Sign in with Facebook
Kemper's Reviews > 11/22/63
11/22/63
by
by
Kemper's review
bookshelves: 2011, time-mower-adventures, time-travel, sci-fi, uncle-stevie
Nov 18, 2011
bookshelves: 2011, time-mower-adventures, time-travel, sci-fi, uncle-stevie
Adventures in Time Mowing
Dallas, Texas
11/22/63
“Hey, you just appeared out of nowhere! How did you do that? And is that a laptop melted onto a lawn mower?”
“Yeah. See there was this lightning strike and now I can use my time mower to visit the past and …. Wait a second. If you’re from 1963, how did you know what a laptop is? Oh, shit! You’re a time traveler, too?”
“Yes, I am. What year are you from?”
“2011. My name’s Kemper.”
“No way! I’m from 2011, too. My name is George Amberson. I mean, it’s really Jake Epping. Amberson is the alias I’m using here in the past.”
“Nice to meet you, Jake. So I assume you’re here for JFK and the …uh…event.”
“Of course. You too?”
“Yep. I thought I’d hang out by the grassy knoll, take a few pictures of the fence during the shooting and hopefully put this conspiracy bullshit to bed once and for all.”
“You’re just going to watch? I’m here to stop it.”
“Stop the JFK assassination? Oh, man. That old chestnut? Really? You‘re buying into that myth?”
“What do you mean, Kemper?”
“It’s the old baby boomer fantasy. ‘Oh, if only JFK had lived, everything would have been better. He would have gotten us out of Vietnam and the ‘60s wouldn’t have turned ugly and we’d all be living in paradise filled with puppies, unicorns and rainbows.’ Never mind that JFK was the guy who kicked off the really serious troop escalations into Vietnam and gave a wink and a nod to their army for the coup and assassination of the Diem brothers. It’s the Oliver Stone idea where JFK would have saved us from ourselves if only the Vast Conspiracy hadn’t killed him first.”
“Oh, well, I guess we did think that saving JFK would make things much better, but we don’t think there’s a big conspiracy. I’m just here to stop Oswald.”
“At least we agree on that. But are you sure you should be changing stuff in the past? That seems really dangerous and could cause all kinds of paradoxes. I just wander around and look at stuff, I don’t try to change anything. You don’t want to end up killing your own grandfather, do you? Or worse yet, accidentally become your own grandfather. Yuk!”
“It should be fine. We did a few trial runs, and everything seemed OK.”
“How did you do trial runs? In fact, how do you time travel? I don’t see a time mower around. And who is this ‘we’ you keep mentioning, Jake?”
“I’m a high school English teacher from Maine. I have a friend named Al who found a kind of portal in time. We call it the rabbit hole. Every time you go through it, you wind up at the same day in our home town in 1958. Al went through the rabbit hole over and over for years and discovered that no matter how long you stay, when you go back through the portal, only two minutes have elapsed since you left.”
“Didn’t Al end up with a bunch of versions of himself in 1958 then?”
“No, because every time you go through the portal, history resets itself like you were never there the first time.”
“Let me see if I understand this, Jake. So if your buddy Al went through the portal to 1958 and changed something like saved somebody’s life, and then he went back through to the present, the change would have been made. The person he saved was alive, but if he goes back through the portal to the past again, then everything resets to the original timeline and that person would die, unless Al saved them again, right?”
“Exactly. But there’s a few odd things like you could go back and buy something like a hat. You could wear that hat back to the present, and it’d still be there. And you could go back to the past wearing that hat which resets everything, but when you went to the store you bought it from, the same hat would still be on your head and on the shelf at the same time! Isn’t that cool? It’s how Al was able to accumulate money and a few other items and still take them back to the past when he needed.”
“That doesn’t sound….right. Jake, are you sure about this? I’m getting very nervous that you’re going to wipe me out of existence or something.”
“I told you, Kemper, we did a few trial runs where we saved people from some ugly fates and then went back to the future and everything was fine.”
“Still, you’re talking about saving a guy who is going to have a huge impact on history with no idea of how it will play out.”
“Don’t worry, Al spent a lot of time thinking about this and doing research. He worked it all out.”
“Let me guess. Al is a baby boomer, right?”
“Uh…yeah.”
“OK, so he talked you into doing this, right? He convinced you that everything would be peaches and gravy if JFK had lived, didn‘t he?”
“Uh….kind of.”
“Who is Al then? A physicist? A historian?”
“Uh…no. He owns the local diner.”
“He owns a diner?”
“You see, the time portal he found was in his pantry.”
“He’s a diner owner with a time portal in his pantry?”
“Yes.”
“If Al’s so convinced that this is the right thing to do, how come he didn’t do it himself?”
“He tried. He came through and lived here several years while he watched Oswald. That‘s why neither of us just killed him. We wanted to be absolutely sure he was acting alone, but then Al got really sick and knew he wouldn’t be able to stop Oswald. So he went back to 2011 and told me about the rabbit hole.”
“Oh, hell. I just realized that you had to live here for five years waiting for this moment. Damn, five years in the past must have sucked, Jake.”
“Actually, I’ve gotten used to it. It was hard at first because I had to go back through and fix some things we’d done on our trial runs again. You know, because of the reset. I couldn’t stand to let those bad things happen. I had to spend some time in a really nasty town in Maine called Derry.”
“Derry? I think I’ve heard of it.”
“Really? It was a very ugly place in 1958. They had some child murders.”
“Wow, that sounds really familiar for some reason.”
“Anyhow, then I spent some time in Florida and then moved to a small town in Texas. I started teaching again and built up a whole life for myself as George Amberson. I really like it here in the past now. I’m thinking about trying to stay forever.”
“But what about the segregation and the sexism and the second hand smoke and the lack of high-def television, Jake? Doesn’t that bother you?”
“A little. But they have really good root beer in this time. And stuff is really cheap! I can buy a new car for peanuts.”
“Nice to see that you don’t let a little thing like institutional racism ruin your appreciation of a good deal. Speaking of which, how did you make money? Just teaching?”
“Al gave me some and he had a sheet of sporting events I could bet on to make more. Like I made a pretty penny betting on the Dallas Texans to beat Houston the other night. It was very cool to bet on the Cowboys before they were even the Cowboys.”
“Uh…Jake, do you think the Dallas Texans became the Dallas Cowboys?”
“Sure.”
“That’s not right. The Texans were the AFL team started by Lamar Hunt. The NFL started the Cowboys in Dallas just to screw with him, and he eventually had to move the team to Kansas City and change their name to the Chiefs. The Cowboys were always the Cowboys.”
“Really? Are you sure about that, Kemper?”
“Yes, I’m goddamn sure about it, I’m from Kansas City. Jesus, you are scaring the shit out of me.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because you’re back in time screwing around doing stuff like betting football games when you have no idea what the hell you’re even really betting on. I hope to hell you know a lot more about the JFK assassination than you do about pro football.”
“Not really.”
“What??”
“I told you, I was an English teacher, not history. I don’t really know much more than what I remember from my classes in college. I’ve got Al’s notes…”
“The research done by the diner owner with the JFK obsession? That’s all you have to go on as you muck around with history, Jake? Did you at least bring some history books with you?”
“Uh…”
“Oh, you have got to be shitting me.”
“We were pressed for time, Kemper!”
“Pressed for time?? You said that Al spent years getting ready for this? And each time hop only takes you two minutes, right? You guys couldn’t have found twenty minutes to run into a damn library and check out an American history book?”
“Well, in hindsight I guess that would have been a good idea.”
“Ya think? I really wish you would have thought this through more than just doing a couple of test runs. You should have done that like twenty times. It would have taken you just forty minutes, right?”
“It’s not that simple, Kemper. You see, for one thing, the time we spent in the past is still elapsed time. I started this when I was thirty-five, and if I go back, only two minutes will have passed in 2011, but I’ll still be forty. If something goes wrong now, I’d have to go back and do all of it again from 1958 on. I don’t think I can handle that.”
“I hadn’t thought about that. I guess it’s like playing a video game with a really crappy system of save check points. The deeper you get into, the more you have to lose.”
“Exactly, but it’s not just that. You see, the past does not want to be changed. If you try to revise something, it fights back. When we did our trial runs, it threw everything it could at us from car trouble to illness, and the bigger the event, the harder it tries to stop you. So doing a bunch of trial runs just isn’t very practical, Kemper.”
“Summing up here: You’re an English teacher who was talked into trying to stop the JFK assassination via a time portal. You’ve spent years of your life doing this even though there’s clearly some very wonky elements to the resetting of the past when you go through and time itself seems to be working against you? And this seems like a good idea, Jake?”
“Please don’t yell at me, Kemper. I did this with the best of intentions. It’s been very hard living like this, and the past seems to be trying to sabotage my life here now. I’m very tired and scared, and this is all coming to a head, and I’m not sure what’s going to happen …*sob*.”
“Don’t cry. I’m sorry. It’s just…. This doesn’t seem like it was thought through very well, Jake. I mean, you seem like a nice guy. I’ll admit that it sounds like you have good intentions, but you know what the road to hell is paved with.”
“I know, I know. But I’ve come too far to stop now.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Good luck you poor bastard. Try not to break the space/time continuum.”
******************************************
Kemper’s Present Day Note About Stephen King and Kansas City Sports Errors (Or Are They?)
The error where Jake thinks about the Dallas Texans someday becoming the Dallas Cowboys is actually in the book, but since it’s a first person account and Jake is definitely not a historical expert, it’s possible that King knew this and just meant for it to be Jake’s error.*
(*Edit - Actually, I realized later on that even this doesn't make sense since the Cowboys and Texans were both formed in 1960. It was part of the rivalry between the NFL and old AFL. This was a big story in Dallas at the time and both teams did tons of promotions and advertising so it doesn't seem possible that Jake was somehow unaware of the existence of the Cowboys.)
However, this isn’t the first time King has caused me to scratch my head with KC sports references. In The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, there is another oddity when the gunslingers are in an alternate version of Topeka, Kansas, that seems to be the one where King’s The Stand took place. There, they see a car with a bumper sticker that says Kansas City Monarchs instead of Kansas City Royals and this is supposed to be evidence that they’re in an alternate world. But the old Negro Leagues baseball team that had players like Satchel Paige was called the Monarchs, and you can still purchase Monarchs merchandise in KC today. (I’ve got a spiffy Monarchs hat I got at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.)
These wouldn’t bother me so much if I thought for sure that they were just errors, but the fact that they’ve both involved a possibly unreliable narrator or hopping to alternate worlds leaves King some wiggle room that bugs me for some reason. Are they mistakes or is King just being cute? I. DON’T. KNOW.
And that makes me nuts.
Kemper’s Spoilerific Present Day Note About the Ending of 11/22/63
(view spoiler)
Dallas, Texas
11/22/63
“Hey, you just appeared out of nowhere! How did you do that? And is that a laptop melted onto a lawn mower?”
“Yeah. See there was this lightning strike and now I can use my time mower to visit the past and …. Wait a second. If you’re from 1963, how did you know what a laptop is? Oh, shit! You’re a time traveler, too?”
“Yes, I am. What year are you from?”
“2011. My name’s Kemper.”
“No way! I’m from 2011, too. My name is George Amberson. I mean, it’s really Jake Epping. Amberson is the alias I’m using here in the past.”
“Nice to meet you, Jake. So I assume you’re here for JFK and the …uh…event.”
“Of course. You too?”
“Yep. I thought I’d hang out by the grassy knoll, take a few pictures of the fence during the shooting and hopefully put this conspiracy bullshit to bed once and for all.”
“You’re just going to watch? I’m here to stop it.”
“Stop the JFK assassination? Oh, man. That old chestnut? Really? You‘re buying into that myth?”
“What do you mean, Kemper?”
“It’s the old baby boomer fantasy. ‘Oh, if only JFK had lived, everything would have been better. He would have gotten us out of Vietnam and the ‘60s wouldn’t have turned ugly and we’d all be living in paradise filled with puppies, unicorns and rainbows.’ Never mind that JFK was the guy who kicked off the really serious troop escalations into Vietnam and gave a wink and a nod to their army for the coup and assassination of the Diem brothers. It’s the Oliver Stone idea where JFK would have saved us from ourselves if only the Vast Conspiracy hadn’t killed him first.”
“Oh, well, I guess we did think that saving JFK would make things much better, but we don’t think there’s a big conspiracy. I’m just here to stop Oswald.”
“At least we agree on that. But are you sure you should be changing stuff in the past? That seems really dangerous and could cause all kinds of paradoxes. I just wander around and look at stuff, I don’t try to change anything. You don’t want to end up killing your own grandfather, do you? Or worse yet, accidentally become your own grandfather. Yuk!”
“It should be fine. We did a few trial runs, and everything seemed OK.”
“How did you do trial runs? In fact, how do you time travel? I don’t see a time mower around. And who is this ‘we’ you keep mentioning, Jake?”
“I’m a high school English teacher from Maine. I have a friend named Al who found a kind of portal in time. We call it the rabbit hole. Every time you go through it, you wind up at the same day in our home town in 1958. Al went through the rabbit hole over and over for years and discovered that no matter how long you stay, when you go back through the portal, only two minutes have elapsed since you left.”
“Didn’t Al end up with a bunch of versions of himself in 1958 then?”
“No, because every time you go through the portal, history resets itself like you were never there the first time.”
“Let me see if I understand this, Jake. So if your buddy Al went through the portal to 1958 and changed something like saved somebody’s life, and then he went back through to the present, the change would have been made. The person he saved was alive, but if he goes back through the portal to the past again, then everything resets to the original timeline and that person would die, unless Al saved them again, right?”
“Exactly. But there’s a few odd things like you could go back and buy something like a hat. You could wear that hat back to the present, and it’d still be there. And you could go back to the past wearing that hat which resets everything, but when you went to the store you bought it from, the same hat would still be on your head and on the shelf at the same time! Isn’t that cool? It’s how Al was able to accumulate money and a few other items and still take them back to the past when he needed.”
“That doesn’t sound….right. Jake, are you sure about this? I’m getting very nervous that you’re going to wipe me out of existence or something.”
“I told you, Kemper, we did a few trial runs where we saved people from some ugly fates and then went back to the future and everything was fine.”
“Still, you’re talking about saving a guy who is going to have a huge impact on history with no idea of how it will play out.”
“Don’t worry, Al spent a lot of time thinking about this and doing research. He worked it all out.”
“Let me guess. Al is a baby boomer, right?”
“Uh…yeah.”
“OK, so he talked you into doing this, right? He convinced you that everything would be peaches and gravy if JFK had lived, didn‘t he?”
“Uh….kind of.”
“Who is Al then? A physicist? A historian?”
“Uh…no. He owns the local diner.”
“He owns a diner?”
“You see, the time portal he found was in his pantry.”
“He’s a diner owner with a time portal in his pantry?”
“Yes.”
“If Al’s so convinced that this is the right thing to do, how come he didn’t do it himself?”
“He tried. He came through and lived here several years while he watched Oswald. That‘s why neither of us just killed him. We wanted to be absolutely sure he was acting alone, but then Al got really sick and knew he wouldn’t be able to stop Oswald. So he went back to 2011 and told me about the rabbit hole.”
“Oh, hell. I just realized that you had to live here for five years waiting for this moment. Damn, five years in the past must have sucked, Jake.”
“Actually, I’ve gotten used to it. It was hard at first because I had to go back through and fix some things we’d done on our trial runs again. You know, because of the reset. I couldn’t stand to let those bad things happen. I had to spend some time in a really nasty town in Maine called Derry.”
“Derry? I think I’ve heard of it.”
“Really? It was a very ugly place in 1958. They had some child murders.”
“Wow, that sounds really familiar for some reason.”
“Anyhow, then I spent some time in Florida and then moved to a small town in Texas. I started teaching again and built up a whole life for myself as George Amberson. I really like it here in the past now. I’m thinking about trying to stay forever.”
“But what about the segregation and the sexism and the second hand smoke and the lack of high-def television, Jake? Doesn’t that bother you?”
“A little. But they have really good root beer in this time. And stuff is really cheap! I can buy a new car for peanuts.”
“Nice to see that you don’t let a little thing like institutional racism ruin your appreciation of a good deal. Speaking of which, how did you make money? Just teaching?”
“Al gave me some and he had a sheet of sporting events I could bet on to make more. Like I made a pretty penny betting on the Dallas Texans to beat Houston the other night. It was very cool to bet on the Cowboys before they were even the Cowboys.”
“Uh…Jake, do you think the Dallas Texans became the Dallas Cowboys?”
“Sure.”
“That’s not right. The Texans were the AFL team started by Lamar Hunt. The NFL started the Cowboys in Dallas just to screw with him, and he eventually had to move the team to Kansas City and change their name to the Chiefs. The Cowboys were always the Cowboys.”
“Really? Are you sure about that, Kemper?”
“Yes, I’m goddamn sure about it, I’m from Kansas City. Jesus, you are scaring the shit out of me.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because you’re back in time screwing around doing stuff like betting football games when you have no idea what the hell you’re even really betting on. I hope to hell you know a lot more about the JFK assassination than you do about pro football.”
“Not really.”
“What??”
“I told you, I was an English teacher, not history. I don’t really know much more than what I remember from my classes in college. I’ve got Al’s notes…”
“The research done by the diner owner with the JFK obsession? That’s all you have to go on as you muck around with history, Jake? Did you at least bring some history books with you?”
“Uh…”
“Oh, you have got to be shitting me.”
“We were pressed for time, Kemper!”
“Pressed for time?? You said that Al spent years getting ready for this? And each time hop only takes you two minutes, right? You guys couldn’t have found twenty minutes to run into a damn library and check out an American history book?”
“Well, in hindsight I guess that would have been a good idea.”
“Ya think? I really wish you would have thought this through more than just doing a couple of test runs. You should have done that like twenty times. It would have taken you just forty minutes, right?”
“It’s not that simple, Kemper. You see, for one thing, the time we spent in the past is still elapsed time. I started this when I was thirty-five, and if I go back, only two minutes will have passed in 2011, but I’ll still be forty. If something goes wrong now, I’d have to go back and do all of it again from 1958 on. I don’t think I can handle that.”
“I hadn’t thought about that. I guess it’s like playing a video game with a really crappy system of save check points. The deeper you get into, the more you have to lose.”
“Exactly, but it’s not just that. You see, the past does not want to be changed. If you try to revise something, it fights back. When we did our trial runs, it threw everything it could at us from car trouble to illness, and the bigger the event, the harder it tries to stop you. So doing a bunch of trial runs just isn’t very practical, Kemper.”
“Summing up here: You’re an English teacher who was talked into trying to stop the JFK assassination via a time portal. You’ve spent years of your life doing this even though there’s clearly some very wonky elements to the resetting of the past when you go through and time itself seems to be working against you? And this seems like a good idea, Jake?”
“Please don’t yell at me, Kemper. I did this with the best of intentions. It’s been very hard living like this, and the past seems to be trying to sabotage my life here now. I’m very tired and scared, and this is all coming to a head, and I’m not sure what’s going to happen …*sob*.”
“Don’t cry. I’m sorry. It’s just…. This doesn’t seem like it was thought through very well, Jake. I mean, you seem like a nice guy. I’ll admit that it sounds like you have good intentions, but you know what the road to hell is paved with.”
“I know, I know. But I’ve come too far to stop now.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Good luck you poor bastard. Try not to break the space/time continuum.”
******************************************
Kemper’s Present Day Note About Stephen King and Kansas City Sports Errors (Or Are They?)
The error where Jake thinks about the Dallas Texans someday becoming the Dallas Cowboys is actually in the book, but since it’s a first person account and Jake is definitely not a historical expert, it’s possible that King knew this and just meant for it to be Jake’s error.*
(*Edit - Actually, I realized later on that even this doesn't make sense since the Cowboys and Texans were both formed in 1960. It was part of the rivalry between the NFL and old AFL. This was a big story in Dallas at the time and both teams did tons of promotions and advertising so it doesn't seem possible that Jake was somehow unaware of the existence of the Cowboys.)
However, this isn’t the first time King has caused me to scratch my head with KC sports references. In The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, there is another oddity when the gunslingers are in an alternate version of Topeka, Kansas, that seems to be the one where King’s The Stand took place. There, they see a car with a bumper sticker that says Kansas City Monarchs instead of Kansas City Royals and this is supposed to be evidence that they’re in an alternate world. But the old Negro Leagues baseball team that had players like Satchel Paige was called the Monarchs, and you can still purchase Monarchs merchandise in KC today. (I’ve got a spiffy Monarchs hat I got at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.)
These wouldn’t bother me so much if I thought for sure that they were just errors, but the fact that they’ve both involved a possibly unreliable narrator or hopping to alternate worlds leaves King some wiggle room that bugs me for some reason. Are they mistakes or is King just being cute? I. DON’T. KNOW.
And that makes me nuts.
Kemper’s Spoilerific Present Day Note About the Ending of 11/22/63
(view spoiler)
Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read
11/22/63.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
November 18, 2011
–
Started Reading
November 18, 2011
– Shelved
December 2, 2011
–
Finished Reading
Comments Showing 1-50 of 52 (52 new)
message 1:
by
Dan
(new)
-
rated it 4 stars
Nov 21, 2011 06:54AM
Let me know if there are any Dark Tower references.
reply
|
flag
None so far, but I'm still getting into it. I think he just did a shout out to that show Haven on SyFi that I've heard is very loosely based on The Colorado Kid, but I haven't seen it so I'm not sure.
19 is mentioned, but that's about it. There are a couple of ties to IT, though, and possibly a couple to Hearts in Atlantis.
Not just a minor tie to IT either, i'm about 20% through the book and a reasonable portion of it has been set in Derry.
There's one small DT shout out late in the book. The Takura Spirit returns!
I randomly decided to look up the boxing match they go to and although Dick Tiger was a boxer at the time, Tom Case is nowhere to be found on Google and certainly not in the list of Tiger's fights. So clearly King didn't mind adding fiction to his narrative when it offered extra suspense.I did think it was funny that he mentioned Chateaugay winning the Kentucky Derby, since this race was also used as a major way to make money in another time travel classic called Replay.
so far all your best reviews involve that time mower.
Joel wrote: "so far all your best reviews involve that time mower."That's because I just keep going back in time and rewriting them until I get it right....
Stephen wrote: "Outstanding, sir."Thanks!
"You don’t want to end up killing your own grandfather, do you? Or worse yet, accidentally become your own grandfather."I take it you are a fellow fan of Futurama.
Great review. If I wore a hat, it would be off to you.
Amber ~Geektastic~ wrote: "I take it you are a fellow fan of Futurama. "It's possible.
Good news, everyone!
I am resisting the spoiler. I didn't want to read the book but now I do.
Truly awesome review!
Allen wrote: "Truly awesome review!"Thanks!
Petra X wrote: "I am resisting the spoiler. I didn't want to read the book but now I do."Your mileage may vary depending on your Stephen King tolerance, but I thought it was a pretty good time travel story.
I'm not much of a Stephen King fan, but I am anxious to get to this one. Another good review, Mr. K.
James wrote: "I'm not much of a Stephen King fan, but I am anxious to get to this one. Another good review, Mr. K."Thanks, Mr. T. (That doesn't sound right. You don't have a mohawk, do you?)
Kemper wrote: "Thanks, Mr. T. (That doesn't sound right. You don't have a mohawk, do you?)"No--at least not yet.
Time mower reviews rock! I have to resist the spoiler as well since this book is on deck next.....but it's killing me! I also suggest writing King to see about those errors.
Oh man.. such a great review! Loved it!
Kemper wrote: "There's one small DT shout out late in the book. The Takura Spirit returns!"Buy a Takura Spirit without delay
And drive along The Beam today
Thank you all for the kind words!
Awesome. This knocks it up another couple of notches on my TBR.
@Spoilerific Present Day Note About the Ending of 11/22/63.(view spoiler)
I can't agree with your comment on objects being taken through the hole yet still existing in the past as a cheat. We're supposed to be suspending our disbelief enough to believe in a rabbit hole through time. If we accept that as a premise of the novel, taking beef and making burgers out of it isn't really that far fetched! Leaving aside the intellectual argument as a reader, it made the story all the more interesting. What wasn't explored was the reason that YCM appeared as YCM to our favourite burger tosser the whole time. What was different about his trips through the rabbit hole?
Being English, the errors that you point out in the sports references are beyond me. But, and like you I don't know, I would say they're there to make people like you scratch their heads!
Lovely review. Had me in stitches! Good stuff. :)
I enjoyed your review. Very original. Am I the only King fan that noticed they mention the remains of Patrick Hockstettter being found in 11/22/63 When Jake gets to Derry (which is in 1958) but in the Book IT, near the end (in 1985) when the remains of the losers club is walking through the sewers to battle IT a 2nd time, he mentions seeing Hockstetters bones still mouldering under the city with a few old school books swelled up from the water... So how could his remains been found at all, in this new novel if they were umder the city in 1985? God I'm a dork.
Derek wrote: "I enjoyed your review. Very original. Am I the only King fan that noticed they mention the remains of Patrick Hockstettter being found in 11/22/63 When Jake gets to Derry (which is in 1958) but in ..."Thanks! No, you're not a dork. That thing with the Chiefs/Cowboy error made me nuts, and I refuse to believe that makes me a dork. We're just observant.
Your review made me chuckle though I really liked the novel. I think your review has a few too many spoilers, though. Just saying :-)
That has got to be without a doubt the longest book review iv ever read!! Fair play to you :-)
Joanne wrote: "That has got to be without a doubt the longest book review iv ever read!! Fair play to you :-)"It's long, but it's pointless...
Gosh darn you are a funny gent. Excellent review, almost as good as the book.
Leah wrote: "Gosh darn you are a funny gent. Excellent review, almost as good as the book."Thanks!
Shawn wrote: "Ahh...puppies unicorns and rainbows."It's the tripod of happiness.
Re: your Kansas City complaints--I think it's King's era. Another example: in this book, Jske comes to Dallas and sees Don't Mess With Texas shirts in the 50s. But that slogan was created in the 80s as part of an ad campaign against littering.
This has been a VERY COOL and highly entertaining review. Thank you, sir!
Jake actually says the Texans were not to become the Cowboys. I know because I had to stop and research this.
Nan wrote: "Jake actually says the Texans were not to become the Cowboys. I know because I had to stop and research this."I don't have a copy of the book handy, but the interwebs tells me that this is the quote:
""By telling her that the Dallas Texans-- not yet the Cowboys, not yet America's Team-- were going to beat the Houston Oilers 20-17 this fall, in double overtime?"
Key words are 'not yet', meaning that he thinks its going to happen eventually.
And after giving it some more thought, it doesn't even make sense that this could just be a mistake on Jake's part because the Texans and Cowboys were both formed in 1960 and existed at the same time. The NFL gave Dallas a franchise to compete with Hunt's fledgling AFL league and the two teams were fighting for market share. Hard to believe that Jake could be living in Dallas while this was going on and still think that the Texans would become the Cowboys someday.
My copy does not say not yet. It says "not to become." I read some other discussions about Killeen and Caroline being misspelled and have come to the conclusion that I read a corrected edition because these mistakes are no longer there. Wish he had corrected some other things. He seems confused about the location of Mercedes St. There is a Mercedes St. in Benbrook, a suburb of Ft. Worth and where he appears to have set Oswald because he talks about Winscott Road and Benbrook Public Library. But I believe Oswald actually lived on Mercedes Ave. which would have been by the Montgomery Ward he keeps referring to. Neither location would ever be referred to as South Fort Worth though.
Danged if you didn't crack me up. This tome still sits unread on the shelf next to Under the Dome, another tome. For what it's worth, I'm a late boomer, born in 52. A would have been historian were it not for snoring jocks on s spring afternoon during a lecture by my favorite history professor. JFK came into office with a series of screw ups. He was more of a Hawk than Tricky Dicky. The Bay of Pigs left him with egg on his face. He began to tone himself down. Learned to rein himself in during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And would have dropped Vietnam for the hot potato it was were it not for Lee Harvey Oswald. It was LBJ who was bound to the Domino theory. Exaggerated the Tonkin Gulf Incident and was led around the nose by William Westmoreland. Were it not for Walter Cronkite's pronouncement that the most we could expect from Vietnam was a stalemate, LBJ would have run for that second term. However, having watched the Cronkite broadcast he admitted he had lost the confidence of the American people. Yeah, I think we would have better off, too, if RFK had lived. Damn, I love puppies and kittens, but you'll never see no Unicorn. Nevertheless. Excellent, hilarious, review!
Mike, read it :)Great review! You spent a lot of time on that... Enough time for me to read another book! Lol (though not of the same size as this one ;) )
Meran wrote: "Great review! You spent a lot of time on that... Enough time for me to read another book! Lol (though not of the same size as this one ;) )"Thanks. Yeah, I probably could have reread Carrie in the time I spent writing this damn thing.
Mike wrote: "Danged if you didn't crack me up. This tome still sits unread on the shelf next to Under the Dome, another tome. For what it's worth, I'm a late boomer, born in 52. A would have b..."Mike, while I respect you, I'm afraid I can't trust your memories because you are a boomer, and The Onion has documented that we just can't rely on your generation's ability to recall things correctly....
http://www.theonion.com/articles/alzh...
Kemper wrote: "Mike wrote: "Danged if you didn't crack me up. This tome still sits unread on the shelf next to Under the Dome, another tome. For what it's worth, I'm a late boomer, born in 52. A..."Bwhahahahahaaaaaa! You are evil, Kemper. That's why I keep reading your reviews. Your wicked humor always brings a special flair to reviews, especially those of this caliber. This is among your best. (Uhm...about The Onion...Not regarded as a reliable historical source. Hell. Who said that. Got it here somewhere. Just read it the other day....)
Great review for a great book. An issue a lot of people are having with the book is that it seems to be written with the mindset that JFK was some type of diplomatic wizard, who could have the world from lots of problems the United states faced. I did not have that problem what so ever. I just read the the book and took that for what it was. The confusing part to me about this book was the unanswered questions and mysteries that seemed to pop in and out before I had time to figure out what was going on. In the end in almost seemed like Lost in a book form. The parts in Derry about Kings other books threw me way off because this is my first king novel. In the end I felt like King just flung in the whole space bubble in time with a not so human protector and hoped for the best. I was looking forward to some unexpected but amazing reveal since the part with the changing card that never came. When you add in tasty mystery like that I need some answers. Another part that I did not understand was when( spoiler) he rest time to its normal state he is wondering if 9/11 is caused by Al's time travel. Wouldn't that be reset too, or is there other time traveling going on or some type of unfixable reverberation in time? Now I am just confused. I guess we would know if Jake had just used a time-mower.
Well, that brightened my day, thanks. Also, did you ever think of using the time mower to go back in time to King's childhood, and spoil the twist in Psycho? You could tell him it's poetic justice.
