sets out to stop the assassination of JFK. But the hole drops him into the 1950s, so he has some time to waste before it's time for his main mission. I was impatient at first and wished that the story could have been shortened by 200 or so pages by dropping Jake closer to the 1960s, but the story soon won me over. This is compulsively readable and gets harder to put down the closer you get to the end.


11/22/63 by Stephen King (Scribner, 2011)
My rating: 4 stars