Short Fiction, Writers Reading

Writers Read: The Dead Zone by Stephen King

ireneallison12

The Dead Zone by Stephen King

1979

The Dead Zone was the first SK novel I ever read. The first book of his that I read, given to me by a neighbor, was a short collection called Night Shift. Lots of good stuff there, my favorite being Gray Matter. It made me double check my beers for a long time.

I was something like twenty-one or two when I read The Dead Zone. I was not much on horror except for the movies, but since the collection went down so well, I read it (I read his early stuff out of order, next was Firestarter then Salem’s Lot and The Stand. Avoided The Shining because I hated the movie).

The Dead Zone is a tremendously personal look into the tragedy of Johnny Smith.  Johnny has a nice little life going and appears to be on the track for marriage until he is cruelly plucked to perform a killing on the behalf of God (but not on Highway 61).

Johnny awakens in the hospital many months later, unexpectedly. So long that he has lost his girl. In exchange God has given him psychic abilities and an endless headache.

I see it that way, not as a random occurrence, because humankind will need someone to take out the trash before the trash takes us out. The trash has a name: Gregory Stillson. A smooth talking evil doer, who, if elected president (as Johnny saw in his visions) would end the world.

The book oddly foreshadows King’s near fatal accident, and if a certain politician had a child handy whilst being fired upon it might have been a prophecy.

Regardless, I find The Dead Zone special because of the sense of great loss and sadness experienced by Johnny. He is an unknown martyr, forced into selfless demise just to keep some asshole, whom God could have struck down on his own, from getting elected. King doesn’t always excel at characters. Mostly he has the same sort of people going through different stories, especially the male leads. And although Johnny Smith has some resemblance to others that followed him, he is a tragic, three dimensional person, whose fate makes the story poignant.

I saw the movie version afterwards (I know there was a television series but I never have seen it).

Christopher Walken and Martin Sheen were excellent (unlike the bizarre casting of George C Scott as Rainbird in Firestarter), but, for me, it never truly captured the melancholy of the story, of happiness forever lost. Then again, I had a bottle of wine in me so my judgment might have been altered.

Leila

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Published by ireneallison12

23 thoughts on “Writers Read: The Dead Zone by Stephen King”

  1. Good review. I haven’t read the book but saw the movie years ago. I remember Christopher Walken was excellent as he almost always is. His dance routine in Weapon of Choice is worth a look on YouTube if you haven’t seen it.

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  2. Leila
    Thanks for sharing your reflections, reactions and memories of King and his work.
    First let me say that, as good, and as big, as King is, I do know of another living fiction writer with whose work I’m familiar who blows King out of the water as a writer of fiction. No one can make this judgement until they’ve read a lot of both author’s works. For prose style, critical intelligence, sense of humor, deep imagination, and especially, CHARACTERS, the writer I’m thinking of is much more graceful, aware, original, and fecund than King is. I’m not knocking King, I’m simply saying that this other writer I know of is better – much better – and will last longer, in the end. I won’t share her name with readers right now and will let ’em figure out who this is on their own, if they have the mental energy and the love of writing required, and if they don’t already know.
    King is inescapable. “My” Stephen King will always be the novella collection DIFFERENT SEASONS. I devoured this entire book one summer in a day or two when I was seventeen or eighteen years old, and I was utterly enthralled by the story-telling prowess in this collection, while sometimes being appalled by the messy, awkward, repetitive prose style (now I like messy prose styles, but only if they’re messy in the right way). This was long before this collection spawned two extremely famous American films, Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me. Both of those films still linger in the back of my mind in very many ways, especially Stand by Me.
    Different Seasons is a book I have never looked at again since I read it forty years ago, but it’s amazing how much of it still lingers in my memory. It’s one of those works of art I don’t want to look at again because it’s still alive in my mind in its own way and I don’t wish to tamper with it.
    MOBY DICK, by Herman Melville, is a book with a messy prose style which I have read through cover to cover at least a dozen times. Some parts of Moby Dick, like the opening chapters or the chapter on The Whiteness of the Whale, have been etched into my brain pan and committed to memory because I’ve read them so many times I couldn’t help but remember them even if I didn’t want to, not that I don’t want to. I first read Moby Dick right around the time I read DS.
    DIFFERENT SEASONS was a different kind of experience than MOBY DICK, but I remember reading it as vividly as I remember reading MD for the first time.
    It’s funny to think that Moby Dick was a MASSIVE critical failure and that it sold less than a few thousand copies when it first came out, and that it also, in effect, ended Melville’s career as a well-paid author. Not too long after that, he had to get a job inspecting goods in ships at the waterfront, a job he kept for 20 years, until his wife inherited some money. He never stopped writing poetry, but was virtually unknown as an author at the time of his death. A single critic traveled from Britain looking for Melville at one point and was told that he was already dead, which wasn’t literally true at the time. One of his other masterpieces, BILLY BUDD, was hauled out of his desk by his wife after his death but NOT PUBLISHED for another 35 years, until the 20th century finally started to catch up with him. Much of Herman Melville’s best work is more like Scripture than mere Literature. Along with Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Walt Whitman, Melville is the best America has to offer.
    I sometimes wish Stephen King would move over a little bit and make more room for other writers of fiction, because it isn’t healthy that he’s the only one; at the same time, he’s become the archetype of THE WRITER for many in this contemporary world, and he has lived up to that challenge with grace, humor, bravery and gusto, and he’s always stuck to his guns, never truly selling out (which is amazing given how rich he is). He’s also a very brave person politically and one of those very few multimillionaires who believes the government should be taxing his wealth hundreds of times more than it is now so that we can deal with things like climate change which will lead to a planetary disaster far more horrific, horrible, terrible, terrifying, and painful than anything even he has ever been able to dream up. (And the animals, who didn’t do anything wrong, will suffer too, not just the humans.)
    Thanks again, Leila! FYI, if you want to know who that other author is go look in the mirror! I suggest readers start with “The Endless Now” (read it at least half a dozen times) and move on from there…
    D

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    1. Woo hoo Dale
      You sure excel at communicating your thoughts well! I really mean that, you have a rare gift.

      I think King puts the story first then adds the people. Sometimes he seems to listen to criticism too much and create awful characters (in my mind) such as the Col. Kurtz lite in Dreamcatcher.
      But man oh man he can write a story and make it move!
      As far as I go, it was probably for the best that I didn’t hit tge jackpot. I would sniffed myself into the grave a long long time ago.
      Thank you once more!
      Leila

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      1. Leila
        Yes, I surely do know what you mean. A former (not current) penchant for a substance known as COCAINE surely would have killed me then if I had a lot of money.
        I forgot to mention Edgar Allan Poe. To me, if I had to pick one from the past, HE is America’s greatest fiction writer. If I’m not mistaken, he’s even more famous than Mark Twain, world-wide.
        And he never hit it big, struggled his whole life through here on this particular Planet. (It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s now haunting other Planets.) Kafka makes a second with him. They have vastly more in common together than merely dying at almost exactly the same age.
        My favorite hero of all time (Yeshua, some call him Jesus) never had money either (actually rejected it, and spoke against it, in fact, which is known to anyone who’s read even small parts of The Gospels, which obviously excludes the vast majority of American Christians right now, Big Time). And myself, my dogs and my kids ain’t starving, so I can’t complain (too much) even though I’ve been fired from every job I ever had (well, some of them, I goaded the boss into it on purpose).
        D

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      2. Hello Dale
        You bring up perfect examples. Also, Mark Twain was great at making money, but ol Sam Clemens managed to blow more than one fortune backing a crackpot invention! He was extremely candid about that in his autobiography. I recall some sort of typesetter put him back on the lecture circuit.
        I believe Einstein said you shouldn’t do what you love for money.

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      3. Hola L.A.
        Whenever you can, see what I said just now to CJA (under Girl on a Trampoline) for a few more riveting (and amusing) reflections on the Stephen King Effect in the US of A…It says a little more about what I think King is on to in his writing…spurred on by your Sunday essay.
        D

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  3. Leila
    My all time favorite author! I started with “Different Seasons” around age 21. I’ve read several of his books more than once. “Gray Matter,” was a classic! He’s written so many.
    His book, “On Writing a Memoir to the Craft,” is a staple for examination.
    I read the “Dead Zone,” but I don’t remember it like I do the movie, except I think it was even more sinister. Where it delved into Greg Stillson’s past. When Stillson/Martin Sheen, came out of that house after slapping a big campaign button into Jonny’s hand for a handshake, and opens the door, says, “My God, what a glorious day!” in his booming voice–that always stuck with me.
    Fire Starter the movie was weird indeed with George C. Scott as Rainbird. General Patton doesn’t work in that film.
    Great post!
    Christopher

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    1. Thank you Christopher

      It is interesting to compare King how he was then to after he quit boozing. Much was gained, including his life, but some little bits were lostvtoo. Sometimes he is a bit of a stern yankee. Still, we all change.
      Thank you!
      Leila

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  4. Leila, an awful confession. I don’t read horror stories or watch horror films, because they give me nightmares (back in my twenties, even an Agatha Christie film, ‘Endless Night,’ gave me nightmares!). I seem to remember that at some point in past LS commentaries, I vowed to read a Stephen King. Still haven’t got round to it, but I reckon I could make a start with ‘Dead Zone.’ Will only read it on spring/summer afternoons and never in bed. Mick

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    1. Hi Mick
      Confession is good for the soul! And in that regard, King has never frightened me. Only one book I have ever read made me uneasy and that was Hill House by Shirley Jackson, but even then it was mild.
      I suppose it is because visual things get me. In The Day the Earth Stood still when Gort the robot was crowding in on Patricia Neal, that scared me (of course I was nine).
      We all react in different ways.
      Thank you for dropping by!
      Leila

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      1. Pardon me for intruding but when you spoke about books that scared you I immediately thought of To The Devil a Daughter by Dennis Wheatly. I read several of his books when I was a teenager and I think they scared me more than the ones by Stephen King. Mind you I did become more careful as time went on.

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    2. Hi Mick, if you’ve never read Stephen King, may I suggest the wonderful, amusing (and short) Joyland, a coming of age story with some spookiness and mystery, but not horror . It’s my favourite of his (I’ve only read a couple of others…). cheers, A.

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    3. Diane, sorry dont seem to be able to place this reply beside your comment about Denis Wheatley. I read him in my teens too. Only title I can remember now is ‘The Devil Rides Out.’ Oddly, I dont recall any nightmares at all. Perhaps I thought that occult stuff just wasn’t realistic enough to worry about, unlike a corpse falling out of an opened wardrobe (after all, there was a wardrobe, right there in my bedroom). Thanks for commenting, Mick

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    1. Thank you Doug
      I think The Stand was great enough at 900 pages, the additional 400 were needless, and only there because he could.
      Vonnegut gave this bit of advice and wasn’t being completely facetious:”start as close to the end as possible.” I believe that to be good advice.

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  7. Hi Leila,

    Excellent review. I’ve read a lot of King, Herbert and Laymen.

    I think the first King novel I read was ‘Carrie’. I really did enjoy ‘The Dead Zone’. The films, well, are any of them ever as good as the books? (Although ‘Sleepers’ by Lorenzo Carcaterra is a fine example of a stunning film being true to the book)

    HAH! You did spoil King a wee bit for me when you said in one of our ‘discussions’ that his dialogue could be terrible…I hadn’t noticed but you were right. I watched the original ‘It’ once again and some of it was cringe worthy. When Ben was talking about Stan he said, ‘I swear this has just come back to me, he said, he saw it’s Dead lights and he wanted to be there.’

    There is no need for the first nine words in that quote!!

    ‘You bet your fern it is’

    Oh dear!

    And, ‘Bev is that really you?’

    James Mason, just because he was James Mason, got away with a few bits of dodgy dialogue in ‘Salem’s Lot’.

    However, I reckon that over-all he is a very imaginative and entertaining writer.

    ‘Bag Of Bones’ was something special and probably better than my favourite which was ‘It’ I should dust off my typing fingers and get a review written about it!!!

    Excellent Leila and hopefully you will have tweaked some folks interest on one of the best writers that I have had the pleasure to read…Even with some wooden dialogue!!!!!!!!!!!

    Hugh

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    1. Hi Hugh

      A lot of the time King is further victimized by whoever adapts the screenplays.

      I have always considered his inner dialogue and first person (like “Red” in Shawshank) first rate. But there’s something “old movie” that gets into the characters words. But for him, as he states, it is always the story–which he is second to none.

      Leila

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  8. I’m convinced to read more King after this. He’s a writer I’ve only read two of and none of his horror writing (the first being The Eyes of the Dragon which I read in my 20s, the second being On Writing in my early 50s).

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