Stephen King’s latest novel is a time-travel fantasy about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At almost 750 pages, 11.22.63 is drawn-out even by blockbuster standards. Critics have bemoaned its surfeit of period detail (bobby socks, Hula Hoops, big-finned cars). I rather enjoyed it. King, now an august-looking 64, is a writer of towering cleverness, whose fiction manages to appeal to a reading public both popular and serious. Much of what passes these days for literary fiction is mere creative writing. Give me genre fiction (John le Carré, Martin Cruz Smith) any day.
A fiction without a story — Kings knows — is scarcely worth its weight in paper. Before King was the emperor of bestsellerdom he studied English at the University of Maine (his birthplace). 11.22.63 is brocaded with allusions to Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allan Poe and other American maestros of horror. It is also a science fiction of sorts.
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