Rereading Stephen King: Week eight - The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone was the strangest experience of my rereading experiment thus far. It's the first book that is totally different to my memories of it; to the point where I even doubted that I had read it, and hadn't just watched the (admittedly excellent) David Cronenberg movie adaptation too much. I had read it, though – I still have the original copy to prove it – but it had slipped from my mind almost completely. (Into the dead zone?) Why? Maybe because, structurally, it's easily the strangest book King had, until this point, attempted to write; and maybe because, unlike other King (not Bachman) novels of the time, it doesn't really have a bad guy to focus on and drive the narrative. Not that it's any the worse for that, mind you …

So, the plot. Johnny Smith is a teacher, dating a fellow teacher called Sarah. They have a potential future together – it's tentative but brewing – until they go to a fair one day, and Johnny wins a lot of money playing Wheel of Fortune. Long story short, there's a car crash, and Johnny ends up in a coma for the next five years. When he wakes up, nothing is like it was: Sarah is married, his father has been praying he'd die, his mother has found a cult-like branch of Christianity to join, and the world has moved on. Oh, and Johnny has woken up with a new ability: he can touch people and read them, almost, telling them something about their future. It's flaky and unexplained, but that makes it better: you're never sure what he's going to tell people. Only, he doesn't have all the details. Some are unreachable from him, like memories that can't be recalled; he calls this blank space in his mind the Dead Zone. He has operations on his legs and arms and neck, where the muscles have atrophied. Some people find out about his power, but it's subtle and quiet. Testing it, almost.

This takes us up to the halfway mark of the novel. This is the biggest sign that something is up (in the best possible way) in King-land: we're allowed time to grow into knowing Johnny. He's possibly King's most likeable protagonist thus far, a really nice guy who tries and who wants others to be happy. He wants peace, and his life back, and we want to see him get those things. So, when he's asked by Sheriff Bannerman of Castle Rock to help with a murder – there's a raincoat-wearing serial killer on the loose, whose modus operandi is to murder one woman a year, terrifying a small town – we want him to succeed. And he does help: what seems like it will be the main thread of the novel – finally! an antagonist! – is solved quickly and efficiently. Johnny's powers help him solve a crime that has eluded the police for years, but he's not a hero: he's just a man who wants to do the right thing. And we, as readers, are left with a third of the book to go, and a question about exactly where it goes from here.

Well, it goes to Greg Stillson. We've seen him a few times through the novel, in vignettes where he has kicked a dog to death, terrorised an unruly teenager, blackmailed a senator, but they've been context-free. Now, in the novel's final stretch, we meet him, and Johnny Smith shakes his hand. Stillson is rallying for a seat in the House of Representatives, an independent candidate who relies on jingoism and hot dogs to win votes. Johnny Smith, though, sees the future: where Stillson becomes President one day, and leads the US into a war the like of which it's never seen. He's a Bad Man, in King's grand tradition, and he must, Johnny knows, be stopped.

A strange structure – almost four distinct parts that feed into each other – and one that absolutely works. When it ends, with a Carrie-style assemblage of external media (newspaper articles and police reports), it's almost a disappointment that the challenging pace of the rest of the book has been abandoned. And while the book deals with psychic powers, it does so in a very different way to, say, Carrie or Firestarter: these are quiet and unwanted, and they're accidental. They are, in their own way, almost believable.

And, somehow, The Dead Zone ends in a way that I would never have predicted when I began reading it: as one of my favourite King novels. Last week, in the comments, we discussed our Top 10 Kings, and I listed mine before I began this rereading project. That list has definitely changed now, not least so that I can put this book on there. It's amazing: it feels like King pushing himself, challenging himself to write something outside his usual patch, even as it appears to be entirely resting there. As with many of his best, it's not a horror, even: over its many sections it's a slow-burn psychological thriller; a crime novel; even (whisper it) a more literary novel about rehabilitation and loss. In many ways, in fact, The Dead Zone is a template for the recent glut of Scandinavian crime novels: a detective story with an unconventional detective, pursuing a case with elements of horror, but which delves deeper into the detective's psyche than most.

King-isms
So, there's a major thematic King-ism here, and one that he would return to with 2011's 11/22/63. When Johnny meets Stillson and shakes his hand, and sees what will happen to America – and the world – if Stillson is left unchecked, he wonders: "If you could jump into a time machine and go back to 1932, would you kill Hitler?" This is a question that King clearly wondered himself, this idea of going back to a root of something and fixing the issue before it has a chance to manifest.

Connections
While Salem's Lot is mentioned in The Dead Zone, this is actually the first Castle Rock novel. Castle Rock is a small town in Maine where a number of King's books are set, and it's here that Johnny is called to assist with the raincoat killer. Sheriff Bannerman, who calls for Johnny's help, reappears in Cujo and in Different Seasons' The Body.

But this book also has two more distinctly self-referential (and fourth-wall breaking) connections. At one point, Johnny is accused of burning down a building by having "set it on fire with his mind, like in that book Carrie"; and, in the Dark Tower VII, a robot butler called Nigel is reading The Dead Zone. He references Greg Stillson, and then offers his own – wholly impartial – review of the book: "Quite enjoyable," he says.