It couldn’t happen here (you’d think)
… the people didn’t elect buffoons to Washington.
Well – hardly ever.
Stephen King, The Dead Zone
We’ll get to that in a minute.
This was a weird one to revisit, in that apart from the broad strokes of the story and one character name (Ngo Phat, for those curious), I had no practical recollection of the story of this. I definitely had read it – the character name was a weird detail lodged in my brain – but nothing else really had stuck. Rereading it was more like reading it for the first time, albeit having heard someone tell me the entire story beforehand. Without having made this mad decision to read everything, I might never have revisited – but I’m glad I did. It quickly launched itself into a favourite book of his, and one that was recognised as good at the time but now seems unfairly overlooked. If you’ve read it before, you should revisit it, and if you haven’t read it you could do worse than put this on your reading pile.
Reading this recalls a lot of other books in King’s oeuvre, both past and future. Its themes and villain seem to complement those of The Stand; its long focus on recovery prefigures Doctor Sleep; yet its focus on psychic powers seems less to complement Carrie but seeks to erase it. And of course, there’s the politics angle.
Let’s tackle them in short to long order. First, the recovery aspect. Johnny Smith’s accident and long road to recovery eerily predicts what would happen to King twenty years later, who would be in a vehicle accident whilst out walking. Johnny goes through a five year coma and undergoes intensive surgery to regain the ability to walk. King seemed to suffer far worse; his shattered hip meant he could only sit for forty minutes before the pain became too much. It seems churlish to draw much more in the way of real-life comparisons though, (well, at least on this point), so the literary comparison is more apt.
Structurally, it is similar to what I remember of Doctor Sleep. In that, King spends the majority of the novel discussing Danny’s alcoholism and recovery, and at least half to two-thirds of The Dead Zone is concerned with Johnny’s recovery. That in itself would be strong enough to sustain any other novel, especially if coupled with the love story between Johnny and Mary and excluding the psychic aspect. That Romance (and this is King’s first real attempt at Romance as a genre here) would have sustained the book, and I genuinely would have enjoyed that, in the same way King writing about Danny’s recovery is story enough. The other, spookier parts, to an extent, feel tacked on. This is especially notable considering the central conceit of The Dead Zone is based entirely around the last quarter of the novel, with the previous three quarters steadily and methodically putting the pieces into place.
In that respect, twinning The Dead Zone with Doctor Sleep is interesting case of seeing where an author is in their life. The Dead Zone is written more wholly from the author’s imagination, pre-accident King, where Doctor Sleep is written from the dark experience of King’s life – twice. When I eventually get there, it should be something I revisit.
Moving onto the Carrie connection. As I was reading, I was making notes for the Observations and Connections as I do and made a couple notes as I went along relating to Carrie. Carrie was published in 1974 and set in 1979 and beyond. I’m still not entirely certain why King did this, but when starting The Dead Zone, it was odd to note that while it was published in 1979, yet its initial scenes are set in 1970, then a large part in 1975 after the five year coma. Almost a bit of a switcheroo. ‘No worry,’ I thought. ‘It would make an interesting paragraph to note in.’ But as I continued, it seems much of the story is the light parallel to Carrie, especially considering the religious themes and mothers throughout. But then the strangest thing happens around the last quarter of the book – there is a direct reference to Carrie. Not Carrie White the character: Carrie the book.
That’s weird. Though there had been (and in The Dead Zone, continued to be) occasional references to locales in his novels, there hadn’t yet really been the sense of a more coherent universe King would build later. In these early books, ‘Salems Lot or Blue Ribbon Laundry crop up a couple times, but that’s about it until a little bit further down the line. But to reference Carrie the book is strange. I mentioned in the Carrie essay how it tends to be overlooked by King reference wise. Here, by setting The Dead Zone throughout the same period that Carrie takes place feels like King is, to a certain extent, replacing Carrie White in his budding universe with a more heroic psychic guy. Putting Carrie out to pasture on a different level of the universe feels mean-spirited, and I’m not sure that’s the intention of King, especially where Carrie is an unrepentant victim and murderer, and Johnny is only an attempted murderer. But a fun reference, and also a strange one that deserves the time to be thought about, if only a bit.
But back to those religious themes. In The Stand, we have Mother Abigail who has direct contact with God, receives messages and directs the budding community along to its fate. God’s hand even takes direct action in Vegas. Here, Johnny’s mother Vera is a mad religious nut, convinced Johnny has a gift from God, and a mission to fulfil, and nothing in the novel really proves her wrong. Where God in The Stand is guiding humanity against the dark force of Randal Flagg, God here is guiding Johnny against the very human, though no less evil, Greg Stillson. It ties into many the assassin’s or would-be assassin’s claim they heard voices directing them to their glorious task, whether those voices be God or four lads from Liverpool. But where God wins in both cases, and in both ways there is hope, the tragedy of the loss of Johnny Smith is far more bittersweet than two good guys dying in a nuclear bomb.
But where faith saves in The Stand, faith is questioned in The Dead Zone. The characters in the Boulder Free Zone never really question their prophet, and reap the rewards. Vera, Johnny’s mother, has blind faith and it is what ultimately kills her. A similar, if maybe even crazier, religious zealotry than Carrie’s mother (another one of those Carrie echoes…), and Johnny questions and investigates until he is sure of his own choices rather than blindly following the matriarchal guide, crazy though she may be. That they seem to line up God’s is a coincidence, mostly. And Johnny’s reward is a half-lived life.
Therein lies what I love about this book. The Shining is a tragedy, but the horror is a strong component in that. Here, the horror is so mild it fades into the background for large sections of the novel, though not to its detriment at all. Though there is no introduction to this book, King has written about his intentions with this book in On Writing. He wanted to write a novel about the assassin and get inside his head (a bit like the not-quite as successful Rage). It’s like his attempt to understand Charles Whitman, even down to the brain tumour and headaches and justify them, as well as discuss the question about time travel and Hitler. But in doing that, and in creating Johnny Smith, he creates a tragedy far more interesting than both those ingredients. Johnny might now have turned into one of my all time favourite King characters. He is a good man, but plagued with some of the worst luck in literature. He nearly gets the girl, and they love each other but time is the enemy that stops them – but even then…
It’s tremendously melancholy. Seeing Johnny spending his last proper afternoon with Sarah is heartbreaking, that his relationship with his Dad is lost to the mission, it’s heartbreaking too. It doesn’t feel cruel, as it so easily could be when giving a character so much hardship. His one respite really is Sarah, and even in death Johnny has nothing but her emotional welfare in mind with his brief, psychic/spiritual good-bye. But Johnny is human, with weaknesses, and that is the secret weapon of the book. A character we love, facing up against the politics of evil.
Which is where inevitably have to talk a bit about Stillson. Coming so soon on the heels of Flagg, Stillson feels very similar but equally strong, with his howdy partner antics and a vicious sociopathy a mile wide. But where Flagg is King’s uber-villain, recurring time and time again, Stillson is the only King villain with the distinction of crossing over into real life.
2016 saw an upheaval in politics that, in a word, sucked. Trump was one of them, and at the time invited comparisons with Stillson a lot, including by King himself. Nowadays, if you want to know how King feels about politics you can just check his Twitter feed amongst the pictures of Molly, aka The Thing of Evil, but this was his first real statement on the matter. Yes, Stillson is ostensibly an independent, But he is clearly coded a Republican.
Much of what Stillson does has eerie echoes of Trump on the campaign trail. Even wearing a construction hard hat as sign of being part of the people is both of them. If I believed Trump was capable of reading, I could easily believe he took the ideas for his own campaign. I read this long ago, before I knew who Trump was (oh, those halcyon days), but now this book exists in a post-Trump world. I tire of those endless articles of how pop culture predicts what happens, especially the more tenuous ones. The only interesting one is that whole Titan/Titanic one, and I don’t hold much truck with the thought of precognition. But what is more interesting is that King taps into what Trump et al recognised as a vote winning strategy – appear as a man of the people, and appeal to their baser instincts. Stillson is even characterised as having liberal surfaces with deep right wing, authoritarian actions, like how Trump supported gay marriage and then locked children in cages. There is nothing new under the sun, and Trump’s playbook comes right out of the pages of a horror novel. No surprise there.
Ultimately, the book is about loss. Johnny and Sarah lose out and what could have been, many lose their minds, and Stilson loses out on a future that Johnny is able to prevent. It’s a mood that seeps through the entire book, and gives it its elegiac beauty, making it a strong early effort from Stephen King.
Observations and Connections
The Carrie connection has already been discussed, but this book is also important in a big way to King – after a brief mention in The Stand, this is our first Castle Rock novel! Castle Rock will be a big location King will return to for quite a while, and after Chamberlain in Carrie is our first major fictional location. Stovington, Jack Torrence’s old haunt, also gets a mention as the school Chuck will go to. Where Johnny is buried also has a whole family of Marstens buried there – maybe the burial place of the Marstens from ‘Salem’s Lot?
But most importantly, Sheriff Bannerman is, so far as I can tell, the first King character to say ‘ayuh,’ and I think that is important to note for everyone.
Though I won’t go into detail, the number 19 makes its first appearance here on Johnny’s Wheel of Fortune, who then goes on to have his accident on Flagg Street. Those who know, know.
Super secret bonus essay? Oh, just a quick one then.
*12/2/2022: A subsequent thought about this. The mention of Carrie as a book is during a High School graduation celebration, so if the events of Carrie were to take place as they did in 1979, they would have at best been very recent to a Prom (not sure of the US school calendar), and maybe not yet discovered to be a psychic’s fault, as all the investigations take place in the 80s. Maybe 1979, along with the events of Firestarter and The Shining, signal an age of psychic power in King’s universe, but to prevent a bit of continuity snarl with Carrie being real and a common reference at this point, King made it a book reference instead. Still a weird choice mind.
UP NEXT: We all studiously try not to think of that one Prodigy song with Firestarter.
Deeper Thoughts for the Horror Inclined 