‘11/22/63’ is ‘vintage’ Stephen King

So, here goes with a brief outline of the story. Jake Epping is a schoolteacher who often eats first rate, cut price hamburgers in a van converted to a tiny restaurant whose owner, Al, seems on the point of death and asks Jake to go back in time through a wormhole in the rear of his restaurant to prevent the assassination of Kennedy and so, the Viet Nam war, and various other evils perpetrated by subsequent administrations – Richard Nixon et al.

At first Jake doesn't want to oblige his friend, but then he reads a story by Harry Dunning, an adult, backward student and school janitor who writes of his childhood and his drunken father's horrific murderous attack on his mother, brothers and sister that left all four dead and Harry crippled and brain damaged. Jake decides that, as a trial run, he will go back in time to kill the father before he attacks his family.

Jake succeeds, finds he likes living in 1958 when life was kinder and slower (at least in the US) than it is in 2011 (oh yes, this book is hot off the press, ending in 2012).

Although he spent several weeks (it may be a month or more) in the past stalking the Dunning father, when Jake returns through the wormhole – as Al has explained to him – he has only been gone for two minutes.

To cut a very, very long involved and complicated story very short, Jake goes back through the wormhole in time to 1958 to bide time until 1963. However, he finds the past doesn't want to be changed. Cars break down, trees block roads etc, etc.

To pass the time until 1963 Jake take work as a substitute schoolteacher, gradually working his way south to Dallas where, thanks to Al's research, he rents a seedy apartment opposite the one to be occupied by Lee Harvey Oswald – the man who, most people believe, shot the President. However, in 1958 Oswald is living in Russia so Jake finds work as a substitute teacher first in Maine, then in Florida, and, later, on the staff of the high school in Jodie, a small town near Dallas, where he falls in love with young and beautiful Sadie, a librarian, who has just joined the staff of the high school.

But, the course of true love never runs smooth. Sadie suspects Jake, or rather George Amberson, as Jake decides to call himself in 1958, isn't what he says he is. From time to time he forgets the time lapse, refers to songs that haven't yet been written … and sometime later, she can't understand why he has to keep rushing off to Dallas/Fort Worth to keep tabs on Oswald while trying to make up his mind if Oswald really was the murderer – or there was someone else.

I won't spoil reader's pleasure by revealing what happened; suffice it to say that 11/22/63 is vintage King. For a really satisfying read, rush down to Nigel R Khan to get your copy of this page-turner before stocks are exhausted.