CarlAlves

11/22/63 is the best Stephen King novel that I have read in years. I have been down on the master of horror in recent years. His latest work has made me think that he has lost a little off his fastball. Although this still isn't vintage King, it's still damn good.
11/22/63 is a time travel novel, which entirely leaves out any scientific explanation of how the time travel takes place. There is just a random wormhole located in the back of a restaurant in Maine. Going into the wormhole takes the traveler back to the same exact spot in 1958. The owner of the restaurant had been going there to get cheap food supplies for his restaurant, but he had a bigger mission planned, one he passed down to the novel's protagonist, Jake Epping, a school teacher from Maine -- and that is to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating JFK.
At over 750 pages, there is much more to the novel than just stopping the assassination. In the process Jake also tries to save a man before his father kills his family and badly injures him. He also settles into a town in Texas and works as a teacher, growing close to the people in the community and finding a love interest. Despite the length of this novel, there is no point where it feels like it's dragging, a testimony to King's writing skill. The novel has tension in the right spots, and King clearly did his research on the assassination of Kennedy. I also enjoyed seeing how he represents the past. It's almost like a living entity that is unwilling to change. The one drawback is that this novel is heavy handed with King's political beliefs. I don't read fiction to have the writer indulge me with his political agenda, something I frequently resented in this novel. Otherwise I found it thoroughly enjoyable and worth reading.
Carl Alves - author of Blood Street