Personal

I received a call from my mother today. My brother was in a horrific accident on a construction site. He slipped from his ladder and fell with a plate glass window landing on him. He came very close to losing his right arm and right eye. Fortunately, the fates were smiling and he sustained just serious cuts to his face and instead of severing a tendon it was the muscles in his arm that sustained all the damage. These will heal. The prognosis is good. I came very close to losing my brother today, it was so frightening. I can't be there with him and I want nothing more than to hug him and tell him I love him. He has a long road ahead of him as he has no insurance and faces many months of rehabilitation and a limited ability to work. It's funny that his first thought was for the woman whose house he was working on, that she is left without a window. He is a good person and never seems to catch a break. It is also hard that we can't just worry about him getting better and now have to worry about the thousands of dollars in hospital and doctors bills that he can't hope to ever repay. It is a hard world. I am posting this to ask my readers (if I have any) to send good thoughts into the universe for his full recovery. Also, tell those you love that you love them, you just never know when you could lose them. Those in Aurora would say that too.

Book Review

11/23/1963 by Stephen King

**SPOILER ALERT** Don’t read this review if you have not read the book! Unless you’re like me and don’t give a damn.

As I’ve said in this blog a few times, I love me some Stephen King. It is the banked love of a long time couple for whom the passion has since faded but for whom the affection and fondness is still strong due to a lifetime of shared experiences. When I first discovered him I was insatiable and couldn’t get enough, many times reading until late in the night, unable to stop. I would talk about him to anyone who would listen and search out interviews because I found his thoughts fascinating, plus reading his odes to “constant reader” made me feel so special like he was talking just to me. I read his entire back catalog and when new books came out, I’d try to be first to the book store to pick me up a copy in the days before Amazon. Any project with his name attached would capture my interest from short-lived series like Golden Years and Kingdom Hospital to the excellent graphic novel adaptions of his work to the mountain of movies (for the big and small screen) both good and bad. If anyone is listening and has some pull, IT would make a great graphic novel, get on that please!!! I enjoyed his later work but I felt that he lost some of his mojo after that terrible accident (for which I am grateful for his recovery) and when I wanted to remember our love when it was young and full of fire, I’d pull out his older work and reread it, like a forlorn wife reading the old and faded love letters that her husband no longer bothers to write. SK has had some clunkers and I was very disappointed by the Ouroboros conclusion of The Dark Tower series, but usually his writing was never dull, so when I tried to read Under the Dome, I was dismayed to find it was just that. I could only get through the first 5 chapters and then had to give it up as a lost cause. I feared the worst… had we become just friends?

When I heard he had a new book coming out, I ordered it from my book club, more out of loyalty than anything. The thought of reading it didn’t excite me and I found subject strange, and was turned off by the premise that Oswald was the only shooter the day JFK was assassinated (I am a conspiracy theorist here and believe Oswald was what he said he was, “a pasty”). Here is the description offered on Amazon:

On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King’s heart-stopping dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination—a thousand page tour de force.

Following his massively successful novel Under the Dome, King sweeps readers back in time to another moment—a real life moment—when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a character who has the power to change the course of history.

Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his two brothers with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.

Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

A tribute to a simpler era and a devastating exercise in escalating suspense, 11/22/63 is Stephen King at his epic best.

Knowing how I felt about Under the Dome, when the book arrived I put it in my night stand with the dozen or so other books I eventually planned to read but had not gotten to yet and went on with my life. Upon finding reviews nearly unanimous in praise for this latest opus, I decided to pull it out and just try a few chapters and test the waters. I settled into my bed one evening resting against my plumped pillows, a bed-hogging dog curled next to me, and cracked it open. What happened next was a shock, after reading the first paragraph I sat bolt upright in bed and said “holy shit”! It was like coming home one day to find that husband of yours had made you dinner and brought you flowers and then told you to get dolled up so he could show you off and take you dancing. I was being wooed again and it felt just fine. The fire was always there, it just needed some tending to come fully alight and when it is a fire built by the master it becomes a blaze visible from space. 

The story started like a shot from a gun. I liked Jake from the start, and he seemed so real as all of King’s best characters do. His life was fascinating and the concept of a portal to another specific time opened up so many possibilities. The book was very like an episode of Quantum Leap with Jake playing Sam trying to put right what once went wrong, his Al is portal guardians who are being driven slowly insane by their task. But, unlike in that show, here the past or AGO is almost a character in itself and it does not want to be changed or as SK says, “the past is obdurate.” It uses all the forces at its disposal to thwart Jake’s plans including insane stretches of “coincidence” and almost having him beaten to death. King’s protagonists never have it easy and it seemed that the last half of the book takes place in too many hospital rooms with first Sadie and then Jake, who is now George, becoming longtime residents. But, the heart of the book is the love affair between George/Jake and Sadie, the shy soon to be divorced school librarian, with a dark secret of her own. I’m not ashamed to say it, I grew to love her. Funny, charming, brave, clumsy (or as King says haunted, being this way myself that word fits perfectly), and sweet, it is easy to see why he fell for her. She is full of good qualities but she is not without her faults, a weakness for alcohol and cigarettes being some of them. For all of her wonderfulness, she is still recognizably human as we all are with both the good and the bad parts of our personalities. Sadie is no Mary Sue. She is a living breathing person although her physical body is made up of individual letters, a literary Frankenstein’s monster stitched together with words and given the breath of life by the lightening of Stephen King’s mind.