20251024 Friday

Book log: The Dead Zone (1979)

The Dead Zone is the book that Stephen King considers his first "real 
novel". The story is more related to contemporary America than its 
predecessors, and it takes on a more directly political narrative. 
Maybe that's why King considers it a more mature effort?

A young college teacher named John Smith is in a terrible car 
accident and spends close to five years in a coma. How much has 
American culture changed while he was away? The Watergate scandal has 
completely ripped apart the political rule book, which is deeply 
unsettling on the frail and recovering John Smith. On a more personal 
level, his girlfriend has married another man and now has a young 
son. On top of all this, John Smith discovers that the brain damage 
he suffered in the car accident has amplified a precognitive ability, 
which was more subtle since his childhood, when he suffered a milder 
head trauma while ice skating. Through his newfound power, John Smith 
realizes that the up and coming politician Greg Stillson -- a bully, 
a populist, a fascist and a psychopath (not unlike Donald Trump) -- 
will become the president of the USA several years into the future 
and cause a nuclear war. The good old philosophical dilemma "If you 
could travel back in time would you murder Adolf Hitler to avert the 
killing of millions" is explicitly articulated by John Smith as he 
begins to consider the idea of murdering Stillson. Throughout large 
parts of the book, the reader expects this outcome, but King still 
manages to surprise us in the end.

I think the three premises of the book -- being away for a long time 
and returning to a changed country, having clairvoyant abilities, and 
the moral sides of using violence to stop a catastrophe -- are all 
interesting and make up for an engaging narrative. Unfortunately, the 
structure of the book is a bit clumsy. At the beginning of the book 
we are presented with John Smith's story arc, as well as that of a 
horrible killer and that of Greg Stillson. We get the impression that 
King is establishing several parallel and equally important threads 
that will be spun together later in the book, but soon the book deals 
mostly with the long recovery of John Smith. And this middle part of 
the book seems to drag on for too long. The "killer" yarn is resolved 
about halfway through the book and seems to have the single 
significance of confirming Smith's extraordinary sense to himself. 
The Greg Stillson part of the story is also in the background for 
much of the book, until we get a huge exposition dump in the form 
of Smith's research notes towards the end of the book. And the climax 
of the book, Smith's planning and attack on Stillson, feels like it's 
just a small part of the whole.

As always, King name drops a bunch of contemporary culture, like The 
Ramones, Walter Cronkite, etc. And in line with the theme of the book 
he mentions several real American politicians, like Nixon, Reagan, 
Carter, etc. And he weaves in a few references to his own works, like 
'salem's Lot, Stovington and Castle Rock (which is mentioned for the 
first time in this book). Carrie is also mentioned, as a fictional 
character in a book, not as an in-universe character. The strangler/
killer/rapist story in the book is reminiscent of King's short story 
Strawberry Spring.