Do Not Disturb: Decoding Kubrick's THE SHINING In ROOM 237

Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, which doesn’t stick very closely to the source novel, has more than its fair share of detractors (King himself among them). But those who like it like it a lot, and some of those who like it have taken it several steps further than the rest of us—reading a variety of coded messages in Kubrick’s detail-packed production design and carefully composed shots. Five such fans, and their various interpretations of the movie’s deeper meanings, are our guides through the new documentary Room 237. These individuals have become lost in the maze of the Overlook Hotel, so to speak, and their obsessive quest to determine the true significance behind every single shot of the film makes for fascinating, if at times laughable, viewing.

The five unseen narrators—mostly writers and indie filmmakers—walk us through their own readings of what they each believe The Shining is really about. One narrator claims that the movie is a subtle indictment of the genocide of Native Americans, pointing to the mention of the Overlook being built on an Indian burial ground, as well as the various Native American artwork and designs throughout the hotel (he ascribes particular significance to a well-placed can of Calumet baking soda, featuring the silhouette of an Indian chief, in the pantry). Another insists that the movie’s famous hedge maze alludes to larger mythological underpinnings, even going so far as to insist that a backlit portrait of a skier in the Overlook's game room is meant to suggest the form of a minotaur (it’s a bit of a stretch, to say the least). Another still is convinced that the film is a commentary on the Holocaust, taking care to point out multiple appearances of the number 42 (the year Hitler implemented his “Final Solution”) and the German-made typewriter used by Jack Torrance. Most absurdly, one narrator, filmmaker Jay Weidner, is absolutely certain that Kubrick used The Shining to admit his compliance in helping NASA fake the moon landing on a sound stage. Details like Danny Torrance’s “Apollo 11” sweater, Weidner insists, are impossible-to-miss signposts of the director’s compliance in the conspiracy. Weidner, who documented the alleged fakery in his 2011 film Kubrick’s Odyssey, concludes that Kubrick was so torn up with guilt over what he’d done that he inserted hidden messages admitting his involvement in the film’s design and, more overtly, within Jack and Wendy’s marital strife (Weidner says that Kubrick scripted these scenes as a way of dealing with his inability to come clean with his own wife over what he’d done). Kubrick, who died in 1999, is conveniently not around to confirm or deny any of the claims made by Room 237's narrators.

Most of these theories are pretty ridiculous, and are clearly the result of watching the movie far too many times. That’s not to say that all of the ideas espoused in Room 237 are completely half-baked, though. Some of the observations are thought-provoking, namely the ones that suggest Kubrick’s narrative is concerned about dealing with our inability to cope with past trauma and societal guilt over unthinkable atrocities. This may or may not actually have been Kubrick’s intent, but it’s an interesting way of looking at his work. Another section deals with alternative methods of viewing The Shining, walking us through a one-time theatrical screening where the film was projected over itself in reverse—playing forwards and backwards at the same time. A number of strange visuals result when watching the movie in this fashion, like Jack Torrance’s face appearing over the two murdered little girls (the combination of visual elements gives Jack a weirdly clownlike visage). Again, there’s no way Kubrick could have anticipated such results, but it’s kind of cool nonetheless. However, for every thought-provoking aside in Room 237, there’s another snicker-inducing observation from the narrating fans, like the aforementioned minotaur, or the massive erection Weidner insists appears onscreen in the form of desk clutter when the Overlook’s manager, Mr. Ullman, meets Jack Torrance in his office for the first time.

Directed by Rodney Ascher, Room 237 could have easily become a dry treatise on film study, and does threaten to do so on a few occasions (such as some of the play-by-play sequences where the audience is invited to watch a super-slowed-down scene from the film, all in the hopes of catching a tiny detail that isn’t really there to begin with). But the film is kept visually interesting through the use of clips from Kubrick’s other work (Eyes Wide Shut and 2001: A Space Odyssey turn up a lot), as well as some other, less-obvious, non-Kubrick choices (like An American Werewolf In London and the 1985 giallo flick Demons). A synthesizer score by William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes keeps the mood appropriately cerebral, with a hint of the macabre. Many of the theories touted by Shining superfans in Room 237 may be as rail-thin as Shelley Duvall, but the documentary gives you a new appreciation for The Shining itself—a fascinating, maddening puzzle-box of a movie that has as many possible interpretations as the Overlook Hotel has rooms.

31 Days Of Horror 2012...PART THIRTEEN! The Final Chapter!

CARRIE (1976): The shadow of Carrie loomed large over several of the movies in my lineup this year. Obviously, Prom Night, with its prom-themed massacre and its teaming up of a bitch queen and a clueless bully thug owes a debt to it, as does Trick Or Treat, which features a similar scene of high school tormentors getting their supernatural comeuppance (only at a Halloween dance instead of the prom). In a way, it even seems that We Need To Talk About Kevin sort of begins where Carrie ends (taking into account Kevin's time-shuffled structure, that is), with a small town full of angry, grieving parents dealing with the aftermath of a high school massacre; it's easy to draw a line from the empty lot emblazoned with the legend "CARRIE WHITE BURNS IN HELL" to the red paint-splattered house Tilda Swinton's pariah protagonist lives in. I hadn't seen Brian DePalma's breakthrough adaptation of Stephen King's blockbuster first novel in over a decade, and I was pleased to find that it only gets better with age. Sissy Spacek is heartbreaking as the telekinetic teen, and her performance is nothing short of remarkable--she sells her character's transformation from wallflower to prom queen to, tragically, angel of vengeance, with no visible effort. DePalma's visuals are pure eye candy as well. Each beautifully-composed shot is packed with detail and teeming with vibrant colour. The tone of Carrie always struck me as a bit odd, but the way it transitions from high school soap opera into supernatural horror heightens the story's ultimate tragedy--you can't help but get lulled into the fairy tale myth of Carrie's transformation into a prom queen, just in time to get sucker-punched by the cruelty of her classmates. Carrie is also a strange sort of female empowerment movie, and not just in reference to the title character's burgeoning psychic abilities, either. The women are unquestionably in charge here, whether it's Chris (Nancy Allen, never better or bitchier) using fellatio to convince Billy (John Travolta) to slaughter a pig for her, or Sue (Amy Irving) convincing Tommy (William Katt) to take Carrie to the prom. Watching it again, I also realized that Frank Darabont's new, much bleaker ending for his adaptation of King's The Mist wisely brings his film into line with Carrie's ultimately horrible truth--the worst, scariest thing in the world would be if the religious wackos in both stories were right, and they sort of are. Sacrificing your kid will make the monsters go away, and if you go to the prom with Tommy Ross, they are all gonna laugh at you.

MANIAC (1980): Character actor Joe Spinnell (The Godfather, Rocky) scripted the role of Frank Zito in Maniac for himself to play, which I guess makes this grindhouse favourite the Good Will Hunting of slasher-trash cinema. Gene Siskel famously walked out of the movie theatre a half-hour into William Lustig's depraved bloodbath, and he probably wasn't the only one. This intimate portrait of a lonely psychopath who murders women and takes their scalps to adorn his mannequin collection is one grimy, unpleasant little movie. Maniac unfolds mostly in slight variations on three scenes: 1. Spinnell's Zito stalks a woman (or a couple) around for awhile, breathing labouriously in some of the cinema's most enthusiastic foley work. 2. Zito then murders the woman (or couple) in spectacularly gory fashion. 3. Zito returns to his crummy apartment to attach the fresh scalp to one of his mannequins, then talk to himself, the mannequins, and the spectre of his dead mother until he throws a fit and breaks down crying. The pattern breaks when Zito meets a sultry photographer (former Bond girl Caroline Munro), and improbably enough, starts dating her. But old habits die hard, and Zito's return to his murderous ways lead to a freaky climax/dream sequence complete with the killer's decomposed mother busting out of her grave, not to mention the murdered women returning from the dead for revenge. The effects by Tom Savini are pretty impressive despite the shoestring budget--particularly a super-graphic exploding head (the one belonging to the character Savini also plays, no less!). You almost get the sense that Spinnell and Zito didn't really think they were making a horror movie, but instead were capturing an intimate yet gritty character study on film, not unlike Taxi Driver (which Spinnell also had a small part in). Borderline inept at times (the film is unbelievably murky, with awkward editing and occasionally incomprehensible audio), but weirdly effective at others, Maniac is most assuredly a memorable experience--just not one everyone will be up for.

DRAG ME TO HELL (2009): I remember being bummed out that Drag Me To Hell didn't perform better at the box office when it was released in 2009, but upon revisiting it this year I can kind of see why it didn't set the box office ablaze. As a big fan of Raimi's Evil Dead films, particularly the gonzo, Three Stooges-inspired second instalment, I immediately responded to the haphazard outbursts of humour in Raimi's return to horror. However, to a new generation of thrillseeking moviegoers, the tone of this movie must have been fairly strange (Drag Me To Hell is rated PG-13, to give you an idea of who it was aimed at). This tale of an ambitious bank employee (Alison Lohman) cursed by an old gypsy woman is jam-packed with Raimi's pet obsessions--broad physical comedy, gleefully evil demonic spirits, and slimy bodily fluids spewing out of people and into the faces of other people. It's pretty light stuff, for the most part. A lot of the shenanigans that bedevil the protagonist are of the social-awkwardness variety--the demonic torments that Lohman's Christine suffers threaten the promotion she's seeking at work, or the opinion of her potential in-laws. In a weird bit of coincidence (or homage on Raimi's part?), the final scene echoes the finale of one of the earlier films on my list, Curse Of The Demon, as both films feature a character on a railroad track beset upon by a demonic apparition. I'd only really recommend this one for diehard fans of classic, pre-Spider-Man Sam Raimi, or younger horror fans looking for a lightweight scare fix.

THEY LIVE (1988): I had planned to finish off my 31 horror films with a screening of the Criterion Collection's new Rosemary's Baby blu ray on Halloween Night, but my copy didn't arrive on time. Thankfully, I got my hands on an advance copy of Scream Factory's new hi-def release of John Carpenter's 1988 classic, They Live, so that helped ease the sting. They Live isn't really a horror movie--I'd file it more under science fiction or action (with a touch of comedy), but it always seemed to end up in the scary section of the video store when I was a teen, so I feel like I can get away with including it. The story of a construction worker (none other than the legendary Rowdy Roddy Piper himself!) who finds a pair of special glasses that allow him to see the skull-faced, silver-eyed aliens pulling humanity's strings continues to be relevant today. In Carpenter's America, the 99 % are enslaved by an extradimensional 1% who maintain order with subliminal messages in the media, coding billboards and magazines with slogans like CONFORM, STAY ASLEEP, and MARRY AND REPRODUCE (even dollar bills are emblazoned with the legend THIS IS YOUR GOD). Of course, since the movie's star is a bona fide WWF superstar, the only way to free mankind from unknowing enslavement is to resort to brutal violence and cartoonish smack-talk (hence Piper's immortal pronouncement "I have come here to kick ass and chew bubblegum...and I'm all outta bubblegum" right before he empties a shotgun into a bank full of the invaders). Carpenter regulars like Keith David and Peter Jason (I guess JC enjoyed working with guys who have two first names and no last names) fill out the cast, along with Meg Foster (Leviathan) and her creepy blue eyes. Scream Factory's new disc features a crazy new cover by Tom "The Dude" Hodge (designer of the theatrical poster for Hobo With A Shotgun), but also thankfully preserves the original, iconic poster art on a reversible sleeve.

There's also a commentary by Carpenter and Piper, which I believe was recorded for the Region 2 DVD but makes its official North American debut here. Come for the message about the disappearing middle class and the rich feeding on the poor. Stay for the one-liners, the cool aliens, and that incredibly overlong alleyway fight scene between Roddy Piper and Keith David.

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2012! (Part One)

For a third year in a row, I'm planning to spend the weeks leading up to Halloween watching 31 horror movies and blogging about the experience (you can check out my previous two October horror marathons here and here. I got off to a head start bright and early this morning, and you can find my report below. As with before, at least half of the movies will be ones I haven't seen before. I've been working up a tentative list of films since the summer, and stockpiling movies of every conceivable genre, nationality,and level of quality, so there are definitely good times ahead. Without further ado, let's wade right in with the two I watched this morning...

TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE (1990): Often considered the unofficial Creepshow 3 (having been produced by original Creepshow director George Romero and featuring one installment adapted from a short story by Creepshow screenwriter Stephen King) Tales From The Darkside: The Movie will, to me anyway, always be the R-rated movie I tried to sneak into when I was 16, was denied access, and had to see Ernest Goes To Jail instead. Directed by Romero collaborator John Harrison (who composed the score for the original Dawn Of The Dead, and would later direct the Sci-Fi Channel's Dune miniseries), this semicomic anthology spins three terror tales, framed by a bizarre story about a suburban cannibal housewife (played by Debbie Harry!). The first story, featuring a young Steve Buscemi as a nerdy college student who uses a murderous mummy to enact revenge on his enemies, was adapted from a short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The second, based on Stephen King's short story "Cat From Hell", stars David Johansen (AKA Buster Poindexter!), as a hit man tasked with the unusual job of whacking an infernal feline. The final installment stars James Remar (Ajax from The Warriors!) as an artist who falls in love with a mystery woman (Rae Dawn Chong) after a run-in with a murderous gargoyle. This is a pretty slick production all around, a solid example of early Nineties big studio horror, and the cast is full of familiar faces like Christian Slater, Julianne Moore, William Hickey, and Mark Margolis (best known these days as Hector Salamanca on Breaking Bad). The creature and gore effects by KNB EFX Group (The Walking Dead, plus countless other film and TV projects) are top shelf. But the script by Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas screenwriter Michael McDowell) is neither funny or scary enough to be truly memorable. Stick with the original Creepshow instead to see it done right.

ANTS (1977): I've always been a sucker for Seventies nature-gone-wild flicks like Prophecy and Day Of The Animals, so a movie about rampaging swarms of poisonous ants featuring Robert Foxworth (star of Prophecy) and Lynda Day George (star of Day Of The Animals) was a no-brainer for me. But this slow-moving eco-thriller ("The Picnic Is Ruined!", screams the film's tagline) is pretty tough going for even the most dedicated fan of Seventies cheese. Construction at a resort hotel unleashes an army of insecticide-mutated killer ants who aren't particular about who they chow down on, whether it's the kitchen staff, the resort guests, or a sleazy developer and his arm candy (a pre-Three's Company Suzanne Somers). Throw in a dinky-sounding synth score and a slumming star of Old Hollywood (Myrna Loy as the resort's owner), and the formula for run-of-the-mill Disco-era horror/disaster movie is complete. The bloodless ant attacks, low body count, and uninspired direction by small screen veteran Robert Scheerer reveal that Ants was originally a made-for-TV movie almost immediately. Dramatic tension is represented by awkward reaction shots and slow zooms into expressionless faces. The supposed swarms of ants often look like the special effects department simply smeared raisins all over the resort walls. The only remotely funny/surprising scene occurs when, after a triumphant rescue, a helicopter's rotor blades blow the killer ants all over a crowd of onlookers. Unintentional hilarity notwithstanding, and even at a reasonable running time of just over 90 minutes, sitting through Ants is no picnic.

TERROR PICTURES: Marvel Comics' THE SHINING

This one requires some explanation. A few weeks ago, I had a dream that the comic shop I manage, Strange Adventures in Halifax, received a shipment of discounted Marvel Essential collections--you know, the big black-and-white, 500-page reprints they do--and amongst these cheap paperbacks was a volume reprinting...Marvel's series based on the 1980 film version of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. I remember being taken aback in the dream, wondering how this series had eluded me, both a diehard Marvel kid and a Stephen King fanatic since my teens. I awoke desperately wishing that this series, which in my dreaming brain was written by Doug Moench and illustrated by Gene Colan, had actually existed. I was also left wondering how they filled out an entire ongoing series with this material; a film adaptation at this point in Marvel's history usually took up about five or six issues, so I guess the series would have continued with tales from the Overlook Hotel's haunted history, maybe? Either way, it wasn't real, so all I could do was wonder what a Marvel Comic based on The Shining would have looked like, circa 1980. Hence this. I think this dream came about because a) I've been thinking about Stephen King a lot lately, having just read 11/22/63 and re-read It, not to mention the fact that I've also been reading Marvel's Essential Man-Thing (how's that for a suggestive title?) collection. Maybe my subconscious brain was trying to imagine how late '70s/early '80s Marvel, which was into some pretty weird shit at that point, would have handled a partnership with the King of horror, who was still only a few books into his career at that stage. I think I'll have to do a few more of these mock covers to explore the idea. On a side note--I absolutely hated the fact that I was reduced to finding that damn carpet pattern online and dropping it in via Photoshop, but believe me when I say that I tried like hell to draw it freehand, and it nearly drove me crazier than Jack Torrance. And one more thing--this was done just for the hell of it. Stephen King owns the novel The Shining and all the characters in it, Warner Brothers owns the movie The Shining, and Marvel Comics owns, well, Marvel Comics. Please don't sue me!

Just Do IT

I recently read and reviewed Stephen King's 11/22/63, in which the novel's time-traveling narrator spends an early passage of the book in the town of Derry. King fans know this fictional New England town well--it served as the location for his 1986 novel It, and 11/22/63 even features a cameo by teenaged versions of two of the earlier book's protagonists, Beverly Marsh and Richie Tozier (their appearance is set a few years after their initial defeat of Pennywise). I hadn't read It, or watched the four-hour 1990 ABC miniseries adaptation, in probably two decades, but this brief taste of Derry and its strangely haunted inhabitants was enough to inspire me to check out both interpretations. And, much like the grown-up heroes of King's magnum opus, my memories had grown hazy, but they came flooding back with frightening speed and intensity.

It, the novel, was every bit as creepy and heartbreaking as I remembered it to be. Just as the Losers had to defeat the shapeshifting, child-murdering clown known as Pennywise as kids only to reunite as adults and return to Derry to really, truly put an end to It, I first read King's massive tome in junior high but returned to It as a reasonable hand-drawn facsimile of a grown-up. I found that I had a new appreciation for the way King's parallel narrative--one in 1958, the other in 1985--highlights the differences in the kid versions and the adult versions of the book's seven protagonists. I love how some of the characters escape the confines of their youth (fat kid Ben Hanscom loses his weight after a run-in with a nasty high school gym coach, motormouthed class clown Richie Tozier is able to parlay his obnoxious nature into a successful gig as a syndicated radio disc jockey), while others aren't able to fully shake their past (Beverly Marsh marries a simulacrum of her abusive father, while Eddie Kaspbrak weds a dead ringer for his worry-wart, hypochondriac mother). But of course, the thousand faces of Pennywise are the real show-stopper here; It knows what scares these kids, and feeds on that fear by transforming into, among other things, a mummy, a rotting leper, a witch, a vampire, a giant bird, Frankenstein's monster, and the Creature From The Black Lagoon. None of this would mean much besides mere name-dropping without King's wonderfully gruesome descriptions of these horrors, rendered vividly in the author's blackly humorous and inimitable voice. At the time, King said It was his last horror hurrah, and he definitely pulls out all the stops, even veering into crazily Lovecraftian territory for the beast's cosmic origins.

And then there's the time that John Boy, Venus Flytrap, Jack Tripper, Lana Lang, and Judge Harold T. Stone got together to fight a big rubber spider with googly eyes. All right, that might not be the fairest assessment of the TV adaptation of It, but the two-part miniseries is pretty rough going. A cast of TV mainstays that includes Richard Thomas (The Waltons), Tim Reid (WKRP In Cincinatti), John Ritter (Three's Company), Harry Anderson (Night Court), and Annette O'Toole (Lana Lang in Superman III, but somehow also Ma Kent on Smallville!) provides the star power as the grown-up monster killers (The Thing's Richard Masur and Dennis Christopher, who I only know from this miniseries, round out the cast). Also on board is Black Christmas's Olivia Hussey and, of course, Tim Curry (in a "Special Appearance") as Pennywise, in a role that apparently made a whole generation of kids terrified of clowns forever after.

To be fair, there wasn't much chance that It was ever going to work on a television budget. The makeup budget for Pennywise's various transformations alone would have been cost-prohibitive, not to mention the price tag for half of the story being a period piece. Then there's also the little matter of all those gruesome child murders--ABC's Standards & Practices Department wouldn't have been too amused. Unfortunately, the solutions arrived at by screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen and director Tommy Lee Wallace don't really cut the mustard. Instead of his run-in with the Leper--a symbol for his paralyzing fear of disease and decay--young Eddie Kaspbrak is menaced by...living, snakelike shower faucets? Rather than being killed by the Frankenstein Monster in the sewers beneath Derry, bullies Victor Criss and Belch Huggins are dispatched instead by a glowy light that pulls them into sewer pipes. And instead of a monster bird nesting in the Derry Ironworks, Mike Hanlon sees...nothing. Not until he joins up with the Losers, anyway (here bafflingly referred to as the "Lucky Seven"). At times, the miniseries is hilariously literal in its interpretation of King's text--Belch Huggins really does deliver approximately 80% of his dialogue in belch form. That must have been a fun audition process.

Tim Curry really gets into the spirit of Pennywise, cackling, capering, and hissing with evil glee. John Ritter, Tim Reid, and Dennis Christopher all do quite well as the adult versions of Ben, Mike, and Eddie. The young cast, which includes Seth Green and Jonathan Brandis as Richie and Bill, respectively, is solid, and some of the monster makeups--like the Teenage Werewolf and an acid-scarred incarnation of Pennywise--are actually pretty good. But then there are those aforementioned compromises of budget and the censors, which serve to de-fang King's monster menagerie. The climax is spectacularly goofy. The nightmarish spider that serves as It's ultimate form in the novel, a black-furred monstrosity with red eyes and ooze-dripping mandibles, is represented here by a rubbery, lobsterlike, animatronic beastie with hypnotic plates in its underbelly. King himself said it best in a Fangoria interview, where he called the creature a "Tonka Toy". There's been talk recently of Warner Brothers adapting It once again, this time as two feature films directed by Cary Fukunaga (2011's Jane Eyre). In this new adaptation, the flashbacks would be set in the early 1980s, which makes sense but begs the question--will the children of Derry now be terrorized by Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers instead of the Mummy and the Creature? Time will tell if the new version works, assuming it ever reaches the screen...but it's safe to say that as far as the exploits of Pennywise the Dancing Clown are concerned, nobody does It better than Stephen King himself.

11/22/63

There was a short-lived TV show called Journeyman a few years back that dealt often with the impracticality of time travel. The show's hero, played by Rome's Kevin McKidd (my girlfriend Hillary still had a crush on him from his tenure as Lucius Vorenus, which is the chief reason we watched this new show) fell victim to a seemingly random, and decidedly inconvenient, form of temporal displacement--he was always being whisked away into another time zone at the most inopportune moment, and as such was always finding himself without the proper currency of said zone, or the proper clothing, or the proper knowledge of the area's geography, or what have you. There was more to the show, of course--a larger conspiracy involving the mysterious forces that kept sending this poor guy bouncing around through time--but it did spend a lot of each episode showing McKidd's character having to adapt by doing things like accumulating big wads of money from years past in the event that he was suddenly sucked back to 1969 or something. Stephen King's 2011 novel 11/22/63 deals with time travel in a similar way. The book's protagonist can't just hop into a souped-up DeLorean and zoom back to Dealey Plaza just in time to save President Kennedy from Lee Harvey Oswald--he's at the mercy of time travel itself. This means he has to play by the phenomenon's peculiar rules, which include the notion that he can only travel to one particular point in time, then wait around to accomplish his chosen mission to save JFK. Depending on your temperament as a reader, this approach to time travel may be either tedious or fascinating, but that's the game King is playing here. Recently-divorced English teacher Jake Epping is stunned to discover that the owner & proprietor of his favourite diner, who only yesterday was perfectly healthy, is now suddenly in the final stages of lung cancer. Jake learns that Al, the diner owner, discovered an unusual naturally-occurring phenomenon in his pantry years ago: a portal that leads always to the same sunny morning in 1958. For the longest time, Al used this portal--which always returns the user to a mere two minutes after they left their own time--to buy deli meats at 1958 prices (leading to lots of local speculation that the only way he could charge so little for his food was to serve roadkill sandwiches). However, after awhile, Al decided to use the portal for a much nobler purpose: he would make his home in the past for the five years required to locate and kill Lee Harvey Oswald before he could assassinate John F. Kennedy. After all, once the deed was done, he could return to 2011 as though only two minutes had passed, and see the (hopefully positive) changes his heroic act had wrought. Unfortunately, while he was waiting around for that fateful November afternoon, Al contracted lung cancer, and no choice but to return to 2011 and pass his mission on to someone else. Which is where Jake Epping comes in. After a few test runs, where we learn some other rules of time travel (for example, each new trip through the portal is a hard reset, undoing the work of any previous jaunts), Jake is ready. Armed with a nest egg of 1958 money and a sports almanacs with which he can place winning bets on any number of World Series and Superbowls to accumulate further funds (shades of Back To The Future II here), Jake kisses 2011 goodbye and sets up shop in the past. Along the way, he undertakes a few other altruistic missions of personal significance, which brings him to the town of Derry only a few years after the in-flashback events of King's 1986 novel It (and allows for a welcome cameo by the now-teenaged Beverly Marsh and Richie Tozier). As he closes in on Oswald, trying to determine if he really was the lone gunman in Dallas that day, Jake resumes teaching, falls in love with a school librarian, and draws the ire of a vengeful bookie who can't help wondering why this mysterious stranger always bets so successfully on such long shots. 11/22/63 isn't a horror novel, as you may have guessed by now. It falls into a more unique category of suspense ringed with science fiction. The SF angle merely provides the What If? scenario, while the suspense comes from wondering how Jake will actually survive long enough in the past to achieve his objective (since he narrates in his own tale, the odds are pretty good). The past, it seems, doesn't want to be changed, and keeps throwing obstacles in Jake's way. There's also the possibility that if Jake does succeed, the world of the future may actually be changed for the worse by his actions. And there's the larger question of what effect all this tinkering is having on the fragile tissue of the space-time continuum. At nearly 900 pages, readers will have lots of chances to discover for themselves if King's approach to time travel is their cup of tea--like Jake, the reader may start to feel like years really are going by. Jake is problematic as well. He's little more than a cipher for the reader in this particular "what would YOU do?" type of problem, and as such, he's not particularly interesting. But his predicament is, and as November 22, 1963 got closer, I found myself turning the pages faster and faster. Time flies when you're having fun, I suppose.