Using his psychic powers, Ian Hamet recalls having read some of the Stephen King novel The Dead Zone even before now.
posted 12.14.05
STEPHEN KING, IN AND OUT OF THE ZONE
I'm sure I've read at least parts of The Dead Zone, though a long time ago, and have seen the Cronenberg movie once. It was curious to return to it, half-remembered, in the context of King's early career—because it showcases his obsessions once again, has the most glaring weakness of any of his early work after Carrie, and is otherwise a nifty thriller with loftier ambitions.
Johnny Smith cracks his head when ice-skating as a kid, immediately after blacking out from which he relays some vague details about how one of the older boys would come to grievous harm. Forgetting the incident, he grows up to be an English teacher (take writing and teaching away from King, and half his protagonists would be unemployed), falls for a fellow teacher, then is a victim of a horrible car accident. He lapses into a coma, is expected to die, but regains consciousness after nearly five years.
Problem with the handling
Johnny awakes with the ability to "read" people he touches. Here's where my problems with the story begin. This is King's fifth book (not counting novels published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym) and is the fifth that treats psychic claptrap seriously. In this one, alas, the handling grows worse.
First, Johnny's power is so ill-defined that it may as well be termed "the author's convenience." Sometimes it is simple mind-reading (telepathy), other times it manifests as remote viewing (clairvoyance), while other times—most critically—it is a vision of the future (precognition). The only pattern it follows is that which suits King's agenda, and that makes it sloppy work.
Second, the case for skepticism is dismissed with a viciously caricatured straw man, a moment so exacting and brutal that I rather suspect King was getting revenge-through-fiction on someone he disliked. Making it worse is that King structures it so that the protagonist, after vivisecting the man's psychology and causing his breakdown in public, simply shrugs it off with a "he asked for it"—and many readers likely agreed, given how King presents it. (There is a second, far more sympathetic skeptic-character in the latter stages of the book. King gives him the gift of unearned guilt for seventy deaths. Writers really don't like it when you disagree with them.)
But the single biggest problem in the book is the antagonist, Walter Stillson.
In his book On Writing (a good read), King says that The Dead Zone arose from the simple question: "What if the wacko lone gunman assassin is right?" Stated that way, it's easy to see why King had yet another bestseller and yet another superior film adaptation on his hands. It's intriguing and twists the Loner Hero image in an uncommon way (for the time).
Had King spent the time and effort (and just a little of his ingenuity), he might have etched a subtle, menacing, charismatic proto-Hitler of great power, and elevated this to stand among his best books. Instead he fell back on three annoyingly easy clichés, which he then fails to integrate into a single coherent character. And then he muffs the key moment in the book, in which John Smith sees Stillson's future and finds reason to turn assassin.
A troika of clichés
Cliché the first: Stillson the psychopath. When we first meet him, Stillson is a young man selling cheap, shoddily made Bibles door to door. When a dog annoys him, he looks around to make sure he won't get caught, then kicks the dog to death. (King can be subtle. Just, y'know, not here.)
Cliché the second: Stillson the clown. Stillson is shown at a rally as a complete (albeit calculated) buffoon, and the crowd eats it up. What King never deals with, though he acknowledges it, is how this just couldn't work in a national setting. He shows that such clowning works live but not in the media, but fails to indicate how Stillson would overcome this to become President (he cheats—the story is over before Stillson is even close to that position).
Cliché the third: Stillson the conservative (but really, we all know that "conservative" means fascist, right?). For a man as well-read as King, there's really no excuse for the political ignorance he displays here. "Liberal," in this book, means New Deal socialism and nothing else, and is so self-evidently good that it needs no further explication. "Conservative" means fascist (despite a throw-away line denying such simplistic thinking), and "fascist" means only "charismatic authoritarian thugs who are against socialist policies," nothing else. Getting pimps and welfare queens off welfare and into productive work is fascist in this reading. So is reducing government financing of libraries. Stillson's projects are described as "conservative hiding under a thin veneer of liberalism," and that's supposed to be evil. When named, however, my reaction to most of his evil programs, which was clearly supposed to be "horrors no!" followed by burning indignation at the evilness of it all, was instead a "well, that makes sense" (except for one price-control proposal). Nothing evil. Nothing fascist. More than a few things passed into law later on by the u¨ber-conservative Bill Clinton. (Like welfare reform which, Mr. King, worked wonders and did not cause the collapse of America.)
Then there's the muffed vision, which is narrated directly and later recapped by Johnny. The two descriptions are utterly different (though not contradictory). The narrated one is diffuse, without context, and communicates to the reader almost nothing. Later, Johnny writes that he saw nuclear destruction—as many as 20 different powers launching warheads, including terrorists—and that it "maybe had something to do with South Africa."
Weak. (The movie, be it noted, did a much better job with nothing more than Martin Sheen, a desk, a gun, a bottle of booze, a blank black background, and creative sound editing.)
Those glaring flaws aside, there is also King's tendency toward metafiction, something that I hear he allows to commandeer at least one of his Dark Tower books. Here it is evident in only two references—one minor character compares an event to "that book Carrie," which places the events of King's first novel outside of this book's reality; and John Smith says that a hospital is located "north of Jerusalem's Lot," making Salem's Lot real here.
There's nothing wrong with it here, but this sort of thing often makes me nervous—I have vivid memories of Asimov trying to tie his Foundation and Robot series together, to the enormous detriment of both, and also of Heinlein dragging Lazarus Long into way too many of his later novels, in storylines where he just didn't belong, again to their enormous detriment.
Even so...
All of that griping, however, fails to take into account King's masterful storytelling. Despite all of these rather embarrassing flaws, I blew through the book in a few days while I was busy with many other things. And enjoyed it. That's talented writing.
Reprinted by permission of the author from the Banana Oil blog. Ian Hamet is a screenwriter and expatriate living in Shanghai who believes that a perfect movie trailer contains no actual footage from the movie itself.
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