Is 11/22/63 Clean? Profanity and Content Guide for the Audiobook

Danny Ellis 2 min read
Verdict
Heavy

A substantial share of the book gets filtered, and most listeners will choose to skip a meaningful amount.

30h 40m audiobook, 1,046 filtered segments, 4.3% of the runtime gets skipped at full strength.

I picked this up expecting a time-travel thriller and got one, but King being King, the ride has some real weight to it before you reach Dallas. The verdict here is Heavy, and I want to be honest with you about what that means in practice. The 1,046 tagged segments spread across 30-plus hours never make the book feel relentless, but they do cluster in ways that matter. Profanity is the highest-volume category, with a chunk of it landing in the moderate-to-severe range, and the slurs are almost entirely severe. That second point matters a lot: this story spends serious time in late-1950s and early-1960s America, and King does not soften that era. If you're listening with a teenager who's studying the Kennedy assassination for school, the slur filter is the one you switch on first, no question. Violence runs long in raw seconds, and Chapter 42 has a single severe scene that stretches past four minutes, so that filter earns its keep too. Sexual content is relatively sparse by segment count but runs nearly half an hour when you total the seconds, concentrated in a handful of chapters. Chapter 70 is the one I'd flag specifically, with 37 tagged segments in a short stretch. The good news: this is still a great book, and with profanity, slurs, violence, and sexual content all filtered, you get the same book, same narrator, same story. I'd recommend it without hesitation to any adult listener who wants the full King experience, cleaned up just enough to finish the book on a long drive without second-guessing the volume.

What we filtered

Category Mild Moderate Severe Total Time
Profanity 230 265 89 584 5m 54s
Slur 1 2 61 64 55s
Blasphemy 66 90 0 156 2m 18s
Violence 49 72 22 143 32m 24s
Sexual Content 27 17 13 57 32m 50s
Crude Humor 29 1 1 31 3m 1s
Substance Use 7 4 0 11 2m 10s

Profanity, by word: 106 G-d, 103 f-ck, 101 sh-t, 85 h-ll, 52 d-mn, and 304 more across 23 other words. (Word-level filters let you keep some words and skip others. Your library, your rules.)

The heaviest single chapter: Chapter 70, with 37 filtered segments across all categories.

The longest single scene we flagged runs about 4m 5s in Chapter 42 and falls under sexual content.

What you get back when you filter 11/22/63 on AudioHaven

  • Same book, same story.
  • About 1h 19m of total filterable runtime, which you choose to keep or skip by category and by severity.
  • Real-time skipping. The book plays straight through, with a soft cut where each segment lives.

Listen to 11/22/63 on AudioHaven

Same book, same narrator, same story.

Try it free for 14 days. Finish the book.