The Dark Tower

In his masterful book IT, Stephen King tells the story of Derry, Maine through the eyes of seven children that fight off an evil living  in the town’s sewers, rotting its very foundation.  There’s a scene in that book when Ben Hanscomb, an overweight loner, is enchanted by his pretty classmate Beverly Marsh as she descends the outside stairs on the last day of the fifth grade.  He catches just the glint of her anklet and his heart leaps into his chest with pre-adolescent desire.  It’s a feeling I remembered well from those awkward years as we’re all trying and figure out the people we are to become.  That scene is magic, combined with so many others to create a story I’ve returned to time and time again.

In 11-22-63 King tells the story of Dallas in the early sixties through the eyes of a man from the present, our present that is 2011.  Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, is drafted to change the world by an acquaintance, Al Templeton, owner of a local diner that serves up burgers cheap – so cheap that most residents believe Al must mix in local cat meat to keep costs down, earning the nickname Cat Burgers.  What the locals don’t know, and what Jake soon finds out is that Al indeed serves the highest quality beef, and he still makes a profit, because he buys his meat from a butcher forty-eight years in the past.  Al, you see, has a portal that opens onto September 9, 1958.

Jake who comes to the diner at Al’s request one afternoon, is shocked to find the proprietor aged and sickly.  He’d just seen him the day before and he appeared fit and vibrant!  Yet Al is dying from cancer that has stricken him for the five years he’s been gone – from 1958 to 1962 when he finally had to return and seek someone who could accomplish what he set out to do:  stop the Kennedy assassination in November of 1963.  The mystery of Al’s sudden illness is answered when it is explained that anytime one steps into the past, regardless how long they stay, whether five minutes or five years, they always return back just two minutes after the time they left.

And so the stage is set, as Jake reluctantly steps through and into the past where he takes on a new life, becoming George Amberson, and on the way he returns to Derry to stop the father of one of his GED students from murdering his entire family, except for the one boy, who grows up disadvantaged.  While in Derry he bumps into Richie Tozier and Beverly Marsh (from the novel IT), practicing a pretty good swing dance.  It has a nice touch, and it felt like an unexpected and pleasant visit from an old friend.

Jake / George leaves New England and spends time in Florida where he makes shoo-in bets to keep his money ample, and then goes on to Texas, where he really digs in and falls in love with the time, the culture, the pleasant little town of Jody, and Sadie, the librarian at the school where he teaches as he waits for the day to come ever closer when he must stop Lee Harvey Oswald and his dastardly task.  And yet… the past isn’t so willing to be changed; not without a protest.  Al calls such blocks as the obdurate past, which have crept up on Jake along the way, nearly killing him and striking him with amnesia just prior to the events on that fateful fall day in 1963.

King has done his homework, spending time in Dallas and describing the city as it was during a tumultuous age when civil rights and gun control were merely ideas feared by those in the south.  Also there was a class and courtesy, a code of conduct that is archaic now but spurs nostalgia.  A decency amongst people and less paranoia; a simpler time, and yet the issues of cold war, nuclear threats and race riots were as complex as any we experience today.  And there was Camelot; Jack Kennedy and all he represented.  Al’s reasons for saving the president were grander, whereas Jake’s become more personal.  King represents Lee Harvey Oswald as an ambitious egomaniac, who thrived on being famous, perplexed as to why he wasn’t!  But Al stresses that Jake must be certain that Oswald is the lone assassin that he estimates at ninety-five percent, but it’s not enough.

And so, we are led all the way to November 22, 1963 and a hair raising rush from Fort Worth to Dallas to make it to Dealey Plaza in time to save Kennedy. The tension is brilliant, effective, keeping us engaged in the tale through the end, and at bitter cost to Jake and the one he loves.  I won’t spoil the ending, but we do get a glimpse of how the world might have been had JFK been saved!

11-22-63 is amongst my favorite books by King, as I’ve been fascinated by the Kennedy assassination and the events that followed since I was a kid.  Although I’m not so convinced of the lone-nut theory, I don’t discredit the idea and it made for great fiction here.  In any really good work the reader easily falls in and becomes a first-hand observer, and Stephen King has always been terrific at creating that transport into the yarn of illusion.  My favorite parts were early in the book, before Florida, and before Jody and the great love he found there.  Jake spends a number of months alone in New England, reading books and making a peace with where he was in time.  He is there to save a little girl from a lifelong handicap when she is hit by a hunter’s bullet while out with her father.  I found myself with Jake in those scenes, enjoying his surroundings and cheering his clever resolve for preventing the accident.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.  It is sure to be a film (the rights have been sold, or so I’ve read), but this is a long story and will undoubtedly go through some serious paring to fit on the screen.  Yeah, King uses a lot of words, and he describes much, but it’s wonderful storytelling and I was sad when it finally ended. I was reminded of C.S. Lewis and his Narnia series, of Heinlein, and of course King’s own Dark Tower series that also has its characters jumping into other worlds in different times.  In the end it all leads back to The Tower

Bill Trager
November 23, 2011