2.09.2012

just finished reading...

It's a Stephen King novel without creepy clowns or scary monsters! Here's an interview with King:



From the publisher:
It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away—a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer. Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life—like Harry’s, like America’s in 1963—turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there’s Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore. Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying.
I really loved this novel. The storytelling is amazing. King is at his best, without a doubt. There is some violence and gore, but it is a Stephen King novel. And, truthfully, I don't think I would have read it if it wasn't in e-book form. It's dauntingly huge.

2 comments:

The Gal Herself said...

Derry! I remember Derry from (shudder) "IT."

I saw Stephen King on MSNBC's Morning Joe and he was bouncing his assumptions about the end with political writers and historians. I enjoyed how humble he was. For if Stephen King wasn't Stephen King, he never could have gotten this book published.

Janet said...

I really liked this book too. Why wouldn't he have gotten this book published?