Stephen King’s “The Dead Zone” is a huge departure from what I normally read.    Actually, I had read many of King’s books when I was in high school and college many years ago.  I would read each new King as it came out.  At some point — I can’t remember which King book was the last one I read — I decided I didn’t want to be scared anymore, and quit reading his books.  I don’t remember ever reading any other horror/suspense writers.  It was just King.    At that time I was also a heavy mystery reader.

After all these years, I can still remember certain snippets from each King book I had read.  “The Dead Zone” has stuck with me the most, I think because of the main character who has psychic experiences, and also the general storyline. 

After I recently read  King’s “On Writing”,  I told myself I should re-read “The Dead Zone” — to experience firsthand (again) King’s writing style and to see if he practiced what he preached towards writing style.   I probably would never have gotten around to doing that if it hadn’t been for Carl at Stainless Steel Droppings’ RIP IV Challenge.

Because of this challenge, I went ahead and read “The Dead Zone”.   It was first published in 1979, and the storyline  takes place through the 1970s.  Reading it now, it feels almost like historical fiction, as well as suspense .    For those of you who are not familiar with this story, ”The Dead Zone” is about Johnny Smith, who receives a head injury as a young boy, which causes him to have psychic experiences later on.  These experiences are not quite obvious until he is an adult, however.  Johnny doesn’t even realize that he has these psychic experiences because he sort of blacks out while he has them. 

It isn’t until much later that he understands the full impact of his powers.  Much, much later.  He ends up in a horrific car accident which leaves him into a coma for four and a half years.  During that four and a half years, his girlfriend Sarah marries someone else.  His parents keep a vigil over him.

When Johnny wakes up, he is shocked that he has been in a coma for so long. 

He asks his parents about who he thinks is the current president, Nixon.  He’s shocked to hear that Nixon had resigned. 

“Johnny suddenly realized that there had been some great and fundamental upheaval in American politics — almost surely as a result of the war in Vietnam — and he had missed it.  For the first time he really felt like Rip van Winkle.  How much had things changed?  He was almost afraid to ask.  Then a really chilling thought occurred.

‘Agnew…Agnew’s president?’  “

Then his parents have to explain to him the convoluted way that Jerry Ford ended up being president instead of Agnew.

Johnny also tries to come to grips with  Sarah now being a married woman and mother of a young child.  A few months after he woke up from the coma:

“He wasn’t over the hurt of the past.  For him, time had been crudely folded, stapled, and mutilated.  In the progression of his own interior time, she had been his girl only six months ago.  He could accept the coma and the loss of time in an intellectual way, but his emotions stubbornly resisted”.

Johnny does become reunited with Sarah, but not in the way that he wishes that he could.

Threaded through “The Dead Zone” is also the plot of a rapist/murderer — because of Johnny’s psychic powers, this case is eventually solved.  Also, there is the story of a corrupt politician, Greg Stillson, working his way up the political ladder.  Again, because of the psychic powers, Johnny realizes that Greg Stillson has the potential to be terribly destructive, but Johnny isn’t sure exactly what and how – because when Johnny has his visions, there is a “dead zone” where he can’t quite see all of what is going to happen.  Johnny then becomes obsessed with Greg Stillson and wonders if it’s possible to change the course of history.

Reading about the rapist/murderer was hard — and maybe part of why I stopped reading Stephen King– because King has a knack for making horrible events so realistic.  I would be a paranoid wreck if I constantly read horror/suspense books.   For me, reading King again would have to be done in very infrequent doses…maybe once a year for the annual R.I.P. Challenge! 

Incidentally, “The Dead Zone” was also made into a movie– starring Christopher Walken as Johnny, and Martin Sheen as Greg Stillson.

To complete the RIP challenge, I still plan on reading “Frankenstein”, and also a collection of ghost stories by Edith Wharton titled “The Ghost-Feeler”.  This challenge ends on Halloween.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at 7:06 PM and is filed under book review, books, challenges. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.