2017/29: 11.22.63 -- Stephen King

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it’s too late.

Jake Epping, divorced schoolteacher, is a man who doesn't weep over anything -- until one day he's reading an account by one of his students of the night his siblings and mother were murdered by his father.

Serendipitously, Jake's friend Al has a time portal in his diner. It leads to 11:58am on the morning of September 9th, 1958: every trip is a reset, Al says, so you can visit the past again and again. Al himself had attempted to prevent JFK's assassination in November 1963, but late-stage cancer prevented him. Maybe Jake can help. Though the past is obdurate: it doesn't want to be changed ...

Jake has read Ray Bradbury's 'A Sound of Thunder' -- though he keeps using the term 'butterfly effect', which is not the same thing as the idea that changing the past alters the future -- and indeed there are frequent 'sounds of thunder' in 11.22.63. But Jake is still convinced that he can fix everything -- Harry Dunning' s father, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Vietnam War -- and return to a rosy future.

Not that the past is so bad. Jake is enthusiastic about food that tastes better; about Sadie, who he falls in love with; about his teaching job (acquired using fake credentials); about his personal wealth, courtesy of some informed gambling. Sure, the Fifties and Sixties are racist, sexist and lack the comforts of technology. But petrol's cheap and the natives are mostly friendly -- and if he makes a mistake he can always come back and run through those years again.

This novel is far too long: possibly to emphasise the sheer slog of Jake's five years in 'the past', working towards a single moment in Dallas, possibly just because it hasn't had a good edit. There are some exceptional scenes -- not least Jake's visits to Derry, the setting for IT -- and plenty of evocative descriptions of the early Sixties. And King's prose is ... transparent, in a good way: very readable, competent, seldom repetitive. Sadly, there is just too much of it in 11.22.63.