Please welcome my guest, Amy Makechnie. You can find Amy’s thoughtful and entertaining posts on reading, writing, running, and motherhood at Maisymak. I think you’ll love her funny, yet insightful, voice. Take it away Amy…
I was ten years old and, for some reason, was allowed to watch The Shining on Sunday night television. I sat in rapt horror the entire two hours and then had nightmares about “redrum” for the next ten years.
This is classic King; there is no doubt he will scare the pants off you.
At age 15, I picked up King’s first book, Carrie. It was so disturbing I threw it across the room and made a vow that never again would King enter my reading world.
This vow lasted 20 years until On Writing made an appearance. Hesitantly, I began to read, and then absolutely devoured.
Then King surprised me by writing the novel 11/22/63, the date of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A divergent from his other works, 11/22/63 still became a New York Times Bestseller, like every other book he’s written.
How does he do it?
There is a quote from 11/22/63 that Jake Epping, the main character, narrates:
“In my life as a teacher, I used to hammer away at the idea of simplicity…there’s only one question and one answer. What happened? The reader asks. This is what happened, the writer responds. This…and this…and this, too. Keep it simple. It’s the only sure way home. So I’ll try, although you must always keep in mind that in Derry, reality is a thin skim of ice over a deep lake of dark water.”
King can tell a story. Line upon line he builds, until one detail is many, many details that all come together to deliver an almost spellbinding page-turner…you must find out what happens!
Though a whopping 842 pages long, 11/22/63 not only focuses on the assassination, but also many subplots, some more gruesome than others (King apparently just couldn’t help himself).
The novel begins with Jake Epping, an English teacher in Maine, finding a portal in a diner. He goes back in time to 1958, falls dangerously in love, and meets a troubled loner by the name of Lee Oswald.
Based on thousands of facts that King personally read or tracked down with his assistant, Russell Dorr, 11/22/63 is fiction, but historically accurate. And for me, that’s what made it such a fascinating read. For instance, King might not know what specific conversations Oswald had with his neighbor, but we do know he bought a rifle and brought it to that second story window. We do know he had a fight with his wife the day before the shooting. We do know that people really said, ‘gee whiz’ in 1960.
11/22/63 hammers at these questions…If you could change the past, Would you? And, even if you could change it, should you?
We come to see, that for every small and seemingly minute action we make, there is a much larger and potentially unwanted, future consequence.
King writes, “The past is obdurate. It doesn’t like to change.” (That’s a good word for the Word Nerds!)
The descriptions are masterful: “An empty barn on the outskirts of town, the hayloft door swinging slowly open and closed on rusty hinges, first disclosing darkness, then hiding it, then disclosing it again.”
Does Jake try to stop the assassination? Should he? Certainly in our reality, the president died, but in our fictional world? You’ll have to read and find out!
As for my truce with Stephen King, I may not be able to read the majority of his books without serious “imagination issues,” but let there be no doubt of my admiration for this extremely talented and hardworking craftsman.
Amy Nelson Makechnie is the mother of four children and doesn’t deny that she occasionally shuts herself in her room to devour books. She’s a contributing freelance writer for Deseret News, KSL, and has exactly six paragraphs appearing in an upcoming book on motherhood by powerofmoms.com. She is in the final editing stage of an adult fiction novel and the author of the blog Maisymak. She loves visitors!
Julia
It’s quite a word, sitting there under my picture in the right side bar of this blog: perspicacious. Fun to say. Try it. I think it has something to do with the “sp” in the middle.
Word Nerd Workout
