What If?

This weekend during youth group at church, my youth played a game where everyone writes a question on a piece of paper, then we crumple them up into balls and have a "snowball" fight.  Everyone reads their question aloud and answers it.  Some of the questions are silly, but some of the questions really cause the person to think, and can start some great discussions.  Here is the question that struck me Sunday morning-"If you could kill someone with the power of your mind, and no one would know, would you do it?"

This question led to a discussion of Unitarian Universalist values, as the activity is supposed to ultimately do.  But it also led to a discussion of whether it is possible to change history.  If you add the ability to time travel to the ability to kill people with your mind, many of my youth said that maybe going back and killing Hitler as an infant would be an acceptable use of that power.  Because you already know what evil he created, and you would have a responsibility to stop it.  This exact idea is the central focus of Stephen King's latest tome, 11/22/63.


In the book, small town high school teacher named Jake Epping is floating through a rather drab existence.  Newly single, he spends his days teaching, grading papers, and eating his meals at a local diner.  One day the diner's owner and chief fry cook, A,l shares a secret with Jake-in the back of his store is an unexplained tear in the fabric of time.  Step through that tear and it takes you back to the same exact time on the same exact day in 1958.  No matter how long you stay or what you do while you are there, stepping through the tear resets any effect you may have had on the past.  Since Al discovered this mysterious tear, he's been travelling back and forth frequently.  His last trip lasted four years-because he had a mission, one that a lung cancer diagnosis is now forcing him to push on Jake.  His mission-to stop the assassination of JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald, thereby stopping one of the most turbulent times in American history.  At least, that's this theory...

What follows is a loooooong history lesson about Lee Harvey Oswald.  Jake studies Oswald like a scientist, trying to discern what kind of man he was, what kind of husband he was, whether he did, in fact act alone...He follows his movements, and as a result we learn a lot about the man who shot Kennedy.

At 849 pages, this is one of King's doorstops of a book, but unlike Under the Dome, which I thought could be shortened by a hundred pages or so, I was riveted every moment of this one.  Maybe it's the historical fiction lover in me, but I actually liked the minute descriptions of Oswald's life, and King provides a personal storyline for Jake that is mildly predictable but very engaging.  Not horror by any means, this genre bending book-part historical fiction part science fiction-evokes the optimism of mid-20th Century America and the tension that builds as Jake gets closer to his goal.  And if he succeeds, will things really be better?  Consider this a novel of unintended consequences...

A Book Lover's Dream-or Nightmare!

Here is but one of the many reasons that I love Stephen King as an author-who else would think to write a horror story about the Kindle, for the Kindle?  OK, I suppose it could seem a little gimmicky, but it works!

UR is a novella about Wesley Smith, an English professor at a mediocre college in a small town in Kentucky.  After a vicious fight with his girlfriend over his reading habits, he buys a Kindle out of spite.  Sure that his purchase will be a passing fad in his reading life, he begins searching for titles.  What he finds astonishes him-the Kindle seems to have access to alternate realities where his favorite authors lived longer, and wrote MORE BOOKS!  Or they died when they were "supposed" to, but wrote DIFFERENT BOOKS!  Seriously, what else could a reader ask for but hundreds of new titles in millions of alternate realities from their favorite authors?  You could do nothing else but read for the rest of your life and never get through all of them!  Which is exactly where I thought the story was going.  King does a good job with obsession-I thought that this would be a return to Needful Things.

But not only does the new Kindle let you download titles from alternate realities, it also lets you check out the New York Times, and the local news.  Difference is, with the local news, instead of getting alternate versions, you get the future of the reality you live in.  And what Wesley sees in his future is too terrible to contemplate.

This is King at his short story/novella best.  He sets the scene, develops a character seamlessly, and moves you right along.  I was so intrigued by the whole idea of the Ur alternates.  Of course, anyone familiar with King's Dark Tower series knows that the Ur references the various levels of the Tower, and I was not surprised when the low men showed up to punish Wes for his paradox infraction.  But you don't have to have read the 3600+ Dark Tower books to appreciate and enjoy UR.

Under the Dome, by Stephen King

If there are two things that Stephen King knows, it's character and setting.  Despite the bizarre situations that he places them in, his characters usually feel completely authentic.  In fact, I think that his real talent as a writer is imagining what the average person would do when confronted with the impossible.  In that sense, Under the Dome represents the most obvious example of what he has spent a career writing about.  He does nothing so well as place his characters under the microscope to see what they will do in in the most trying of circumstances.

Imagine that your entire town is suddenly cut off from the rest of the world by an impermeable, impenetrable barrier.  Nothing can go in or out.  In an instant, you become just one creature in a very large terrarium.  That is exactly what happens to the small Maine town of Chester Mills.  As the government outside the dome tries to figure out where it came from and how to get rid of it, the residents of The Mills go about the business of figuring out how to survive their captivity.  In classic King style, there is the corrupt town leader, the drifter with a past, the good-hearted average guy, the strong, feisty woman (in this case, the owner of the town paper), and a cast of townspeople (good, bad, or a little of both) who make up this particular microcosm of America.  If I thought about it long enough, I could probably match every main character from Under the Dome with their counterpart in The Stand (my favorite King book by a green mile!).  What makes this familiar cast work time after time is the fact that most of us know someone exactly like them.  The power struggle unfolds with a Lord of the Flies inevitability, with some people rising to the occasion, and others showing their true, evil nature.

My one criticism of this book is its length.  I'm not averse to a 1000+ page book, if all 1000+ pages are integral to moving the story along.  However, the middle 400 pages or so of this particular tome dragged.  I suppose when you have a story with this many moving parts (there are something like 20 important characters, with many more minor characters), you run the risk of getting bogged down in each individual storyline.  In the end, however, it was worth it.  The last 100 pages were fast-paced and exciting.  And in an example of another thing I love about King's writing, there are no safe characters.  This gives his writing a delicious unpredictability.    But, satisfactorily, the truly bad guys almost always get what's coming to them.