Hello everyone and welcome to the Stephen King cast One Man's Musings on the Works of Stephen King.

Each week I will review one entry into bibliography of Stephen King in the chronological order of publication.

And this week, it is my honor.

I have the absolute pleasure of being able to examine 2011's incredible what-if tale. One that King has posed in many of his stories leading

up to this moment, and that's, what if you could go back in time and stop JFK's assassination?

Would you do it? Well, here, King masterfully explores this concept, but the greatest part of this reading experience is not the time travel or the race against time or the huge seismic event that Jake Epping races towards.

What makes this novel so great is that it's really only a what-if time travel tale on its surface.

What 112263 really is is Stephen King's greatest love story,

one that happens to be set against the backdrop of JFK's impending death.

I think that when we all sat down to first read this novel,

we expected the fish out of water, the man out of time element.

What King does is completely play against those expectations. He doesn't build up or play too heavily into the science of the time travel. In fact, as I'll get to later, there's a distinct lack of science when it

comes to the time travel. How King handles the time travel? It might be a criticism to others,

but the fairy tale quality is definitely a strength, in my opinion. And as for the fish out of water,

again, King subverts our expectations, and has Jake immediately fall in love with the past. King zigs

where we expect him to zag and as soon as George, Jake's alter ego in the past, meets

Sadie, King elevates what has been until his point a very good novel into one of his best

of all time. On top of that, King indulges in what is probably the most unexpected and greatest Easter egg

was an extended cameo of some of his most beloved characters of all time.

All of this, everything that I've talked about, combined with the rich detail of historical facts, makes for, like I said, an all-timer.

Now when this novel came out, I didn't know what to expect.

As you'll know from previous episodes, at this point, when 2011 rolls along,

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