22/11/'63

So there's a hole in time with pretty clearr rules, right?

1. You can only go back to a specific date and time. A specific September day at 11:58 AM, 1958. From a dark late night in 2011. That's the portal. No freely controllable time-travel.

2. While the past-hole is static, the future-hole is moving. I.e. each time you return to 2011, two minutes in the future will hae passed. So you go back, stay there for say 1d6 months, you'll return two minutes later than you entered. So time can pass in the future but each time you go back, you go back to 11:58 AM that same particular September day in the fifties.

3. You can bring stuff from there and back home through the hole and vice versa. So feel free to bring a fifties fake ID and fifties money with you.

4. But, only the most recent trip "counts" in affecting your travel. I.e. if you travel back and carve your name in a tree, that will be there when you get back, but then if you travel back again and get a pack of gum and don't carve your name in the tree that time, the carving will be gone. You can get many many packs of gum this way and stack them up in the future time line, but if you want to affect meaningful change for example by buring treasure boxes as opposed to schlepping the stuff with you through the portal,

So far, so good, right?

We've got clear, unambiguous rules that are different enough from any other time travel story to be interesting. Presented cleanly and clearly through storytelling in the first few chapters.

And, as the title indicates, the main guy wants to go back in time and tough it out for five years so he can save JFK that November day in Dallas, through quaint li'l small-town romance stories as the main guy lives undercover in Dallas exurb interleaved with biography details on Lee Oswald and other historical figures. And a creepy and unwelcome cameo from two of the It kids in Derry. And way too many sex scenes.

But climbing to a premise this lofty only sets this book up for a very brutal tumble as we pretty much immediately head into triple mumbo-jumbo land. Haunted by weirdo supernatural monsters along with a Final Destination–esque "willful fate". Trees falling, diseases showing up, car tires giving up, that kinda stuff. (And it's not all bad: the main guy getting a traumatic brain injury was one of the interestingest part of the story! That felt original and true-to-life.)

Yes, that's right. It's our bad old enemy a weird framework as a tension driver. As the only tension driver in this case. What's that horror lurking around the next corner? Why, it's... lolrandom hatpullery, of course! I mean, NOS4A2 had a very surreal setting and antagonist too, but NOS4A2 didn't keep changing the rules of the story as a means to drive the story.

But that's not the worst part. I'm sure almost everyone will have the "okay so when he comes back to the present day the world will be worse off than before he saved JFK so he can go back buy one rootbear and erase his own time travel shenanigans like a shower dream season" in mind as one of the possible outcomes. I try, I try, I try to not guess what's gonna happen in books but some endings are so resonant that you feel their approaching rumbling on the tracks nine-hundred miles in advance and you read on because you don't know for sure that it's gonna end up that way, and having a very bradburyesque poetic resonant ironic ending option like that doesn't in and of itself doom a book.

You're still like "okay, so A. Can he or can't he..." ...even succeed with the mission in the first place? Stopping assassinations are plenty difficult even with hindsight. Especially with the pale horse of inevitabilty working against him.

"B. Will it or won't it..." ...go bad in the future if he does succeed with the mission?

"C. Will he or won't he..." ...undo it all with a reset trip? And if so...

"D. How much will it sting?!" as he keeps sinking cost after cost into both his past life and into the mission at hand.

That juicy li'l quadrivalent switch/case statement is a nurturing enough chewing gum to help me push through the ebbs and flow of the novel's tension. The tension in-the-micro might be tedious hatpullery but the zoomed-out puzzle box as a whole still has this particular hitchcock ticktock boom under the table to tease our nerves, right?

So many possible endings to imagine... Maybe he just dies in the past? Maybe he needs to go back again and again? Maybe he gives up? Maybe he does a splendid job and Hitler dies in a French cinema fire and the world is good now? Maybe he can do the job but then the time machine breaks so he can't go back? Maybe he falls in love with someone in the past and doesn't want to undo the timeline because he loves her so much? We've got a delicious assortment of washi ribbons available for tying a bow on a box like this.

So okay I'm gonna spoil it. Because I have no mouth and I must sublimate. Here's what happens:

When he returs to 2011 the world is indeed super bad. But the main reason (to be fair: not the only reason) that it's bad is that his timetraveling causes earthquakes and the earthquakes cause nuke plants to fail. Yep, a new rule pulled ex petasum.

Turns out the four rules of the time home don't at all work that way. It doesn't reset. Eachabandoned thread isn't real either, exactly, it just become like-dreams-but-definitively-not-just-dreams. (And that's where all the creepy dream monsters come from, they're shadows from his own past trips.) And all those compounded strings, especially the longer 200 µcg two-tab trips where you stay head under in the wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff for over five years, well, that's what causes earthquakes and destroys the world. And the humans-not-angels-but-humans-from-a-weird-timebubble-line that keep an eye out for this kind of stuff end up begging and pleading for mr main guy to... Take another trip!!! One more reset it all! Even though we just three sentences earlier were told that the new trips don't reset and restore, they just combine and enworsen the situation. But okay. One more cup of coffee for the road!

I've got a love-hate relationship with this book. There's plenty of gems sprinkled in the sand here. Awesome scenes and setpieces. And, I want to like Stephen King. On Writing is a masterpiece. He writes in a parasocial-enabling way that makes it feel like you're his pal when you read his books and I love that. This one especially he has been working on since 1972 and it finally got made in the early 2010s. But normally when I say a book is among the weaker Stephen King books, it's still a banger of a read. This one was bad just not bad-for-King but bad bad. It's fun to write negative rants but I hate pressing send on them because fundamentally I do want to build the world up rather than tear it down. I don't like being negative.

Yes, he makes us the reader fall in love with Sadie (the main guy's love interest in the past), and yes, over time he tones down the creepy and controlling and tantrummy and offputting vibes of the main guy, but I just can't even, since first and foremost:

This is a book that doesn't play fair with its readers. Time travel is bad. Because will turn out in the last few pages of the book that your time machine causes earthquakes and that is the reason that time travel bad. Now don't you feel dumb for going on time trips you silly silly time dreamer? Even though we gave zero hints about that consequence of the time traveling until now. Sorry about that.