Once again, reading Stephen King I’m struck not so much by the horror as by the astute psychology that drive his writing.
There is some horror, but it’s a tiny aspect of this big book. Likewise, there’s the supernatural, but its function is to make the plot move forward, and so allow King to do his thing – write a gripping, easy to read novel full of great characters, relationships and conversations.
It’s about Johnny Smith who, after an accident on an ice rink as a kid – an incident which actually nobody really remembers, even him – acquires the ability to read people: when he touches them, sometimes, not always, but sometimes, he knows what they’re thinking, their innermost thoughts, and can even see aspects of their future.
But he doesn’t get time to enjoy it or use it, cause as a young man after a night out at the fair – where he wins big money on a game because he can see the future – he is hit by a car, and enters a coma that lasts years. When he comes out, his gift is stronger than before, a little more controllable. He starts to use it to help people, but then ends up freaking people out, getting backs up, contacted by thousands of people wanting help from him, and it gets messy.
He retreats, keeping his gift to himself. But at the back of hid mind he has his Mum’s voice telling him to use his gift for good. Whilst working as a teacher for the child of a rich industrialist, he averts tens of deaths with his gift. He goes and helps track down a brutal serial killer in a nearby small town. And when he shakes hands with Gregg Stillson, an aspiring politician with a very shady character and background that Johnny sees will be president one day, he vows to assassinate him. The attempt goes wrong, but in the process Stillson ends up revealing his character on a public stage.
It’s a gripping read, like I say, but not so much because of the tension of a fast-unfolding plot, more because of the style. And even more than that, the characters. Johnny himself is truly likeable, and a good hundred or so pages in the first half are about his rehabilitation from the coma, how hard it is to adapt to the life he wakes up in, where his once-girlfriend is now married with children, and his parents’ relationship has collapsed, his Mum becoming a complete religious zealot as a way of coping with his accident and hospitalisation.
And then there’s Stillson, who has made his way into public life through a mix of thuggishness and charisma, using Hells Angels as bodyguards, threatening anyone who gets in his way, and appealing to the basest desires of the voters. Incredibly this book was published in the late 70s – close enough to half a century ago! – but it’s feels intensely contemporary, given the previous occupant of the White House, and the surge of right wing populists elsewhere.
And of course there are all the bit characters – the struggling police chief desperate for help, the conflicted ex-girlfriend, the kid who just needs someone to lift the pressure from his over-achieving Dad… it’s all of this too, that make The Dead Zone a great piece of writing.
Giles book reviews 