on pulling up late to the stephen king party
Even as a lifelong enthusiastic reader, as someone who dragged their mom along to the midnight release parties for the Harry Potter books, who used to scour garage sales and used bookstores for old copies of the Happy Hollister mystery series — I somehow missed the memo on Stephen King.
Like anyone else not living under a rock, I have of course seen several of his tv and film adaptations. The first Stephen King movies I saw were probably 1408 and Shawshank Redemption. The Shining and Secret Window were definitely in the mix too. Most recently I saw both installments of It as well as Doctor Sleep (and had to cover my eyes for multiple scenes because Rose the Hat was too scary).
Also this past year, I watched Stand By Me for the first time and discovered that my childhood favorite The Sandlot was nothing more than a lower-stakes knockoff. That’s a subject for another day.
Despite my unmatched literary prowess, I had only ever read one of King’s short stories, “Room 1408” — I loved it and even wrote a fan fiction piece based on it. But it wasn’t until a few months ago that I finally picked up one of his books. I overheard Bill playing the audiobook 11.22.63 and got hooked. Fairy Tale followed right behind and then Billy Summers.
There’s no arguing about King’s skill as a writer. His resume speaks for itself. As much as his books excel at the entertainment level, the endings of 11.22.63 and Fairy Tale left me feeling unsatisfied. In fact, I found the plot lines of these two novels exceptionally similar to one another.
They each follow a male main character discovering a portal to a parallel supernatural universe. Both characters come across these respective portals by way of a crazy old man who has been essentially hoarding it and keeping it hidden from the public. And both books end with the main guys deciding that no one else should have access to the alternate world and ultimately returning to their mundane earthly lives.
The ending of 11.22.63 bothered me the most. The main character, Jake (also known as George in the alternate world), travels back in time to 1958 via a wormhole in the back closet of his friend Al’s butcher shop. Al basically coerces him into going on a mission to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. He argues that JFK’s death was a watershed moment in the world as we know it, and that by keeping him from dying, one could change the course of history an prevent a bunch of other terrible things from happening.
The problem with this logic, of course, is that the theoretical possibility of time travel naturally entails a bunch of unintended consequences. Upon entering the world of 1958, Jake almost immediately becomes aware of a sort of resistant force working against his efforts. The story is told in the first person from Jakes perspective, and throughout the story he repeats the mantra, “The past is obdurate.”
There is also the problem that Jake is a mere mortal and therefore subject to human desires and lapses in judgement. He ends up falling in love with Sadie, a teacher he crosses paths with on his quest to save Kennedy. However, because the timeline of history is tamper-resistant, he encounters a series of obstacles along his journey.
One such obstacle is Sadie’s mentally unstable ex-husband, who eventually attempts to murder Sadie. Jake manages to save her life, but the incident leaves her permanently disfigured. Sadie ends up getting killed in the scuffle that ensues with Lee Harvey Oswald as she and Jake intervene in his assassination plot.
After completing the mission that Al set out for him, Jake returns to the portal and snaps back to 2011, where he discovers that history has been radically altered as a consequence of his intervention. The world he once knew is now a dystopian civilization ravaged by famine, war, and poverty.
On behalf of all humanity, he makes an executive decision to go back down the rabbit hole and reset the timeline, effectively erasing all of the actions that he took during his previous trip. He never meets Sadie, and Kennedy’s assassination is successfully carried out. All for the collective good of life on Earth.
“What a noble MAN!”
…the reader is ostensibly supposed to think by the end of 11.22.63.
Maybe it was bad timing on my part, but I read this book at the same time as I was rewatching season one of The Last of Us, where the decisions made by protagonist Joel stand in stark contrast to Jake’s choices.
I could sit here all night and conduct a side-by-side psychoanalysis of Jake and Joel and try to identify what drives them and what philosophies underly their behavior. But in my mind, there is one big difference between these two men that could entirely explain their opposing character arcs:
Joel is a parent. Jake is not.
As a parent myself, I can attest that I immediately became way more tribalistic after my son was born. My world became a lot smaller, and a lot of the social and political views I used to scream about on Twitter, while still important, began to take a distant second place to the family right in front of me. I would do hella dumb shit to protect my family, even at the risk of precipitating societal collapse.
Joel operates on this same principle. His choice to save Ellie and destroy the only possibility of an antidote for the zombie fungus was arguably selfish and short-sighted.
This to me is one of the most inconvenient truths — that when push comes to shove, the family takes priority above all else. It’s one of the reasons I used to doubt whether I should even contend with parenthood in the first place.
The inherent drive to take care of my immediate family sometimes feels in tension with the desire for a better society for all. Perhaps that’s an illusion perpetuated by the bootstrapping isolationists. Or maybe that old saying is right — that if you’re not a conservative by the age of 30 then you have no brain.
But back to Stephen King. For me, King’s stories are best enjoyed as pure entertainment. My efforts to glean some greater insight about humanity from his stories have left me disappointed.
If there is one takeaway from King’s work, it’s that evil is a conscious and independent force larger than any single bad actor, and that the abyss does in fact gaze back.
