I have always liked the idea of Stephen King more than I have cared for any of his books. At a meeting of the John Randolph Club here in Rockford many years ago, Tom Sheeley, in the midst of a lunchtime performance of classical guitar, asked, “What is creativity without editing?” His question was meant to be rhetorical, yet had someone answered “Stephen King” even Tom, more of an admirer of King’s writing than I, would have been hard pressed to deny that to be true.
Since the release of Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Carrie in 1976, filmmakers and TV producers have acted as King’s de facto editors, with mixed success. While many film and TV adaptations of King’s work have flopped, either by adhering too slavishly to the source material or, conversely, excising the truly brilliant parts, the best directors and producers have used King’s genius as inspiration for their own works of art. Among the successes I would count Stand by Me, Needful Things, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Mist. (Don’t ask me about The Shining; I do not share the general belief in Stanley Kubrick’s genius.)
So when I greatly enjoyed the Hulu original miniseries 11.22.63, I naturally assumed this to be another case in which the visual adaptation rose above the written source. Yet I was fascinated enough to pick up the 1,100-plus-page book—and was delighted to discover that I was wrong.
This story of a high-school teacher who spends five years in the past in an attempt to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy never drags (though it could have benefited, as usual, from a good editor). Unlike the miniseries, which largely portrays the first few years of the 1960’s in golden tones, King’s work realizes the world of nearly 60 years ago in its fullness, letting the reader sense what has been lost, both for ill and for good. And while there are obvious anachronisms (including a ridiculously frequent use of profanity), the sense of entering another time is as palpable as in Jack Finney’s Time and Again, which King himself acknowledges as “The great time-travel story.”
That said, I recommend both watching the miniseries and reading the book, because there are ways in which the former rises above the latter, including the change in the character of Miz Mimi (more true to the state of race relations in small-town Texas at the time) and the very ending, when Jake Epping (the high-school teacher) and Sadie Dunhill (his love from 1963) are reunited. This scene—more fully realized in the miniseries—was not King’s idea; he included it as an epilogue in the book at the suggestion of his son, Joe Hill, who, as a novelist, may more fully approach the Platonic ideal of Stephen King than King himself has ever been able to do.
First published in the October 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.