11/22/63 by Stephen King

11/22/63
By Stephen King
Copyright 2011

Stephen King explores a new genre of writing as he undertakes time travel and dystopian futures in his latest novel. King, who loathes doing research, did his homework and produced a fantastic novel based on the real events leading up to and during the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.

Jake Eppling is a recently divorced teacher forced to teach English in summer GED classes. He loathes the process of grading student essays which vary in quality, with none ever rising to the level of good. However, one essay stands out in the latest batch. The school’s janitor, who is earning his GED, writes about the night his alcoholic father broke into a rage and killed his entire family – save our janitor – on Halloween Night.

Jake is moved by the simple prose of the profoundly emotional story. He and the janitor, Harry Dunning, later celebrate Harry's graduation at a retro 1950s diner owned by a friend of Jake’s named Al Templeton. Al takes their picture and puts it on his wall of fame – a collection of his customers who are really all average Joes.

A few days later, while at school, Jake receives a call from Al which is alarming and strange since Jake didn’t think the two knew each other quite well enough for Al to interrupt him at work. Al tells Jake he has to see him tonight at the diner – it is an emergency.

Jake meets Al and notices his friend’s physical condition has deteriorated dramatically in just a few short days. He appears to have aged years. Al tells Jake this is because he’s been living the last several years in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While living in that time, he’s developed lung cancer and it is terminal.

He has summoned Jake because he must share his secret and his goal with someone before he passes on. Al tells Jake that there is a temporal anomaly – or a time portal – in the pantry of his little greasy spoon diner – a diner which will undoubtedly be torn down upon Al’s untimely death. This temporal anomaly has but one terminus – October 1958 Maine. Al says that he dedicated more than four years to being at the right place at the right time to save President Kennedy from assassination. In Al’s mind, the world would be a better place had Kennedy not died that November afternoon.

The temporal anomaly has a fixed return point in time and place as well. The return is always back to Al’s diner and the return time is always just two minutes after you leave. If you go back, all the changes wrought previously are reset. Al invites Jake to try it out. All he has to lose in his own time and place is two minutes of his time.

Jake resolves to return to Derry, Maine in October 1958 to stop his janitor’s father from killing his family. He steps through the portal and finds himself outside of a working textile mill and it does appear to be 1958. He is greeted by a drunken old man who asks Jake for a dollar to take advantage of a two for one special at a liquor store just around the corner. This man, who Al calls the Yellow Card Man because of the strange yellow card stuck in the band on the guy’s hat. Jake gives him fifty cents as Al instructs him to do.

He is struck by the differences in his hometown and the cultural differences as well. Well stocked with 1950s vintage cash, courtesy of Al who used his knowledge of future sporting events to amass a healthy stock of cash, Jake acquires a set of wheels and motors off for Derry to save Harry Dunning’s father from killing his family.

While biding his time and trying to learn more about Dunning, Jake acquaints himself with 1950s culture. He buys the right clothes and tries to learn to adjust his speech and mannerisms for the times – with uneven results. He also encounters two characters well known to fans of Stephen King. Richie Tozier and Beverly Marsh, just a few months removed from sending IT into deep hibernation, are in the park trying to learn the fine art of swing dancing with a battery powered record player. Jake stops long enough to provide a little instruction. He also encounters the taciturn and abrupt Norbert Keene, proprietor of Derry’s only apothecary who, one day in the summer of 1958, told Eddie Kaspbrak that the only asthma he had was the asthma his mother placed in his head.

Halloween night finally arrives and Jake prepares to make his move. However, Mr. Dunning the elder has more than one enemy and Jake has tipped his hand to this guy who is determined to stop Jake from killing Dunning so he can do it himself. He and Al eventually head to the Dunning house together and encounter Mr. Dunning in his full rage. Dunning kills one of his sons with a hammer, but Jake and his accomplice are able to save the wife, the daughter, and Harry Dunning – future janitor extraordinaire.

After what seems like a month in another time, Jake returns to 2011 to find Al patiently waiting for him, finishing the cigarette he started when Jake left. Jake tells Al that he is successful in preventing the horror that would shape Harry Dunning’s life. Al asks Jake to consider taking over the quest to save Kennedy and change the world for the better. Jake, born long after Kennedy’s untimely demise, says he will take it under advisement.

Jake returns to the school to find that Harry Dunning is not a janitor there and never was. This does not particularly surprise Jake, so he starts research to find out what happened to Harry Dunning. The Internet reveals no clues. It seems there never was a Harry Dunning. Finally, Jake is able to track down the sister whom he calls. She informs Jake that Harry grew up and went off to fight in Vietnam where he was killed in action.

Jake is distraught that he doomed a man to die in an undeclared war instead of living out full life. He reasons that if he goes back again, saves Harry Dunning again, and then saves Kennedy, that Kennedy will not escalate the conflict in Vietnam and Harry Dunning will be saved by the wise political actions of JFK. (This is specious historically, but serves the story).

Jake goes to Al’s house to tell him that he’s decided to make the trip. However, when he gets there, he finds that Al has ended his life and his suffering with an overdose of painkillers. Jake helps himself to the remainder of Al’s 1950s cash and heads for the past. He takes with him Al’s extensive notes on the Kennedy assassination and the biographical notes on the last years of the misbegotten life of Lee Harvey Oswald to guide him.

First, he goes back to Derry and, in a much neater fashion, saves the Dunning family. Finding Derry, Maine to be an unfriendly, unsettling place he’s eager to vacate, Jake attains an education degree from a correspondence school and heads to Florida where, using his fake credentials, he gets a job as a substitute English teacher.

Jake warms to his job and his colleagues. While in Florida, he places a number of bets on sporting events. Some are small, routine bets. But others are high yield bets which are sure things to Jake with his knowledge of events, but draw attention from his bookie with strong ties to organized crime. Sensing he has overplayed his hand, Jake vacates Florida and heads for Texas. He later learns that the house he was renting was firebombed shortly after he left town.

He settles in the town of Jodie, Texas and takes a job teaching English there. He soon falls for the school librarian, Sadie Dunhill who is in the process of divorcing her husband who lives back in Atlanta. The two quickly fall in love, but Sadie soon grows suspicious of Jake for his strange language and odd statements. Despite his best efforts, Jake can’t help but have lapses and one day, starts singing Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones – a song’s lyrics that were mildly risqué in 1971 when it was released and would be over the top by the standards of 1960.

Sadie pressures Jake to tell her more about who he is and where he came from, suspecting that Jake is holding back. Jake finally admits there is more to his story, but will not tell her. She breaks off their relationship at the end of the school year. Sadie heads off for Las Vegas to establish short term residency to get her Vegas divorce. Jake heads for Fort Worth where Lee Harvey Oswald will soon set up residence.

Jake rents the house across the street from the house that Lee and Marina Oswald will soon take up residency in a Fort Worth slum. Jake also finds a bookie so he can maintain his cash flow. He talks to the current residents who are preparing to vacate the home that the Oswalds will soon occupy. The woman’s name is Ivy Templeton. The name is striking in the story because it happens to be Al’s last name. Through Mrs. Templeton, Jake is able to learn the layout of the house across the street.

Jake settles in to observe and study the Oswalds and to worry about Sadie whom he misses badly. The Oswalds soon take up residence. Jake has bugged their apartment and studies the Oswald family with the underachieving Lee with his delusions of grandeur, his domineering mother who henpecks him constantly, and his lovely, but submissive wife whom he beats and mentally abuses.

One of Al’s major concerns he documents in his notes is whether or not Lee received help in killing Kennedy. Conspiracy theories regarding the Kennedy assassination have been an industry unto themselves in the United States since that date in Dallas and Al had one major concern regarding a Russian émigré who was close to Oswald.

The Oswalds receive frequent visits from a Russian named George de Mohrenschildt who is obsessed with a ranting right winger who takes to the radio to speak out against all things communist. General Edwin Walker will soon survive an assassination attempt undertaken by Lee Harvey Oswald. Jake is convinced that if he ascertains whether or not de Mohrenschildt was actually a participant or just an agent provocateur, he will know the truth about Oswald’s role as either a lone assassin or patsy in a conspiracy.

Jake continues to worry about Sadie as well. He is convinced that Sadie’s strange husband is not going to take the divorce well and is concerned. One night he calls Sadie and she doesn’t answer. Convinced that something is wrong, he heads back to Jodie instead of observing the assassination attempt on General Walker. As Jake often notes, the past is obdurate; it does not want to be changed. Time itself is fighting Jake’s efforts to change it.

He arrives in Jodie to find that Sadie has been attacked by her ex-husband. She is badly beaten and slashed across the face by her husband who is killed by one of Sadie’s fellow teachers. Sadie falls into a deep depression over her disfigurement and injuries. Jake briefly abandons his pursuit of Oswald to help Sadie return to mental and physical health.

The Cuban Missile Crisis comes and goes. As Sadie and the rest of the world look on in terror as the two superpowers play chicken over a Caribbean island, Jake reassures Sadie that the Russians will look for a way out to save face and avoid nuclear war. When Sadie demands to know how Jake knows this, he finally confides in her his true nature. She doesn’t believe it at first, but with more and more information flowing from Jake, she soon accepts it.

The Oswalds abandon Fort Worth and head for a brief sojourn in New Orleans before they will return to Dallas one final time. Lee rents the downstairs apartment in the duplex where the Oswalds will reside upstairs. Jake is resolved to track all of Oswald’s final days to ascertain whether or not there was a conspiracy. He visits Dealey Plaza and visits the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository.

Before he can learn much, he is attacked by a bookie who is angry over having lost so much money to Jake. It turns out that his bookie in Derry, in Fort Worth, in Florida, and in Dallas are all linked to the same organized crime organization. Time is being obdurate again. One of the Dallas police officers investigating Jake’s assault is none other than Officer J.D. Tippit – the officer Oswald will kill in his desperate attempt to escape police pursuit.

Jake is brain damaged and much of his memory, his ability to speak, and his ability to reason is damaged. He has no recall of who he really is and what he is doing. Sadie tries to help him regain his senses. As the final month passes and October 1963 turns to November 1963, the man who would stop history altering events isn’t sure who he is.

Finally, one phrase breaks through Jake’s mental block – “The word of Al.” Jake remembers that he had a notebook put together by a guy named Al that told all about what he was doing and why he was doing it. Jake retrieves the notebook from a safety deposit box and reads it. Most of his memories come flooding back to him over the next several days.

November 22 finally arrives and Jake takes off in a frenzy to reach Dealey Plaza in time to save the president. Sadie is determined to accompany him. Along the way, they have a flat tire, are caught in a traffic jam, and are in a car wreck. History is trying to keep him from his appointment with Oswald.

Sadie and Jake race the final few blocks to the book depository and climb the steps to the sixth floor. As they weave through the stacks of books, they hear the first shot fired and see Oswald sitting at his perch, chambering another round into the bolt action rifle. Jake shoots and misses Oswald. Oswald turns and fires, hitting Sadie in the chest. Jake returns fire and kills Oswald. Kennedy’s motorcade flies out of Dealey Plaza and back to Love Field.

Jake spends Sadie’s last moments with her before she dies and he is arrested. The police question him but his story matches what apparently happened: Jake saved the president’s life. While still at police headquarters, Jake receives a call. President Kennedy calls to thank him for saving his life as well as that of Jackie and others in the motorcade. Jake becomes a national hero.

The FBI accepts that Jake is not part of any conspiracy to kill Kennedy, but they want him to drop out of sight for awhile so they can investigate, not entirely sure how Jake knew that Oswald was going to be at that particular place on that particular day. Before Jake leaves 1963, a massive earthquake kills thousands in California – an event that did not happen in the normal course of history.

Heartbroken over the death of Sadie, Jake returns to Maine and the textile mill where the portal still exists. There, he finds another man standing where the Yellow Card Man used to stand. This man reveals himself to be a guardian over the time portal. There are many portals and many timelines, the guardian tells Jake. The guardian that Jake knew as the Yellow Card Man died of alcoholism. It is an occupational hazard, the guardian tells Jake, with many guardians driven insane by trying to keep timelines straight in their own head.

This particular guardian wears a green card in his hat band. This, he says, is indicative that this string of time is healthy. He encourages Jake to return to his own time. Jake is eager to see the world as it would have been had Kennedy survived. He arrives to find the future he created quite dystopian.

The world has been nuked. Kennedy did not save the world. Instead, he became increasingly unpopular. Hostilities between the superpowers increased with the gunslinger Kennedy in the White House. Ronald Reagan, elected president in 1976, made matters worse and eventually nuclear war broke out and the government of the United States fell. Maine seceded from the union and joined Canada, Jake learns. He learns this from none other than Harry Dunning – the man he saved from Vietnam but doomed to live out his years in post nuclear Canada.

Realizing that he’s badly messed up time itself and fundamentally altered the course of the human race, Jake returns to 1958. He can immediately set things to right by sampling returning to 2011. But he can’t forget Sadie. He checks into a hotel room and contemplates returning to Jodie, getting a teaching job, and meeting and falling in love with Sadie all over again to live out his life in the 1960s and 1970s.

Finally, he realizes he cannot doom man on earth for his own lost love and steps back through the portal one final time. All is as it should be. He travels to Jodie to find Sadie, now an old woman, has survived the attack by her ex husband without his help. She is an old woman now, having never married. Jake asks her to dance. . .

Give Stephen King kudos for doing his homework on the Kennedy assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald before writing this book. In his closing notes, King tells us that he and a research assistant invested hours in interviewing historians, visiting Dallas, and learning all they could about Oswald. Their primary text in research was William Manchester’s 1967 book, The Death of a President. This factual account of Oswald’s actions prior to killing Kennedy and the events themselves that day in Dallas is a narrative account of history, unfettered by the wild conspiracy theories that developed later. Although it was one of the first books published on the subject, it remains one of the most authoritative. I've read more than a dozen books on the subject of the Kennedy assassination and none are more straightforward in the telling than Manchester's.

As for the story, it is one of King’s better works – certainly the best thing he’s written since Cell. As is King’s wont, each character is provided with extensive backstory, making them deep and rich. The story is not only a narrative of a man trying to change history, but a man observing what was good and bad about another time and a man in love, which is always timeless. King weaves Jake’s dual motivations together seamlessly and we experience Jakes struggle between what he regards as his duty to save Kennedy and his desire to love Sadie.

I feared that this book would become an outlet for all of Stephen King's liberal politics and fantasies to play out. I've never let the difference between King's politics and my own discourage me from enjoying his work. Seldom do his politics creep into his work, even when dealing with political issues such as he did in The Dead Zone. When the do, such as in the horrible book, The Regulators, it is always distracting. I was certain that King's political hero, Gary Hart, was going to be savior of the world in the end.

Alas, King spared us from all that. He instead developed a plausible series of political events that did not disparage any person or political party. Gary Hart didn't even figure into the equation.

King, like many writers his age, has romanticized that time of the late 1950s and early 1960s as a wonderful time. I’ve heard of people referring to November 22, 1963 as the day the “nation lost its innocence.” King does not rhapsodize on how beautiful that period was and how innocent they all were back then. His story points up the overt racism, sexism, and narrow mindedness of American culture as well as the terrifying international events that transpired. He notes that Dallas circa 1963 was a mean place. It was and the political rifts that existed between the competing ideologies were as wide then as they are today as is evidenced by the ascendency of ardent right winger Barry Goldwater to the Republican presidential nomination in 1964.

But he also notes how we, as a people, were less suspicious of each other. How trusting we were in our fellow man 50 years ago as opposed to now. Some things, as King notes, do get worse with the passage of time. We are a nation of paranoids now when compared to the halcyon days of modern society in 1963.

King has reverted to form in linking 11/22/63 to his earlier works – a practice he’d all but given up. We see Beverly Marsh and Richie Tozier from IT. Also in Derry are the aforementioned Norbert Keene as well as the Tracker Brothers who own the trucking depot that became the metaphorical mental refuge of the main character in the novel Dreamcatcher. King seems to revel in his return to Derry and helps the reader revel in it as well. Derry is a dark place, King readers know. Now we have Jake Eppling’s confirmation as he was palpably aware of the Derry’s dark undercurrents. There is also passing references to the Shawshank State Prison that is the setting for Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and is referenced in so many other King Castle Rock stories.

King uses the name Ivy Templeton as the person who rented the Fort Worth home before the Oswalds. Many horror fans will recognize her as the young girl who dies at the end of Frank DeFilitta’s 1976 novel Audrey Rose. I doubt this was an homage to DeFelitta since King ridiculed his work in his 1981 non fiction book, Danse Macabre, saying his work and that of author John Saul were not what he regarded as good horror. Perhaps just a name King grabbed out of his subconscious. He never elaborates on it.

The book comes in at just under 900 pages. While King is often criticized (often rightfully) for overwriting his stories, 11/22/63 is not one of them. In those 900 pages, there is nary an unimportant event or word. The story is epic and King tells it in the grandeur it deserves.

Book to Movie: Audrey Rose (1977)

Book to Movie: Audrey Rose (1977)
Screenplay by Frank DeFelitta
Directed by Robert Wise

Soon after publishing his best selling novel, Frank DeFelitta retooled it for the big screen. What emerged was an average movie that was devoid of the strong characters that made the novel enjoyable.

The movie is a straight retelling of the book. There are just a few, very minor deviations from the book. There are major deletions, however; many of which were proper for telling a story in a visual medium. One might conclude, however, this story was not a good one for a movie.

As I noted in my review of the book, the novel’s strong point was the development of each character’s motive and how Ivy became a secondary consideration as parents, pseudo parents, and ambitious lawyers and judges all subjugated Ivy’s mental and physical health to their own agenda. Only Ivy’s mother seem to care first and foremost about Ivy, but her actions ultimately were to cleanse her conscience rather than aid her daughter.

DeFilitta did this in print with well crafted reflection and internal dialogue. This is hard to accomplish in the visual medium as is evidenced best by the foolish internal dialogue penned by Richard Matheson for his hero in his otherwise stellar script for the movie version of Duel. Internal dialogue, voiced by an actor or detached narrator – with the possible exception of The Ten Commandments – just reflects the inability of the screenwriter to accomplish through action what authors accomplish through words.

The movie could have been a psycho thriller a la Sybil or The Exorcist or it could have been a good legal thriller. It tried to be both and didn’t have enough substance to be either.

The movie was well cast and the cast did the best they could with the script with which they were provided. Long before he emerged as the sadistic Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Lambs, Anthony Hopkins played the meek and mild Elliot Hoover to perfection. His soft voice, with just a hit of British propriety in his dialogue, made him the unlikely villain that Defilitta created in his prose.

Marsha Mason deftly walks a fine line between frantic drama and over acting in the scene’s final climax. Her performance was true to Defillita’s anguished mother character and emerged as the central character in the movie version.

Susan Swift also successfully traverses that dangerous territory between dramatic portrayal and over acting in bringing Ivy Templeton to the big screen. A bad performance by Ivy Templeton’s portrayer would have destroyed this movie now matter how strong the script or cast. Even though her character was a supporing role, the movie’s success or failure rested on how successfully this young, untrained actor performed in her first role.

Swift did not ham it up. Her screams were not so shrill as to hurt one’s teeth. Her violent thrashing was not so violent as to be comedic. Her portrayal of Ivy Templeton’s malady was flawless and again, perfectly replicated what DeFelitta authored in his novel. It’s too bad that other than a supporting role in the hit movie, Harper Valley PTA, Swift did not have a distinguished or long acting career.

The weak link in the cast was John Beck as Bill Templeton. Bill Templeton, in the novel was a slightly pretentious, professionally ambitious advertising executive who loved his family and tried to do what he could to protect them, even proposing the desperate gambit of his daughter’s life to protect the family. Only as he’s pushed does he actually resort to anger and a bout of violence.

Beck portrays Bill Templeton as a man always at the edge of violence. Bill Templeton was a frustrated man to be sure. But nothing in the novel indicated he was predisposed to anger. The fault, I think, lies not with any flaw in Beck’s acting but rather it being a case of Beck being miscast in the role.

Director Robert Wise is well known in Hollywood if not to the general public. His directing credits include the iconic The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Sound of Music, The Haunting (the superior 1965 version), and The Andromeda Strain. Other than not reigning in Beck’s excessively edgy performance, Wise did the best he could with the script he had.

As I noted in my review of the novel, DeFellita should have authored more books because his first effort was incredibly strong for a first foray into the world of writing novels. He did author a handful of books, one of which, The Entity, was made into a movie that I would describe as incredibly pedestrian horror. Other than, The Entity, I’ve not seen any of his other movie or television writing efforts and other than Audrey Rose, I’ve not read any of his other novels. But based on what I’ve read and seen, he was better suited for writing novels.

Audrey Rose By Frank DeFelitta

Audrey Rose
By Frank DeFelitta
Copyright 1975

Whose child is she now?

Bill and Janice Templeton have constructed the perfect life for themselves. He is a successful Madison Ave. advertising executive; she a stay at home mom with a lovely and vivacious daughter named Ivy who attends an elite Manhattan private school. They live in a Central Park West apartment famous for being constructed by and for artists. They are happy beyond the dreams of most people.

Then Elliot Hoover entered their lives.

Janice notices that over a period of days, there has been a strange man outside of Ivy’s school, watching her and watching Ivy. One day, this man follows them home. Janice is concerned, but not overly worried because the city is full of crazy people.

One day, Ivy is forced to miss school because of a fever. Whilst at home with her daughter, Janice receives a phone call from a mysterious man, concerned about Ivy’s health since she was not in school. Now that the man has invaded her home life with his call, Janice resolves to tell Bill. Bill wonders if it is the strange man that he’s seen outside of Ivy’s school in the morning when he drops her off.

A few days later, the cab in which Janice is traveling is involved in an accident and she receives a minor concussion. While recovering her wits on the sidewalk under the watchful eye of a policeman, she realizes that she is late getting to her daughter’s school. In a panic, she flees the scene and heads for the school, only to find Ivy gone.

She hurries home in a panic. As she approaches her building, the mysterious stranger steps out of the shadows and assures her that Ivy is fine, that he has seen her safely across the dangerous intersections and to her home. He asks her and Bill to join him for dinner in their building’s restaurant for dinner where he will explain his surreptitious observation of their daughter.

Bill and Janice arrive at the restaurant to find the man sans the fake beard and mustache he’d worn while scooping their daughter. He invites them to join him at his table where he tells them his incredibly sad life story.

His name is Elliot Hoover. Once upon a time, he’d been a respected engineer and steel industry executive from Pittsburgh. His life crumbled, however, when, on one tragic afternoon in October 1964, his wife and daughter were involved in a traffic accident on a Pittsburgh freeway. After being hit, the car rolled over an embankment and caught fire. An eyewitness said that as the car caught fire and burned, they could see a five year old girl inside the car, clawing at the windows to get out. Hoover’s wife and young daughter, Audrey Rose, burned to death in the accident.

Hoover was devastated beyond consolation. Shortly after his family’s death, he visits a medium who tells him that his daughter is not dead; that she lives on in the body of another little girl. A couple years later, he is in New York on business and encounters a spiritualist at a party who tells him his little girl lives in the body of a girl born in New York City shortly after his daughter died.

He left his job and went on a spiritual quest to learn more about the afterlife. That spiritual quest took him to India where he learned of the Hindu belief in reincarnation. He fully embraced that belief, then set out to look for his daughter he knew to be reincarnated somewhere in the world.

His search led him to New York where he found that Ivy Templeton had been born just minutes after his daughter died. Ivy Templeton, their daughter, he tells them, is the repository for the soul of Audrey Rose Hoover. He asks the Templetons to allow him to become part of their lives and share in Ivy’s upbringing so he can be close to his daughter again.

Bill quickly dismisses Hoover’s tale. He tells him he is sorry for all of the horrible events that have transpired in his life, but he wants Hoover to leave him and his family alone. Bill and Janice leave the restaurant and Mr. Hoover to head home to their daughter.

The next day, Bill contacts his attorney who advises Bill that he should meet with Hoover again, this time at their apartment. The plan is to get Hoover to spill his wacky story one more time while the conversation is taped and the lawyer witnesses it. The material will then serve as evidence to obtain a restraining order against Hoover.

Hoover shows up at the Templeton apartment just as planned. Ivy is sent to a neighbor’s apartment. As Hoover starts to retell his tale, the Templeton’s phone rings. Their neighbor tells them they need to come quickly because Audrey is in the throws of a nightmare from which she will not awaken.

Bill, Janice, and Hoover rush to the apartment. There, they find Audrey running about the place, screaming, DADDY! DADDY! DADDY! and HOTHOTHOT! She runs into furniture and makes a shambles of the place. She runs to windows and touches them, only to quickly withdraw her hands as if they were burned. Bill and Janice try to awaken her. Bill tries to calm her, telling her that Daddy is here, but she wrestles free and continues her vain attempt to escape from whatever haunts her nightmare.

Finally, Hoover steps forward and says, “Daddy’s here Audrey Rose!” With a little more coaxing on Hoover’s part, Ivy finally falls into a restless sleep. An Angry Bill tells Hoover to stay away from his family and they take their child home.

The Templetons decide to contact a child psychologist that has treated Ivy before. This is not the first occurrence of these dreams, for they had also occurred over a period of days a few years before when Ivy was a toddler. The doctor examines Ivy, who has no recollection of the dreams, and promises to get back to the Templetons after doing some research. She finds that the first occurrence of Ivy’s nightmares correspond to Hoover’s first visit to New York when he met with the spiritualist.

A few nights later, Janice is home alone with Ivy while Bill wines and dines clients. The nightmare starts again. Janice his helpless to stop her daughter as she scurries around the apartment, falling down the stairs and knocking over furniture. As Janice is trying to coral her daughter, the house phone rings and the doorman informs Janice that Mr. Elliot Hoover would like to see her. In desperation, Janice asks that he be sent up. Upon arriving, Hoover immediately acts to calm the child by assuring Audrey Rose that daddy is here.

As he prepares to leave, Hoover gives Janice his journal that he kept during his sojourn in India. He asks her to read his observations with an open mind, combine them with what she has just witnessed, and ascertain whether or not he is earnest in his belief.

This time, Ivy has injured herself. She has burns on her hands and a bump on the head. Witnessing the event, Janice is sure Audrey burned her hands on the cold glass of her bedroom window. Bill, whose disbelief in Hoover’s story grows as the evidence mounts, assures Janice that the burns came when Audrey touched the radiator even though Janice is certain Ivy never touched the radiator.

A few nights later, The Templetons are awakened when Ivy again flies into a nightmare rage. Bill and Janice try to restrain her, finally tying her to her bed to keep her from injuring herself. As they are dealing with this horrific scene, there is a knock on the door. Bill goes to answer it and Elliot Hoover is in his doorway. Bill immediately attacks Hoover. Janice, hearing the commotion, runs to the door. Hoover puts Bill in a police sleeper hold to subdue him, pushes Janice out of the way and enters the apartment, locking the door behind him.

Neighbors call the police and the doorman informs the Templetons that Elliot Hoover has sublet an apartment in the building. The police arrive as the doorman opens the Templeton apartment with a passkey. They find Hoover has absconded with Ivy.

They go downstairs to Hoover’s apartment and the police demand that Hoover open the door. After some initial resistance, Hoover opens up and allows the police and the Templetons into his apartment where they find Ivy sleeping peacefully. Hoover is arrested and charged with kidnapping.

Hoover hires a young attorney who is eager to fight for his client, but is also eager to make a name for himself by taking on such a fantastic client and more fantastic defense strategy. The case is assigned to a judge whose entire career has seen him relegated to handling the most mundane cases to come before the New York courts. Both are eager to see the case make headlines. The scene is set for one of the most fantastic trials New York and American jurisprudence have ever witnessed.

To shield Ivy from what’s going on, the Templetons send her to a private Catholic school miles away from their Manhattan home and their apartment. Despite all that has happened to her, Ivy has no idea that her soul and the soul of a girl who died at the time of her birth are the source of the court proceedings that are about to commence.

As the trial proceeds, Janice reads Hoover’s journal. She finds her beliefs in Hoover’s story growing. Bill’s disbelief hardens every day. One weekend, while visiting Ivy at the private school, Janice is awakened by her daughter talking to herself. Janice opens the bathroom door in their hotel room to find Ivy standing naked before a mirror, admiring her early adolescent body, chanting, “Audrey Rose. Audrey Rose.” Janice’s resolve crumbles further.

As the defense is wrapping up its case, the Templetons are summoned to Ivy’s school. During an annual bonfire ritual, Ivy, seemingly in a trance, walked directly into the ring of fire and set herself ablaze. An alert custodian, observing Ivy crawling into the fire is able to save her and keep her injuries minor. However, the school tells the Templetons she is not to return.

The prosecutor pitches the Templetons on an idea he is certain will destroy Hoover’s case. He wants a hypnotist to regress Ivy back through her childhood, to the womb, and then further beyond the womb, to prove that Ivy Templeton’s existence started at her conception – not upon the death of Audrey Rose Hoover. Bill, now desperate to disprove Hoover approves the plan. Janice, having read Hoover’s journal and witnessed Audrey Rose interacting with her daughter, is horrified and frightened at what can happen.

Janice decides to testify for the defense. Her testimony where she divulges her belief in Hoover’s claim that Ivy Rose’s soul is indeed an inhabitant of her daughter’s body devastates the prosecution case. Bill insists on the hypnotism. His need to destroy Hoover now dominates his every motivation. Janice and Bill’s once perfect love, life, and family are now asunder.

Audrey is brought to an operating room and the jury and court personnel, including Hoover, are placed in the observation theater. A hypnotist places Ivy into a deep sleep and begins taking her back through her short life to various birthdays, through her infancy, then into the womb. The audience watches stunned as Ivy strikes a fetal pose in the chair.

He then starts to take her back beyond her conception. Ivy grows restless and agitated. Bill, now realizing he’s made a terrible mistake, starts screaming for them to stop the test. Janice, now resigned to what is about to happen, looks on from a separate room, weeping.

As the hypnotist takes her further back, Ivy then jumps from the chair and starts running about the room, screaming her litany of pleas for daddy and running from the hot. The hypnotist tries desperately to bring Ivy from her trance, but she is unresponsive. From behind the one way viewing glass, Hoover implores the hypnotist to call for Audrey Rose. The scene in the operating room grows more frantic as Ivy runs from place to place trying to escape her nightmare. In an act of final desperation, Hoover jumps up and throws a chair through the glass and struggles into the room. However, Ivy is now unconscious. She is rushed to an emergency room where she dies for no evident reason.

There, the narrative of the book ends. What follows is a newspaper clipping telling of the not guilty verdict in the trial and the autopsy records of Ivy Templeton, a healthy 11 year old girl who died of no apparent reason.

The book closes with a letter Janice writes to Elliot Hoover who, grief stricken, returns to India. She assures him that she is confident that both Audrey Rose and Ivy have moved on to new lives and are at peace. Bill, in his grief, is coming to believe in Hoover’s tale and they are repairing their marriage. She wishes him good luck and a good life.

I enjoyed this book a great deal when I first read it as an adolescent having picked it out of my mother’s library. I enjoyed reading it just as much as an adult. However the perspectives were much different. As a child, I enjoyed what was a fascinating tale. I was particularly taken with the creepy autopsy notes at the end. I had never read a tale whose resolution was presented in such an unconventional manner.

My perspective as an adult was more emotional. As a middle-aged man, I am the father of a nine year old daughter. My attachment to the emotional turmoil of the parents, and of Hoover having lost a daughter to such tragic circumstances transfixed me more than the unconventional ending.

What makes this book interesting is that there are no real villains. The Templetons love their daughter. Bill, acting with the male instinct to protect, is trying to shield his family from this unpleasantness, even when the evidence clearly demonstrates the truth of Hoover’s belief. Janice acts with the maternal instinct of doing anything, no matter how desperate to protect her daughter. Hoover has no desire to wreck the Templetons’ lives. He is a grief stricken father who is certain he has found a way to reconnect with his lost daughter and will risk his life to make that connection.

What emerges from the story is the selfishness of all those involved. Although the story revolves around Ivy Templeton, her character is not developed. It is never told from her point of view. DeFelitta uses her and her actions to advance the story. But she is not a central character in the narrative. The story is told from the point of view of the adults, each acting to satisfy their own independent needs.

Bill allows his daughter to die because his resolve to have Hoover put away forever motivates him. Hoover would have been found guilty, jailed for life, and been out of Ivy’s life forever had Janice not testified. Since it was Hoover’s presence that triggered Ivy’s nightmares, had she not acted, her family’s life would have returned to normal.

Then there are the judge and the defense attorney who were the most selfish. The attorney puts forward his fantastic case to defend his client. But more important to him is the headlines and reputation he will garner. The judge, bitter about having a nondescript judicial career, allows the dramatic theater of the case to proceed, not because he thinks it is sound jurisprudence, but because he will finally be able to make a name for himself.

All of this goes on while the life of an 11 year old girl hangs in the balance. Other than Janice, none of the characters in the story pause to think of Ivy and her fate.

My only criticism of the writing is DeFelitta’s need to show us what a snob he apparently was. His description of the apartment’s architecture and artwork read like a marketing brochure and was entirely overlong as was his descriptions of the various meals and liquors consumed by the characters. These were but minor distractions however. DeFelitta otherwise told a riveting tale with seldom a lull in the tension.

As an author, Frank DeFelitta had an obscure career. He published this book and a 1982 sequel entitled For Love of Audrey Rose. This is a shame. For a first book by an author, Audrey Rose is a stellar effort.

DeFelitta was a screenwriter by occupation. The dust jacket says he was the writer on a number of television documentaries. His IMDB entry lists several movie scripts he penned along with numerous television scripts and directorial credits.

The novel was adapted to the big screen in 1977 with DeFelitta penning the screenplay. Anthony Hopkins plays the role of Hoover. I will review the screen treatment later.

The book, movie, and author may be lost to the ages now, but if you can lay your hands on a copy, the book is well worth reading.