11/22/63: A Novel
Stephen King
Language: English
Pages: 880
ISBN: 1451627297
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Now in trade paperback, acclaimed author and Master of Horror Stephen King’s #1 bestselling time travel novel, winner of the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller and praised by USA TODAY as “extraordinary.”
WINNER OF THE 2012 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE
In Stephen King’s “most ambitious and accomplished” (NPR) and “extraordinary” (USA TODAY) #1 New York Times bestselling novel, time travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying.
Dallas, 11/22/63: Three shots ring out.
President John F. Kennedy is dead.
Life can turn on a dime—or stumble into the extraordinary, as it does for Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in a Maine town. While grading essays by his GED students, Jake reads a gruesome, enthralling piece penned by janitor Harry Dunning: fifty years ago, Harry somehow survived his father’s sledgehammer slaughter of his entire family. Jake is blown away...but an even more bizarre secret comes to light when Jake’s friend Al, owner of the local diner, enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination. How? By stepping through a portal in the diner’s storeroom, and into the era of Ike and Elvis, of big American cars, sock hops, and cigarette smoke... Finding himself in warmhearted Jodie, Texas, Jake begins a new life. But all turns in the road lead to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald. The course of history is about to be rewritten...and become heart-stoppingly suspenseful.
irritated and doing a bad job of it. I decided I liked these two as much as I liked the root beer. I even liked the aspiring teenage hood outside, if only because he didn’t know he was already a cliché. There was a sense of safety here, a sense of—I don’t know—preordination. It was surely false, this world was as dangerous as any other, but I possessed one piece of knowledge I would before this afternoon have believed was reserved only for God: I knew that the smiling boy who had enjoyed the
Al was probably right: the fissure leading into the past was almost certainly delicate. For all I knew (or he did), it could pop like a soap bubble if the Aluminaire was even joggled hard. Then I thought of the federal government discovering they could send special ops into the past to change whatever they wanted. I didn’t know if that were possible, but if so, the folks who gave us fun stuff like bio-weapons and computer-guided smart bombs were the last folks I’d want carrying their various
Street, I thought. At Neely Street, in my other life, I’m always alone but still careful to close them all the way. Except when I’m peeking, that is. Lurking. Just then I didn’t like myself very much. “George?” I sighed. “That’s not my name.” “I know.” I looked at her. She inhaled deeply, enjoying her cigarette guiltlessly, as people do in the Land of Ago. “I don’t have any inside information, if that’s what you’re thinking. But it stands to reason. The rest of your past is made up, after
had been pressed against the checked oilcloth covering the kitchen table. I looked at what was on my pad. I didn’t know if I’d drawn it before going to sleep or if I had wakened long enough to do it and just couldn’t remember. It was a gun. Not a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, but a pistol. My pistol. The one I’d tossed beneath the porch steps at 214 West Neely. It was probably still there. I hoped it was still there. I was going to need it. 11 11/19/63 (Tuesday) Sadie called in the morning
bathroom mirror—might cause my brains simply to disintegrate. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to get through this day, so I didn’t try. One step at a time, I told myself as I walked slowly down the stairs. I was clutching the railing with one hand and my souvenir pillow with the other. I must have looked like an overgrown child with a teddy bear. One step at a ti— The banister snapped. For a moment I tilted forward, head thudding, hands waving wildly in the air. I dropped the pillow (the gun