This book truly got me back into reading consistently. Before reading it I was intrigued by the idea of going back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination, and didn’t expect the book to take such a deep turn as I went on.

Despite its long length (800+ pages), you would wish the book was longer. I read that Stephen King originally wanted to write this book back in the 70s, but decided to wait until finally publishing it in 2011. In retrospect, that was probably a good idea, with the change in public perception surrounding the assassination making it a less sensitive issue to write about.

The book is about Jake Epping, a teacher in Maine in 2011, who discovers, through his ill friend Al Templeton, a time-machine in the cellar of his restaurant. Suffering from cancer, Templeton tasks Epping with stopping Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating JFK. Epping starts his journey with an alias in George Amberson, and first saves the family of Harry Dunning, one of his students in 2011, from being murdered by Dunning’s father. Later on, Epping gets a job as a high school teacher in Jodie, Texas, and falls in love with Sadie, the school’s librarian.

Throughout the book we find Jake planning his takedown of Oswald while also balancing his life as a teacher and partner to Sadie, all while trying to keep his identity as a time-traveler a secret. Jake Epping’s time traveling journey began not in 1963, the year Kennedy was assassinated, but in 1958, where the time traveling “portal” supposedly always dropped its travelers too. Thus, Epping had 5 years to plan how he’d stop Oswald on that fateful day in Dallas and also experience the United States in the 50s and 60s.

The topic of the book itself makes it an ambitious and seemingly daunting task to write about, with all the research and planning that must have gone into it. But, I think King managed to capture the historical elements of the assassination while also not deviating from the deeper plot elements that were crucial to Jake Epping/George Amberson’s character development.

Perhaps the biggest theme in this book was the idea of the butterfly effect, where even the smallest change in the past can have drastic effects on the future. Maybe King started Epping’s time-travel journey 5 years prior to explore that idea. Without the idea of the butterfly effect there wouldn’t be much to this book — it’s what held the plot together. After Jake saved his student’s family, he would go back in time to 2011 to witness the changes caused by the butterfly effect. Similarly, Epping’s attempt to save JFK would have wide ranging effects on the future as well, an idea the book gradually builds up toward as the day of Kennedy’s assassination approaches.

This was the first book I read front to back in quite a while, the last being ‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho. I surprised myself by finishing the whole thing, especially considering the length of the book. King, however, somehow makes everything easier to digest and by the time I finished I wanted to read more. Safe to say I will be reading a lot more of his books now.