Eijo: Just finished reading Stephen King’s latest novel, 11/22/63, and whooooo-doggies, it’s a good’n! It strikes me that King has entered a new phase in his writing, a period of lean mean storytelling that hits the ground running and doesn’t stop until the last page.

This is a distinct break from the pacing you’ll find in King’s earlier work. Let me put it this way — I learned how to skim like an son-of-a-gun by reading his books when I was a kid. I’ve always loved his stuff, but I ain’t gonna lie — I’ve got a shaky attention span. Anything that isn’t moving the story forward annoys me. Always has. To this day if a novel hits the alleys of flashback or deep characterization, it had better come with the prose thunder, like mind-blowing Salman Rushdie level work, if I’m gonna be expected to read each n’ every word. Otherwise, I’m skimming until something relevant to the larger story happens.

King’s always told sharply-plotted stories, but he often takes a leisurely almost stream-of-conscious approach to the telling. He doesn’t hesitate to step off the path and explore the past of a character or place sometimes peripheral to the story. One often gets the feeling while reading King of hearing a story at night around a campfire. There’s a casual confidence to his work that feels personal, almost intimate. It’s one of King’s charms. So I wanna make clear that I don’t find his wandering focus to be a weakness as a writer, but rather that my impatience for it is a weakness as a reader.

Nevertheless, something changed in recent years. My theory is J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter novels. I remember noticing at the time that Rowling had pulled off something in her later books that I’d rarely seen — she wrote 700 to 900 page doorstops that sped along without stopping for anything. They didn’t have an ounce of fat on them, despite their epic sizes, and built up such momentum that suddenly 700 pages felt too short. It was quite a feat and King, a vocal fan of Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, may have been inspired by it.

Aiming specifically for a new, higher pacing and tighter plotting, King released Under the Dome in 2009, a novel that comes in at a whopping 1,072 pages (even bigger than his arguable masterpiece The Stand) yet zooms along faster than anything else in his collection — excepting perhaps the breathless pacing of a couple of his early (and much shorter) Bachman books, Rage and The Long Walk.

Under the Dome‘s insanely entertaining pace was part of its design. King comments in his author’s note, “I tried to write a book that would keep the pedal consistently to the metal. Nan [Graham, King's editor] understood that, and whenever I weakened, she jammed her foot down on top of mine and yelled (in the margins, as editors are wont to do), “Faster, Steve! Faster!”

At the time, I considered Under the Dome to be a one-shot, a kind of creative experiment to see if he could keep up a break-neck pacing at over 1,000 pages. And then I read 11/22/63 (which weighs in at a substantial 849 pages itself) and damn if that book don’t run! If anything, it’s his fastest book yet, with suspense that reaches near unbearable heights. I feel like we’ve entered a fantastic new period in Stephen King’s work where he guns it for the horizon, and all us Constant Readers (lucky skunks that we are) just gotta hold on and enjoy the ride.

Oh, and speaking of a son-of-a-gun, here’s the single from Oh Land that I absolutely cannot stop listening to. Enjoy!