Whoo boy this one was a doozy, 842 pages, 849 if you count the afterword, of heart-stopping, breath-taking action. I’ve read a lot of Stephen King and I think this is his best novel in years.
The book starts with a school teacher, Jake Epping, who teaches in a small town in Maine. Jake’s marriage has recently fallen apart and he finds himself with more downtime than he previously had. His friend Al, who owns a diner, lets Jake in on a little secret. The pantry in his diner is a portal into the past. A very specific portal, it takes you back to a fine September day two minutes before noon in 1958. The best thing about this portal is that no matter how long you spend in the past, only two minutes will have passed by in the present.
Al has known about this portal for years, and has been using it to buy cheap beef from the butcher in small town Maine, 1958. He hatches a plan to try and save Kennedy from being assassinated, assuming that all the bad that has happened since then can be undone, by stopping this one act. Vietnam, being at the top of the list and all of the millions of deaths that war caused. Al made it four years into the project before he became too sick, he was already pretty old when he started, so he recruits his pal Jake to take over for him.
Al sets Jake up with money and identification, as well as sports figures from 1958-1963, so Jake can easily make more money if he needs it. And Jake sets out to save the world.
As Jake goes along he finds that the past is “obdurate”, the past does not want to be changed, and this obviously causes a lot of problems for Jake when he tries to make such a big change as to prevent JFK’s assassination.
I try to make it a habit to not give away most of the book in my reviews; I think that ruins it for everyone else, so I will leave the synopsis there. This is written like a mystery, but has the elements of suspense and thriller. There were several parts of the book I had to stay up late to finish because there was no way I could put it down at that moment. Not only do we get to hypothesize what would happen to the future if we could change the past, but we also get an in depth look at America in the late 50s and early 60s.
Remember the portal drops Jake in September of 1958 that means he has over 5 years until JFK is assassinated in November of 1963. That’s 5 years of Jake living in the past knowing about things, but unable to tell the friends he’s met along the way, the event that stands out for me is the Cuban Missile Crisis. Jake considers this just a bump in the road, but at the time it was as frightening as 9/11 was to us.
King takes us on a wild journey and even shows us what a world with JFK living would have looked like. This book isn’t as scary as some of his others, (I still have nightmares about The Mist and IT.) But there is an intellectual scariness to it, what would happen to the world if someone went back and altered history?
Date Started: 1/14/12
Date Finished: 1/18/12
Stars: 5 stars
Next Up: The Gate House by Nelson DeMille
No comments:
Post a Comment