Stephen King's Next Book Features Portals and JFK.

(Source: Charles McGrath of the NYT)

In early 2002, Stephen King said he was written out and was thinking of retiring. Some retirement. He has since published at least four novels, a couple of story collections and has collaborated on a monthly comic book. On Wednesday, Scribner, his publisher, announced that in the fall it will bring out yet another King novel, called 11/23/63/

The new book is 1,000 pages long—enormous by most standards, but cruising length for Mr. King—and is apparently a “counterfactual,” a novel that imagines what would have happened had history turned out differently. It’s the story of a Maine high school teacher named Jake Epping who discovers a portal back to 1958 in a storeroom at a local diner. He travels back there and, while enjoying some sex and rock n’ roll, finds himself with a chance to thwart the assassination of JFK.

Mr. King is no stranger to parallel or alternate universes, but for him this is a rare foray into alternate history. In American fiction, perhaps the groundbreaking instance of this genre is Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel “The Man in the High Castle,” which imagines that the Axis had won World War II. More recent examples are Philip’s Roth’s novel “The Plot Against America” (2004), in which Charles Lindbergh beats FDR in the 1940 presidential election, ushering in an era of American fascism and anti-Semitism, and the just published collection of novellas “Then Everything Changed,” by Jeff Greenfield, which actually upends Mr. King’s premise. It has Kennedy being assassinated three years earlier, not in Dallas but in Palm Beach, Fla.

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My Word: I WANT THIS BOOK.