While there’s no shortage of Homo Sapiens (in fact, I can easily be convinced we’re a global blight) I think I qualify for the Endangered Species List. Or maybe more exactly, the Endangered SUB-Species List.

And what, pray tell, is my sub-species? It is Homo Sapien Lector Obsessus. Or in plain English, a compulsive reader. I say “compulsive” only half-kidding … which means I’m also half-serious. Labels, aside, I have no TV and in my free time (of which I have buttloads) I almost always have my nose buried in a book.

The subject matter runs the gamut. My standard fare is mysteries. Ironically, I rarely care whodunit. Good plotting is vital to any fiction, or the entire effort falters. But I never find myself actively mulling over who the villain might be. Instead, I like characterization and dialogue, especially if it has humor attached to it. I like the characters in my fiction to resemble the people I like in my life — competent, decent and amusing conversationalists. Life is serious enough as it is, so I see no need to add to it — either in person, print or any other way.

Given that limitation, while I avoid the news, I do read some biography and history, but absolutely NO horror. And frankly, I’ve no idea how or why anyone does. Some of the mystery writers add gore galore (a lot of which adds nothing to the story EXCEPT gore) and is on par with the horror genre. Often it’s called “suspense,” but regardless of its label, I can’t stand it.

On more than a handful of times, I’ve gotten halfway through a mystery when the blood starts flowing like the AuSable in spring melt. A typical, though imaginary, scenario: One day the body of a former Olympic athlete, his left eye scooped out, his left ear slashed off, is discovered in the middle of a Los Angeles stadium, impaled on a javelin. A week later, another former Olympic athlete, similarly mangled, is discovered in another LA stadium, impaled on a hockey stick. And a week after that, one more one-eyed, one-eared former Olympic athlete is found in yet another LA stadium, this time impaled on a fencing saber.

At which point the Police Commissioner holds a press conference, uttering the immortal words, “Ladies and gentlemen, it appears we have a very disturbed and dangerous individual in our midst.” Also at which point I say I’m D-O-N-E with this crap. I mean, how many impaled one-eyed, one-eared ex-jocks does it take before any sane reader says to hell with it?

Knowing this about me, it should make perfect sense that I’ve read only one Stephen King story. It was the short story, “The Lawnmower Man,” which, while weird, wasn’t scary. To clarify my position a bit: Having read a lot of excerpts of King’s writing, courtesy of my students, I think he’s a brilliant writer. Plus, the opinions of my fellow readers whose judgment I respect, further reinforce this. Certainly, his output has been stupendous and his following devoted, and I never met anyone who read a bunch of his stuff and said, “Yeah, it’s okay.”

That said, I never wanted to read anything of his till last year, when I ran across a book in a thrift store called “1/22/63.” As soon as I saw the title, a jolt ran through me. That title might mean nothing to most of the under-40 generation, and I’m sure it means nothing to ALL the U-30’s. But I doubt there’s anyone around my age who wouldn’t immediately recognize it. It is, of course, the day JFK was assassinated.

To my generation, that day is as unforgettable as Pearl Harbor Day was to my parents. I was a high school senior, in my seventh period class, when the bell to change classes rang. I grabbed my books and went out in hall full of kids going to and from their classes, when Kathy Klein ran up to me and shouted, “Someone shot the president!” “What?” I shouted back. She repeated herself and because it was so unbelievable, I didn’t know if she was putting me on or not. Within mere seconds I found out she wasn’t, as the word spread throughout the whole school. In my next class, we just sat as the principal, Mr. Murphy, filled us in on whatever details he knew, ’till maybe 15 minutes into it, he announced JFK was dead.

To call it traumatic is understatement. In those simpler, more naive times, we were sheltered from violence in any form. I think Mickey Spillane’s stuff was as graphic as it got in books, yet compared to today’s, it’s mild, at best. There was none on TV, and if it was in the movies, it was either suggested or stylized. Today you can watch a splatter flick on a 60-inch TV while the whole fam is sitting down at dinner — something we couldn’t even imagine, as we squinted at our little 18-inch black and whites, watching something then considered horrifying, but now considered bland, like “Psycho.”

To add to the Nov. 22, 1963 trauma, two days later, a weirdo minor gangster named Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald, on a live broadcast, and to me it seemed it was a world gone mad. Then, after the Warren Commission report and the rise of assassination conspiracy theories galore, I was sure it was.

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The aftermath

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Like millions of others, I read dozens of books and hundreds of articles on the assassination, running the gamut from factual, logical and grounded to contrived, fanciful and insanely conspiratorial. I finally concluded Oswald acted alone and consigned the assassination and all its related madness to rest. To rest, yes, but not to sleep: For decades, every Nov. 22 it’d come back to haunt me like my own personal dybbuk. But a few years ago, that faded away, due to I think to a combination of few media mentions of it, as well as maybe my finally letting it go.

But as I found out with the shock of seeing that book, it hasn’t vanished completely.

If you didn’t already know, or haven’t guessed by now, the “11/22/63” book was written by Stephen King. I bought it, took it home, and left it on a bookshelf, untouched, till last week, when I decided to consider giving it a try. I was hesitant because it’s a huge book (over 800 pages) and I had no idea how gory or grotesque it might be. But what persuaded me to at least start it was a good review from my fellow Enterprise wage slave and bibliophile, Devon Stratton.

Devon’s a diehard Stephen King fan and has read all his stuff, so his opinion of the book would be one I’d value. When I asked him for a review, the word he used repeatedly to describe the book was “touching.” It was the last word I ever expected to hear describe a Stephen King work, but guess what? He was right.

It starts in a small Maine town, the narrator being a local high school teacher. The teacher is friends with a man who owns a local diner and who 1) Is dying, and 2) Has a time-travel portal in his storeroom. The essential plot is the diner guy wants the teacher to go back to 1963 and prevent JFK’s assassination. While on the surface that sounds hokey (and it surely is — if you lack an imagination), King does a great job of avoiding any corniness. Instead, it’s a page-turner and I’ve been drawn into it. And, yes, it’s been very touching.

I’m only 150 pages into it, and where and how it’ll go is anyone’s guess. If it gets harrowing and horrific, I’ll drop it like the proverbial hot potato. If it keeps on the way it has — intense, interesting and evocative — I’ll soldier on.

Obviously, for my comfort as a scaredy cat, I hope the super weird violence is avoided. And for the master storyteller I want Stephen King to be, I hope it stays intense, interesting and evocative.