The date doesn’t cause the instant recall for me that it does for my parents’ generation, but the Kennedy assassination (and an idea of how to stop it) has obviously been on Stephen King’s mind for a long while. King started researching this book back in the 1970’s, but had to put the project on hold when he realized he wouldn’t have time to do the research it would need and hold down a full-time job. After a forty-year writing career he has the time and the skill for it now, and it shows. He’s also come up with the oddest time-travel method I’ve seen; an accidental portal, hidden in the back of a diner, leading to 1958. If that sounds a little simplistic, think of everything you could do with a door to 1958. Now think about the fact that each and every time you step through that portal it’s 1958. The same day in 1958. I spent the rest of the book waiting to see just how that was going to mess with the characters. No spoilers, but the answer is: badly.
One thing you need to know before you start a book like this; the story is dense. Eight hundred and forty-nine pages, and the details don’t let up for a second. Once the main character, Jake Epping, figures out everything he wants to do with the time portal (preventing the Kennedy assassination is just one of his goals), he has to find a way to lay low for five years without tipping off anyone to where he really came from. Epping makes a whole life for himself in a quiet part of America, and since this is a King novel you have a huge cast of quirky, lovable, funny, and of course completely insane characters that make up life in a Stephen King small town. The story never went where I was expecting it to, and that’s just with the normal lives of the characters. Some of the story elements seemed a little forced, sometimes things came across as just a bit too heartwarming to be believed, and then occasionally the aforementioned insane characters would drag the story away from sci-fi historical fiction, and into horror.
Speaking of sci-fi, the time-travel method gets the least amount of explanation possible. You can see the effects and understand some of the basic rules, but that’s pretty much it. How the portal came about is never fully explained, and it isn’t until close to the end of the book (which takes a left-turn into some pretty strange territory) that the wider effects are explored. For the most part there’s just the underlying idea that time itself is alive, and it really doesn’t like being messed with.
Of course the main focus of the book is King’s fixation on President Kennedy’s death and Lee Harvey Oswald’s role in it. A lot of this comes across in the story of the main character’s stakeout of Oswald’s squalid little life, trying to figure out how the most powerful man in the country could have been brought down by someone so…small. A loner. Wife-beater. Henpecked by his unpleasant mother. Probably the worst kind of communist: someone who didn’t care one bit for the plight of the worker, but truly believed that his poverty, his series of dead-end jobs, his lack of friends, and his desperately unhappy wife, were all due to the fact that he was being kept from getting what the world owed him. Plenty of ambition but no real focus or drive, at least until it came to that one act that he’ll forever be known for.
In a way, Oswald is exactly the kind of villain who would come out of a Stephen King novel: a small-town loser, hero in his own mind and just slightly unhinged from reality, who somehow manages to gain more notoriety then he ever should have deserved.