I just finished reading 11/22/63. Back in the day, I was a Kingophile, one of those read-everything-by-him devotees, but that was ages ago. This massive tome was my first in a very long time by the master of the macabre.
So long, I can't quite remember why I gave him up. Something to do with It, I think, and a general distaste for violent clowns. Oh, and that overindulgent length thing, let's not forget that.
I liked 11/22/63 for the first 500 pages or so, but once the narrator got to Texas the whole thing started to piss me off. I don't read Stephen King for romance, and damn if he didn't turn the whole time travel thing into a love story.
What's worse is that after several hundred pages of star-crossed lovers dancing the lindy-hop, he spent only ten paragraphs summarizing the results of the narrator's mucking about with Lee Oswald and JFK. Which I thought had been the whole point of the book anyway, not the ill-fated romance. Dude, this creepy, apocalyptic stuff? This is what you're good at! Why devote so few pages to your actual talent?
My review doesn't end there, no it doesn't. Just when I thought I would slam down this brick of a book with a disgusted harumph, he won me back. He brought me to tears, Stephen King did.
"She is the dream, and so am I. Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief . . . but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it? Yes, I think so. Because when the time is gone, you can never get it back."
Beautifully worded... but if you get the whole brevity thing, Steve-oh, then why can't you figure out how to write a book under 800 pages?
Might I recommend mailing out a few postcards, to give yourself some practice in getting more quickly to the point?
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