Stephen King · 2011 · road

Stephen King's 2011 novel. Maine schoolteacher Jake Epping steps through a portal in a Lisbon Falls diner into 1958, charged with a mission across the country: to live in the past for five years and stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating President Kennedy. From haunted Derry to Texas, he builds a life and a love in Jodie before the reckoning in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

1. 1
   Lisbon Falls

   The Maine town where Jake Epping steps through a rabbit-hole in a diner's pantry into September 1958, beginning a five-year mission to change the past.

2. 2
   Derry

   King's fictional Maine town, still shadowed by an old evil, where Jake first tests whether the obdurate past can be changed before setting out for Texas.

3. 3
   Sunset Point

   The Florida Gulf coast, where Jake rents a beach house under the name George Amberson, buys a mail-order teaching degree from an Oklahoma diploma mill, and starts winning money off a bookie called Eduardo Gutierrez.

4. 4
   New Orleans

   He drives west to scout the addresses the Oswalds will live at when they come back from Russia - and while he is away, Gutierrez's men burn the Florida house down, which is the past starting to fight back.

5. 5
   Jodie

   The small Texas town where Jake makes a home teaching school and falls in love with the librarian Sadie, as the years count down toward Dallas.

6. 6
   Fort Worth

   He quits the school and takes an apartment across the street from Oswald's, with a microphone through the wall - five years of waiting narrowing to one man in one room, and the sound of him hitting his wife.

7. 7
   Dallas

   Where Jake shadows Lee Harvey Oswald toward the Texas School Book Depository and the motorcade of November 22, 1963 - and learns what the past exacts for being changed.