What comes through most powerfully is the author’s joy at working a new muscle
Jake Epping is a high-school English teacher with a crumbling personal life and a taste for greasy food. Both are normal enough traits, and Epping is a typically likable Everyman. What’s abnormal — and so very Stephen King — is how the Everyman’s everyman-ness leads him into a tangled ball of bizarre and unsettling events. In the case of 11/22/63, those events constitute an alternate history of mid-20th-century America. Yep, that’s right: Jake Epping is the hero of a time-travel novel.

Here’s how it works. Left alone by his wife, Jake eats occasional suppers at a local diner that his teaching peers avoid, and it so happens that a time portal has opened up inside the greasy spoon’s pantry. Don’t ask how — the mechanics of the rabbit-hole go mercifully unexplained. What matters is where it leads, and what might be accomplished by returning to that era. After revealing his secret and explaining that the portal leads back to1958, the diner’s proprietor urges Jake to make the journey. “If you ever wanted to change the world,” he pleads, “this is your chance. Save Kennedy, save his brother. Save Martin Luther King. Stop the race riots. Stop Vietnam, maybe.”

How can Jake say no? He steps through the portal and finds himself whisked back to the tail end of the ’50s — a time of Eisenhower, rabbit-eared televisions, Viceroy cigarettes and 95 cent meatloaf dinners. The problem, of course, is that Jake doesn’t know what happened on the day of the Kennedy assassination, and neither, really, do we. The fog of uncertainty around that day complicates the novel’s question of whether it is possible to change the past. If Jake doesn’t know what happened, how on earth is he supposed to circumvent it?

The struggle to answer that question is what drives 11/22/63, and what comes through most powerfully is the author’s joy at working a new muscle. King’s enthusiasm is infectious.