Beware those who tread here, for there be MAJOR Spoilers ahead.⌗

Stephen King has never written an ending I’ve really enjoyed. I’ve read many of his books, most of them from his younger days, and I’ve never really left any of his books satisfied. There is a fundamental disagreement Mr. King and I have. I truly believe that the ending of the book should never make the journey feel worthless. What I mean, is that you should never write an ending that makes the reader feel like they’ve wasted their time, and with almost every King book I’ve read, I’ve felt that the ending just didn’t quite make the story worth my while. The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, as they say.

I knew my history with Stephen King going into reading 11/22/63, and I expected to hate the ending. But dammit if I don’t hate it even more than I expected to. In traditional King fashion, the last part of the book makes the entire journey feel like a complete waste of time. Worse, it’s depressing. And not just that our main character eventually chooses to fail his mission of saving JFK, but that the entire romance we sat through for 900+ pages was a complete dud. He didn’t get the girl. Nothing Changed Not. A. G#$damn. Thing.

Let’s talk about it.

The Plot⌗

The main idea behind this book is that someone discovers a way to slip back in time. Specifically to the year 1958. This rip in time can be used over and over again, theoretically, therefore allowing someone to reset time as often as they want to. One of the characters, Al, conjures up a plan to go back in time to save John F. Kennedy. His rationale is, if JFK is saved from Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet, so many bad things that happend in the late 60s and 70s would never come to pass. Al, of course, can’t actually do this on his own, because he’s been going back in time so often, he’s aged too much and ended up with lung cancer. Turns out the air in the 50s and 60s wasn’t too good and everyone smoked like it was going out of style.

That is where Jake Epping comes in, our MC. Jake is a high school English teacher, well spoken and an all around perfect human being. He doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink, he helps out and volunteers, and seems like the kind of fella who only truly exists in fiction. I don’t remember a single vice. This is important to the story, especially how it ends. Anyway, Al convinces Jake to go back in time, and Jake does so. Several times, actually. After all, he has to test if he can actually make changes. Turns out, he can. When he saves a family from slaughter, he goes back to 2011, and finds that he made changes but that they weren’t necessarily the changes he wanted to make. This is also very important foreshadowing.

Needless to say, the entire plot revolves around the idea that the past doesn’t want to be changed. All of the conflict and strife that our MC faces revolves around the idea that the past will do everything in its power to avoid being changed. This leads to all sorts of horrible things happening, but through it all, we had a goal in mind. The pain and suffering would be worth it, because we were going to save JFK and the world!

Yeah. More on that later.

Along the way, Jake meets Sadie. Sadie is a woman just getting out of a troubled marriage, and has moved to Texas to avoid her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Jake and Sadie fall in love and have a really nice love story. It fills up most of the space in this book. When Jake isn’t learning as much about Oswald as he can (he has to make sure there really wasn’t a shooter on the grassy knoll), he’s in a small Texas town making friends, falling in love, and being the perfect guy King has written him to be.

And Jake does succeed. JFK is saved. The journey was long and definitely arduous. 800 pages to get near this point, at least digitally. A lot of that revolving around the love story of Jake and Sadie.

JFK is saved, Oswald is dead. But so is Sadie.

Yeah.

Now, that sucks. I hate unhappy endings when it comes to romance. But, remember, Jake has a way back. And he’s so damn in love with Sadie, he’s willing to go back to 2011 and do it all over again. Awe, sweet, right? I told you he’s perfect. You’ve got to remember that the struggle he had getting to the point of saving JFK was not insignificant. He damn near died doing it. Hell, Sadie had damn near died before the final confrontation. And yet, love would prevail. This time Jake would know Oswald was the lone shooter, and everything would be taken care of long before JFK rode through the streets of Dallas.

The End⌗

I’m, at this point, really loving the book. I can’t put it down. I’ve read something like 200 pages in a day, and I just know that I’ll finish before the night is over. After all, the book has been great so far. King has written a romance novel inside a historical retelling of one of the most important moments in American History. As a bit if a romance nut, and a historian, how could I not love it? But that pesky history I have with King was sitting at the back of my mind. I knew that King doesn’t like to make the endings of his books so tidy.

I figured something would go wrong. What I predicted was that the future wouldn’t be as good as Jake hoped it would be, so he would come back, find Sadie, fall in love, but let JFK die. After all, that was the big change. It would also fit King’s MO. It’d make the reason why the book exists seem pointless. After all, he was supposed to save Kennedy, right? If all he does is get the girl and stay in the past, that would make a lot of readers question why they read 900 pages of Jake trying to save JFK.

But I was only half right.

The future was horrendous. Nukes everywhere, radiation poisoning, constant earthquakes, and Maine was now a part of Canada. I didn’t make that last bit up. It turns out that there are guardians of time. You know, like Dr. Who. Only these guardians are apparently the only thing holding reality together, and Jake and Al have gone and buggered up so much that reality is going to be destroyed. The only person who can save it?

Jake Epping.

And how does he do this? Well, you see, he has to go back and live in his 2011. With that, all will be good, reality will settle, and the world will go on as it always has. Of course, this ending fucking sucks.

Remember, Jake is perfect. He’s the ultimate boy scout. Oh, after visiting the horrible future, he does run and think about staying in 1958. For a few days. But our perfect guy can’t risk the world for love. So, he goes back to 2011. Without Sadie, without having made a single damn change. 5 years or more, wasted with nothing to show for it beyond a broken heart, a bum knee and partial amnesia.

And that’s the end. No love story happy ending. JFK is still six feet under. And Jake, the idiot, ends the story by seeking out 80 year old Sadie and dancing with her. Then the screen fades to black.

Fuck You, Stephen King!⌗

I’m a sucker for a happy ending. I don’t need everything to be hunky dory, but I do not like endings that are 100% unhappy. I would have hated that JFK was dead at the end of this book. It would have made a lot of the book seem pointless. But I get it. The past doesn’t want to be changed. But to make him go back to 2011 and make the entire thing, love story and all, completely pointless? Fuck you, Stephen King. Fuck you.

This was 900 pages of wasted time. I enjoyed most of it. But the ending ruined every good feeling I had about this book. Why did I read it? Nothing changed at the end of the story. Nobody got a happy ending; not even a smidge of one. It feels like a betrayal. It feels like a sucker punch right to the face.

And yet… This is what Stephen King does. He’s done it in almost every book he has written. I’ve not read all of his books, but the number is over a dozen, and all his endings are subpar.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Matt, King writes horror. How often do you get a happy ending in a horror story? Well. A lot of times, actually. Good triumphs over evil in a lot of horror stories. People die, and there is sadness, but a lot of the time, there’s some form of happy ending. People surviving to tell the tale. The bad guys defeated.

In 11/22/63, the bad guys won. And yes, I get that is the way history sometimes works. Hell, it’s the way it works a lot of the time. But this book is fiction. It’s not a history text book. And even if King wanted to make the point he made, that the past doesn’t want to be changed, he could have still given us a nice conclusion to Jake and Sadie. Made something of the journey worthwhile.

But he didn’t. Why? Because King is an asshole who hates happiness and glories in the suffering of his readers, that’s why. It’s a shame he’s a great damn writer.

I Don’t Know What to Say⌗

1500 words, and I’m finding myself still stunned that this is the way it ended, despite knowing that King doesn’t write good endings. I just finished the book about an hour ago, and I’m still high on my feelings of utter betrayal and dismay. I’ve spewed a lot of that out in this review. I don’t know how to rate this book, if I’m honest. The writing alone merits five stars. The plot, until the end, was engaging and (despite the absurd length) well paced. The characters were also very well done. Jake was much too perfect for my tastes, but he was still well written. Until the end, the romance was also right up my street. I thought it was great.

But the ending just sucked. If you haven’t picked up on my feelings for how this book ended, you should probably go back and read though this again. I hated it. With a passion. I feel like the last month of my life has been a waste of time, and that’s not a feeling I enjoy.

So, I’m giving this 2.5 stars. It honestly deserves less than that, but the writing is excellent. It always is with Stephen King. Too bad the fucker can’t write an ending to save his life.

Post Script⌗

What’s above was written in August. This was one of the books we read for our book club, and this was my review. It wasn’t posted on our site there, so it eventually made its way here. That was a couple of months ago, and I still haven’t fully recovered from 11/22/63. My reading slump after this book has been epic, and shows no real signs of going away regardless of a ambitious reading plan.

I don’t know that there’s a day that goes by where I don’t think about this book. That may be the sign of a truly epic book, but given the way it ended, I don’t think it’s a good thing. Normally, when a book grabs a hold of my head in this way, like with Ready Player One, I just reread the book. I loved RPO, and have read it a couple times since I wrote that review. I can’t do that with 11/22/63. I know how it ends, and all rereading it would do is make me even more unhappy. I’m working on moving on, but dammit if this King novel hasn’t caused me some strife. Well played, Mr. King, well played.