Book Review: '11/22/63' by Stephen King

| Published: January 22, 2012

If you read Stephen King, you know you have to accept whatever unlikely premise he comes up with in order to get on with the story. In “11/22/63” (Scribner, $35), the premise is time travel.

It begins in 2011, when Jake Epping, 35, an English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, reads an essay written by one of his adult GED students. He asked the students to write about an event that changed their lives.

One essay touches his heart. It is about a time 50 years earlier, when Harry Dunning's father came home and killed his mother, his sister and his brother with a sledgehammer. Harry's leg was smashed, leaving him with a limp.

Later, Jake's friend Al, who runs the local diner, shares a secret: His storeroom is a portal to 1958. He has been returning to “Ago Time” for years, obsessed with preventing John F. Kennedy's assassination. Al is dying and persuades Jake to complete his mission. He has taken extensive notes from his time travel and knows where assassin Lee Harvey Oswald will be at any given time.

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