Though the FBI does not suspect him of being involved in the attempted assassination, one agent deduces that he was sent by someone to Texas, and tells him to leave before they can find out where he came from. Edwin Walker (a target of an assassination attempt by Oswald), and had a private tour of the Sixth Floor Museum in the Texas School Book Depository. When I heard the concept of this book, I worried that King was succumbing to a bad case of baby boomer JFKitis, and the early parts of the book seem to have confirmed this. It took me a while to realise – even the tell-tale “There was something wrong with that town, and I think I knew it from the first” bypassed me initially – what King was up to here, and why Al’s “rabbit-hole” came out in September 1958, rather than sometime closer to the date of Kennedy’s assassination. I found it unreasonable that after a lifetime spent having at least some African-American friends/classmates/teachers/co-workers (yes, even in Maine), a lifetime that almost definitely included watching The Cosby Show and Men in Black and very definitely included years of having an African-American president in the White House, our hero would be able to ignore the treatment of others around him almost every moment of every day.

The planet is on the verge of collapse, and many countries are involved in various recurring nuclear wars. Hosts of butterflies are always in the air, waiting to fly around like crazy ass future-changing bastards. There's a killing of a family by sledgehammer-wielding maniac described in detail multiple times in the first 300 pages.

I need you to pick up Georgia from school, she had a rehearsal for the play so I couldn't do it, and can you (pointing at the future me) nip to Sainsbury's and get me a few things? How would neuropsychiatry and pharmacology explain the origin of his creativity under the influence of at least 3 to 6 substances that all, already as single consumption, have massive impacts on thought quality and imagination? King has been very clever with his method of time travel, building some important rules into the process: the rabbit-hole always takes the traveller to the same time on the same date, so there can be no jumping back and forward through time when things get hairy.

NPR book critic Alan Cheuse found no fault with the structure, commenting: "I wouldn't have [King] change a single page.I'm not going into any more detail than that, because I don't want to give away one single thing in this brilliant novel.

Al has aged overnight, a process exacerbated by the cancer that is killing him, cancer that he did not have the previous evening, when Jake last saw him. Kennedy (and if the title fails to convey the message, then hopefully you - like yours truly - have Google-pedia'd it. It was hard at first because I had to go back through and fix some things we’d done on our trial runs again. He has created his own brand of psychological suspense - with the brilliant and scary insight into the minds of average everyday people (who all have some darkness inside them and a skeleton or two in the closet - sometimes quite literally) superimposed onto the masterful description of small towns themselves (eerily resembling sentient living creatures, determined to hold on to their dark secrets).Fans of his story "It" may be excited to know he revisits the town of Derry, Maine, where "It" was located. At first his mission is just to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating JFK, but then little things pop up here and there making him consider a few new things that need to be changed. We get that it’s Patrick Swayze in spirit, but somehow we can’t let go of the knowledge that it’s actually Whoopi Goldberg who’s feeling up Demi Moore. The past is obdurate for the same reason a turtle’s shell is obdurate: because the living flesh inside is tender and defenseless. King’s premise is simple, a question that most people have pondered at some point: if you could go back and change it (save Kennedy, assassinate Hitler, etc.

And we get plenty of these in this book, as Jake's quest to prevent that fateful shot in November in Dallas takes him along the way to the small towns of Derry, Maine and Jodie, Texas. Jake stays with Sadie in the hospital as she recuperates and as a result is not able to watch Lee as he attempts to kill Edwin Walker. King first talked publicly about the idea in Marvel Spotlight magazine issue The Dark Tower (January 27, 2007), prior to the beginning of the ongoing comic book adaptation of his Dark Tower series. The review in the Bangor Daily News commented that the novel "[is] another winner", [32] but provided no critical review of the plot construction. No, because every time you go through the portal, history resets itself like you were never there the first time.

And, as the ominous date of 11/22/63 approaches, he encounters a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald. King has stated the book's idea came to him in 1971, yet at the time didn't have enough confidence in his skill or ability to properly pull something like this off.