I didn't like "Cujo". I may have ranted about how such a boring book could be on best-seller lists. But it wasn't a total loss since it reminded me of "The Dead Zone", and I noticed both were by the same guy, which taught me to avoid books by Stephen King. Then the same thing happened with movies, even Carrie. Don't get me wrong, Sissy Spacek did a wonderful job showing a terrified young woman with no idea what puberty was. But when I watched the entire thing, the dragging, overwritten parts outnumbered the good ones.
So I was reluctant when someone recommended a more recent book by that guy. But maybe he's gotten better? Silly me. Why would a widely praised artist worth half a billion dollars change how they write? But like Cujo, I got something out of it. I can now explain exactly what I dislike about his writing.
The book is the one about going back in time to prevent the Kennedy assassination, "11/22/63". First I'll explain the time-travel part, then go over the aspects of bad writing, then give the single reason why King's horror annoys me. Then one thing I liked, then I'll probably make fun of the book some more, since it was 850 pages.
When this was written, in 2011, time travel was an established genre with lots of ways to add to it, riff off established tropes, and so on. This book ignores all that. Time travel rule #1: a portal can take you back to a time in the late 1950's, and only that one time. Rule #2: like Groundhog Day, each trip is a re-do, erasing whatever you did last time. Rule #3: changing the past meets active resistance starting the morning of the day you plan to change it. It can be stubbing your toe, a flat tire, getting sick, up to getting hit by a truck.
The plan to save Kennedy is: 1) make sure it's our real past. In other words, will things we change then really be changed in the present. 2) make absolutely sure Oswald is the right guy and stopping him is all we need to do. 3) stop him somehow.
The crazy old man who first discovered the portal already did phase-1. He prevented someone in the past from being permanently injured and when he came back, the guy was fine -- the injury never happened. Even so, the hero wants to test whether he can prevent a killing. He finds an entire family which was killed and plans to save them. Phase-II is to watch Oswald's earlier failed assassination attempt on a right-wing general. If he really tried that, with no prodding or help, he must be a lone gunman. For phase-III, we'll play it by ear. Maybe we can do it well-in-advance and non-violently.
All together the plan is he'll take two trips. In #1 he'll save that same injured person to get a feel for Time Resistance and to check the old man's notes. Then he'll prevent the family from being killed, come back, and verify both things worked. For trip #2 he'll save them all again (since saving them the first time will have been erased, and he has an emotional attachment by now). Then he'll go on to the Kennedy part. He'll take copious notes just in case he fails and has to do it all again.
The two trips give us some fun Groundhog Day action. On trip #1 he barely manages to follow the script to prevent the injury, and for the murder it takes piles of detective work, one family member still dies, and he nearly gets killed himself. But on trip #2 he finds a smooth way to prevent the injury, with no Time Resistance at all, and for the murder he easily ambushes the confirmed killer in a deserted spot well in advance (which he knew about from the last trip). Phase-I is complete.
Phase-II starts with years and years of watching Oswald, making notes. He uses a small town as a base, unexpectedly becoming social -- getting a job as a teacher and starting a relationship with a shy young divorcee. That personal life interferes with observing the event for Stage-II, but he quickly figures out another way to be sure Oswald is the guy. Stage-II complete.
For Stage-III, stopping Oswald, he waffles. He's not sure he can pre-emptively kill him, emotionally or practically. While waiting, he gets badly beaten-up (by angry bookies after he wins too many long-odds bets). His girlfriend, previously a hindrance, comes to the rescue. With her help he arrives in the nick of time, is a big hero, but sadly, she's killed.
Back in the present, Kennedy was never shot but things are much, much worse -- anarchy and radioactive mutants. He goes back in time to erase his changes and then gives up. He destroys the portal and lives in the unchanged present. THE END.
So it stinks as a time-travel story, but that's fine. Plenty of time-travel is an excuse to learn history. In this book we learn Oswald really did try to kill some general first, and that he was actually working in the depository at the time. Anyone who missed that Quantum Leap 2-part episode learned Oswald had trouble holding a job and that his young Russian wife was pregnent with his second child. And that's about it. This book isn't a fun history lesson. But it could be other stuff.
Now onto the writing. I'm going to divide it into "no one edits the king!", red-rumming, lying for drama, and motivations-smotivations:
There are long scenes which could be cut or aggressively editted. For example, the book spends the first 27 pages saying our main character is an unhappy teacher who knows how to swing dance, and introducing the crazy old time traveller who chooses him. 27 pages for just that. Then there are extended easter-eggs in the prevent-the-family-murder trip. He explains that town is the same one from a more well-known King book. We visit places and meet characters from that other book. There's also a subplot where he's being stalked by a townsperson. The big reveal is that guy also wants to kill the soon-to-be-murderer. When we finally get to Oswald we spend lots of time buying and installing bugging equipment, which mostly picks up dinner conversation, which we get to read, a lot.
King also loves adding silly stuff that doesn't go anywhere. The past-girlfriend is magically clumsy. The first time traveller emotionally blackmails the hero into taking the job, twice, even though he wants to do it. The hero escapes arrest in a tense scene with a suspicious FBI agent, interrupted by a pointless call from Jackie-O thanking him for saving her husband. At the end of the book he meets a Time Guardian who explains this all could have been avoided if only the previous Time Guardian hadn't been drunk.
There's more. He learns about the Phase-I murdered family because the sole survivor is in his adult English class. We get to read that guy's essay about it, twice. He chooses to stay in a small town near Dallas because Dallas is supernaturally ominous and reminds him of the horror-town from the other book. When he first sees the book depository he senses that a monster lives there.
You see, no-one edits the King. He gets an idea and writes paragraphs and they stay in the book no matter what, even when he changes his mind. In the last scene King wanted the old "bullet misses the hero when he trips, but it flies past and kills his girl". That doesn't work when the girlfriend's big thing is tripping and falling, but he already wrote that and no one edits the king! The monster thing seemed cool at first, but later it seemed silly and there's no monster when we get to the book depository in the end. So, do we edit-out that first monster feeling? No. No one edits the king! Even the way he tells us the prices for so many things in the 60's represents an inability to cut things. King looked up prices and he's darned well going to use them all.
In one of his early books, King made a lot of money with REDRUM. A kid in it said REDRUM in a creepy way, it was written on walls in blood(?), the meaning of it was a big reveal and people liked it. REDRUM's are now his thing. In this book the mysterious drunk (Time Guardian #1) gets REDRUM'ed -- he's given a mysterious name, heard through-out the book and we find out what it means at the end; but that character isn't important. The hero keeps being shocked and scared as he hears a mysterious word in odd places. But it turns out to be a another clue to that pointless Time Guardian. He notices people and things seeming to repeat, and assumes it's caused by his time travelling, invents a Deep Phrase for it and wonders what it means (nothing -- it means nothing). Not quite a REDRUM, but similar, the hero latches onto a phrase "the broom between us" to mean lack of communication in his relationship. It's Deep because the girlfriend's ex-husband used a broom to divide the bed in their sexless marriage.
And now to explain lying for drama. One of the Time Coincidences was lots of similar-looking cars, seen near the hero's house. But, surprise, it was actually a stalker disguising his car! King surprised us by giving us clues and then telling us they weren't clues. Another: after the hero collects on his first long-shot bet with a shady bookie he warns us "much later this would have tragic consequences". He goes to another scary bookie near the end, but reassures us that he'll never see any of those guys again. Surprise! He's followed and beaten senseless, but by a different angry bookie! That's one step below the old "it was only the cat. I'll just let down my guard ... ah! The killer!". The next is lying for false suspence: on a date with his future girlfriend he tells us they would have fallen in love that night except for the shocking event half-way through. The shocking thing is ... he's mildly distracted by someone saying the nonsense word the drunk Time Guardian used. They don't fall in love until next week.
Now onto motivations-smotivations. The hero is happy to live in the past since he hates teaching, but he settles down in the past because he loves teaching. Huh. He doesn't care about the past, then falls in love with the past, then sees a gross coloreds-only outhouse and hates the past, then his 1960's Texas small-town has no racism and the past is great again, then he finally decides to stay in the present. That makes sense. In phase-II he's deciding whether he can stop Oswald pre-emptively, who has a baby and beats his wife, but when the wife is pregnant again he suddenly can't execute a family man.
I don't think the girlfriend sub-plot has the emotional impact he's going for, but you tell me: he's with her because they're the only single teachers and she's so tall that no other man will look at her. She has super-low self-esteem due to her abusive ex-husband, and her first adult fun is with our hero. Despite that, she gets the nerve to ask questions about his secret life, then leaves when he clams up. She crawls back after a traumatic event and promises never to ask questions again. Her face is slashed by the crazy ex-husband, she take that knife and keeps it with her at all times, and the scar makes her try to kill herself (the hero saves her).
As promised, here's my newly dicovered problem with King's horror: it uses disgust as a substitute. I noticed this in The Dead Zone. The killer was gross and did gross stuff, and the main character keeps having flashbacks to the bad man's gross closet. In this book the bad places are shabby with people who are poor, vulgar, drunk, ugly and abusive. A chicken explodes in a spray of blood and feathers, a fat bleeding man shoots an underaged prostitute in the stomach, Oswald beats his wife. It's not horror, it's gross-out. We see Oswald's shrill controlling mother several times, berating her loser son and grabbing her sleeping grandkid and bouncing it around, ignoring the crying. It's not part of any story, all it does is make us uncomfortable. The horror.
On to more specific things I hate. To show our hero's fine teaching, we see him using a banned book to prompt an out-of-the-box conversation about life. You know, the stuff normal good teachers do every day. Next thing, after telling us about that terrible colored outhouse, we're shown that the black part of Dallas is vile, then a bus full of black people offer our hero their seats before being rammed by a Time Resistance truck, which the hero knew would happen. Don't get me started on the Jewish bookies.
And now the nice thing. When the FBI agent is questioning our hero, arrested on the 6th floor with a dead Oswald, he notes his non-existant background and hints he may be a deep-cover Soviet agent, activated to prevent an international incident. That's pretty good. For real the Soviets went nuts when they found out the man who killed Kennedy spent time in Russia. They did everything they could to cooperate and would have prevented it if they'd known. And a bonus nice thing: I enjoyed "The Shawshank Redemption". But it was based on a mere novella which was then extensively reworked for the movie.
Lastly, as promised, "making fun of it some more". King loves to remind of us of stuff. After the hero brusquely stares down someone trying to intimidate him he reminds us that he shot a man in cold blood last year. We know, from the last two times you reminded us, and also when it happened. But mostly he flatout says "and that made me think back to the time... ". It's that cheesy thing from movies where a guy gets fired and they re-play his mom saying "you'll never amount to anything". But to be fair, King clearly can't remember what he wrote 50 pages ago. Maybe he's genuinely trying to be helpful.