This was the novel that started it all for Stephen King. It wasn’t his first book, nor his first great book, but it was the first King book to top The New York Times bestseller list, a feat he has repeated over 30 times since. It’s the book where his reign of terror really began.
People say King is a sloppy writer, an indifferent craftsman, that he goes for big scares and brand-name placement in place of things like tone and character. Yes, sometimes I am one of those people. But The Dead Zone forces a reappraisal. It has a powerful human intimacy, a sense of what makes people tick, that makes it a very credible horror tale.
John Smith has a problem other people would kill for: An ability to see the future. Precognitive insight has been part of his life as long as he can remember; after a five-year coma it metastasizes to a point where he can discern the fates of other people by touching their hands.
For Smith, this is more curse than blessing. People either want to use him for reasons that disturb him; or they draw back from him, afraid of what he will discover. He is compared to a carnival freak. His mother, a mentally-disturbed fundamentalist Christian, becomes more manic when her son’s power begins to manifest itself.
It leaves John to a bitter conclusion: If this talent was a gift from God, then God was a dangerous lunatic who ought to be stopped.
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| This carnival was not taken in 1970, it was only composed to look that way by photographer David Young. In The Dead Zone, an October carnival becomes a suspenseful centerpiece as John Smith tries his luck on a wheel of fortune, only to find himself unable to lose. That is, until he opts to stop playing and go home. Image from https://www.leicalux.com/blog/carnival-in-that-70s-feel |
You feel like you understand the point, given the way King draws out Smith’s ordeal. He goes from a young schoolteacher with a new girlfriend and a fresh wad of money to the victim of a senseless car accident that leaves him impoverished and unable to walk after he wakes from his coma. It is only after a physical therapy session that he discovers his ability to read the future from casual human contact.
What is the “Dead Zone”? King describes it as a shadowy world where dread is omnipresent but clarity elusive: “It’s like some of the signals don’t conduct,” he explains at one point. “I can never get streets or addresses. Numbers are hard but they sometimes come.”
But the flashes, when he gets them, hit with unmistakable power. After his therapist touches him, he suddenly realizes she left the oven burner on in her kitchen. He tells her she just has time enough to call the fire department and save her house.
His problems begin when she makes a call and proves him right:
The nurses were lined up against the glass of the nurses’ station, staring at him. Suddenly they reminded him of crows on a telephone line, crows staring down at something bright and shiny, something to be pecked at and pulled apart.
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| After leaving the hospital, Smith struggles to find work. One offer comes from Inside View, a supermarket tabloid which offers him a well-paid guest column to make wild predictions to gull its readers. "Some people are crazy as bedbugs, God love em," says a pitchman from the paper. Smith throws him off his porch. https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/entertainment/movies/2019/11/15/movie-review-documentary-reveals-sordid-history-of-national-enquirer/2286503007 |
This idea of becoming a social leper by doing good continues throughout the book, one of several themes King weaves masterfully across the narrative. There is also a chilling crime story, a portrait of aging parents being pulled apart by life’s ruthless undertow, a tale of lost love, and a mentally-twisted politician worming his way into the people’s hearts.
Read today, not for the first time, I was struck by how effectively the novel works as a time capsule for a decade just coming to an end. As John Smith’s coma-inducing injury occurred in 1970, he wakes up finding half of the 1970s already over. He must adjust to a world where even doctors now wear sideburns and where President Nixon resigned after the exposure of a two-bit burglary.
“There’s been about a million books written on it already, and I guess there’ll be a million more before it’s finally done,” Johnny’s father Herb says regarding Watergate.
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| The 1976 Presidential debate between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. In The Dead Zone, Carter puts in an appearance where Smith tells him after shaking hands that "Poland will beat him," a reference to a real-life gaffe where Ford declared Poland a free country, despite being under Russian rule. Image from https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/presidential-debate-philadelphia-gerald-ford-jimmy-carter-1976-20240909.html |
The concept of time travel was something King would revisit in later years, though usually by having a character travel backwards. Here he really lights into Smith’s dislocation by fast-forwarding him through early adulthood, witnessing his old girlfriend as a young mother married to another man, unable to find steady employment because of the notoriety of his condition, wanting to hold back but being impelled to warn others when danger rears its head.
“Heed the still, small voice when it comes,” his mother tells him, words that echo even after her death.
So when he first touches the hand of an unconventional politician named Greg Stillson, whose plank includes seemingly benign if kooky ideas like pay-what-you-want parking meters and shooting trash into space, the nightmare vision he suddenly gets is transformative:
For Johnny it had never been this strong, never. Everything came at him at once, crammed together and screaming like some terrible black freight train highballing through a narrow tunnel, a speeding engine with a single glaring headlamp mounted up front, and the headlamp was knowing everything, and its light impaled Johnny Smith like a bug on a pin. There was nowhere to run and perfect knowledge ran him down, plastered him as flat as a sheet of paper while that night-running train raced over him.
The Dead Zone is probably best remembered for the Stillson subplot, which is teased across the length of the novel (our first sight of Stillson is as a travelling salesman, killing a dog), then dominates the last section. It’s what grabbed me about the book when I first read it.
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| The Dead Zone was adapted several times for movies and television, the first of those adaptations being released in 1983. Starring Christopher Walken and directed by David Cronenberg, it is one of the more idiosyncratic King movies, if not as much as the similarly dark Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining. Image from https://posteritati.com/film/2086/the-dead-zone?srsltid=AfmBOoo95F7q4WsYxYwZnN2B3Wu13wd8UX0Y_N01OQbvxEPI7af4OAyV |
Today, the Stillson subplot had for me a simplistic quality that felt out of place in an otherwise elegantly paced and structurally vibrant story. There is no ambiguity about Stillson, who seems more of a piece with overbearing King bad guys like Randall Flagg from The Stand. Ethical shadings were never King’s thing, but given clairvoyance is the dominant storyline, you need it given the dark themes The Dead Zone explores so deeply. Most of the suspense you get at the end involves Johnny’s fragile health and whether he can complete his mission, not whether he is doing the right thing. King does land a fine ending, but getting there felt longer than the entire rest of the book.
What makes The Dead Zone great for me is its build-up. The first 275 pages that make up “The Wheel Of Fortune” section is early King at his finest, laying out a tale in a careful, involving way, incorporating pieces of recognizably real life, only to blow up when one least expects it.
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| Christopher Walken would revisit his Dead Zone role in a series of Saturday Night Live sketches as "Ed Glosser, Trivial Physic." He has the power to know you are about to burn your tongue with coffee, just not where or when. GIF from https://makeagif.com/gif/ed-glosser-trivial-psychic-limited-usefulness-saturday-night-live-BSwleO |
He makes time for the protagonist’s girlfriend, explaining her unhappy romantic past of abusive jerks and well-meaning clods. King knew how to connect to regular people by emphasizing their regularness:
She suddenly realized she was sitting in an apartment by herself late at night, eating an apple and watching a movie on TV that she cared nothing about, and doing it all because it was easier than thinking, thinking was so boring really, when all you had to think about was yourself and your lost love.
With Johnny, normalcy is always emphasized, too, usually by its lack. All he wants is to be a teacher, helping young people reach their full potential. When his car crash happens, it’s one of many sudden jolts sprung at the reader, but the worst of it is the loss of common ground with the rest of humanity. “He had gone into the darkness with everything, and now it felt to him that he was coming out of it with nothing at all – except for some secret strangeness.”
Secret strangeness would become King’s calling card for many books to come, the ability to transform everyday reality into something terrifying and phantasmagoric. The Dead Zone was one of his most memorable excursions, a novel which remains as eerie and suspenseful as it was when first published. It is a book by someone who had just found his unique voice and now was learning how to master it.
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