The Dead Zone Review
The Dead Zone, by Stephen King, is one of the most haunting books I’ve read in the last year. At the moment I would class it as my joint favourite Stephen King novel, alongside Misery. Like Misery, the Dead Zone tends to focus on the emotions and reactions of the characters rather than on any particular force of evil. Greg Stillson is a bastard, but he is human, not a demon.
In his book, On Writing, Stephen explains his struggle to make Johnny Smith likable, and Greg Stillson the villian. These two facts had to be evident right from the start of the book, because although, Johnny is the good guy, he is going to end up as the assassin part of an assassin/victim relationship, with Stillson taking on the role of victim. I think Steve did a damn good job of turning Johnny into our friend. We start off with him taking his girlfriend, Sarah, to the funfair, and we quickly discover that John Smith (no middle initial) is a regular, genuine, fun guy, if maybe a little cocky. In fact, Sarah goes on to describe the contrast between John and her previous boyfriend, Dan, who was the violent type and made her nervous. Meanwhile, Greg Stillson is introduced as a Bible Salesman – a nice exterior – who kicks a dog to death for getting a wee bit snappy with him, after he sprays it in the eyes with tear gas (or something like that).
I have to admit that I fell in love with Johnny straight away, after an initial reaction of ‘I’m not sure I’m going to like this one’, but I am happy to say that I was wrong. I picturedJohn as a sort of cross between David Tennant and Jude Law. For some reason I thought of Stillson as being bald or nearly bald, even though he was never actaully described as being so. It’s strange what your imagination can come up with, isn’t it?
On page 96, there is a supposedly throwaway sequence about a lightning rods seller going for a few drinks at a bar called ‘Cathy’s’ and trying to persuade the owner, Bruce Carrick, to buy some lightning rods from him. Bruce rejects the salesmans wares and the sequence ends with the seller glancing up at the exterior of the bar and wondering if Bruce Carrick might not pay for the mistake of not buying them in a few years time. It doesn’t mean anything yet, but it will do.
It’s an interesting and brave move by King to have a sort of hiatus after Johnnny’s accident that puts him in a coma. Sarah moves on with her life, gets married, has a child, and Johnny’s parents struggle to pick up the broken pieces of their life. Vera’s (Johnny’s mother) religious mania develops into something terrifying and she even considers joining an ‘End of the world’ commune, using the last of the family’s savings.
Meanwhile, Greg Stillson goes from strength to strength, improving on his standing in the community and becoming more popular each day. Demons are stirring in Maine, and the ever present, ever cursed Castle Rock, Stephen King’s personal fictional town (when do I get my own damn town?) is haunted by a mysterious killer who calls himself ‘slick’. What does all this have to do with John ‘No Middle Initial’ Smith?
We start to learn the answers to these questions, and to understand what is going on here, both in John’s mind and in the outside world, when Johnny
wakes from his coma on May 17th 1975, at approximately 3.15 pm. He has been in a coma for four and a half years, and has to cope with how the world has changed, his own physical condition, the fact that his girl is married to a man that looks a little bit like him and the fact that he can now tell the future. After predicting several incidents, such as the identity of Dr Sam Weizak’s mother, who was thought to be dead, a fire at his physical therapsists house and the outcome of an operation carried out on a nurse’s son’s eye, the press get involved, inevitably. Before I move on to that, I’d like to linger a while one of my favourite scenes: the scene where Johnny realises that Eileen Magown’s house is on fire. Their interaction is a very nice scene that adds a lot to Johnny’s character in subtle ways. He’s a perfectly sweet guy but he knows how to take control when he has to. The best bit is the following sequence:
(All italics are the words of Stephen King and were not written by me.)
****
The two nurses went on drinking their coffe and talking about some doctor who had turned up drunk at Benjamin’s. The third was apparently talking to her beautician.“Pardon me, I have to make a call.” Johnny said.
The nurse covered the phone with her hand. “There’s a phone in the lob…”
“Thanks,” Johnny said, and took the phone out of her hand.
*****
I just really like that bit. 
It’s very David Tennant.
Anyway, like I said, at this point the reporters arrive in force to quiz Johnny about his abilities and he manages to make an enemy out of a jounalist named Roger Dussalt, who faints from the shock of hearing Johny tell the assembled journalists family secrets about his (Rogers) sister when he gives Johnny a medallion to see if he can get a reading from it. Johnny’s mother suffers a stroke when she sees her son on the news and dies the same night, after telling Johnny that God has brought him out of his coma for a specific purpose. She forces him to promise to her that he will find out what that purpose is, and that he will carry it out for her sake. At the end of the story, it turns out that maybe Vera Smith was right.
After his mother’s death, and in a bid to escape from the attentions of the press, Johnny and his father retire to a small, out of the way house, where Johnny has his first and only sexual experience with the woman he loved, loves and will always love, Sarah. The story of their doomed love is a poignant and sad secondary plot. Sarah visits for the day with her son, Denny. That afternoon Johnny and Sarah consumated the marriage that was never meant to be and that night, Herb Smith plays with the boy that should have been Johnnys son, and Herb’s grandson. I think it was at this point that I doubted that Johnny would ever find happiness and I was no longer sure that he would be alive at the end of the book. This fact is reinforced because Sarah does love her husband, Walt. He is good to her and she would never leave him for Johnny because of Denny and because of her feelings for Walt. I did wonder whether Sarah would leave conceive Johnny’s child during the one liason they had together, but Steve isn’t that obvious, and anyway, if that had been the case, Johnny could have had a chance of a happy ending. Not to be. Johnny was doomed on the day he fell on the ice and banged his head as a five year old child.
I have come away from reading quite a few of Stephen King’s books with a ‘Kingism’ or two. Some of my favourites come from Misery – “Oogy”, “Dirty bird” and “Now I must rinse” being a few of them. I have also started using the phrase ‘The Dead Zone’ in everyday conversation. When I can’t remember something I say ‘Oh, its in the Dead Zone’. Basically ‘The Dead Zone’ is the ‘X’ in algebra. It’s the unknown factor that could explain everything. It’s the part of Johnny’s brain that was destroyed in the accident and the resulting coma, and also the part that awakens and causes him to have visions of the future. It’s everything that was lost and everything that can be found.
I feel that the episode in Castle Rock with Sheriff Bannerman, where they discover the identity of the ‘slick killer’, is filler, but it isn’t exactly wasted because we learn more about Johnny’s ability, although it’s nothing to do with tthe resoltion of the story as a whole and The Dead Zone could easily stand without that sequence.
At this point, the book goes into a second half, and we return to find Johnny makig a start on a new life. He is staying at the Chatsworth’s house and teaching the family’s son, who has difficulty reading. Later on we discover the significance of the lightning rods sequence at Cathy’s bar – Johnny has a premonition that it will be struck by lightning, on the night of Chuck Chatsworth’s graduation party. This premonition proves to be accurate, but luckily most of the kids that would have been killed go to a party at Chuck’s house instead, spooked by the premonition. After this accident, Johnny leaves the Chatsworth home and begins work on his plan to assassinate Greg Stillson, and learns that he does not have as much time to spare as he thought – he is dying of a brain tumour.
The ending is neither sad nor happy, but bittersweet, because in Johnny’s death we are losing a friend we have only just begun to know, and yet it is also satisfying, as he has fulfilled his purpose on Earth and can die complete. I think I knew, from the moment that Sarah left Johnny’s house with her son to go back to her husband, that Johnny was not meant to have a happy ending,. Everything he ever cared about drove away in a little red Pinto.
The book ends with Johnny not being a murderer, but a scared and lonely man whio has tried to do the best he can to save the world that was borrowing him. And he has succeeded. Greg Stillson is still alive, but Johnny had ruined his reputaion, and for someone like Stillson, I would say that is a fate worse than death. Stevie doesn’t have to write an afterward about Stillson’s future life, and we’d probably hate him if he tried it. We can imagine what sort of life Stillson will have now – that of the disgraced prophet. Looking at it another way, Johnny has become the murdered president, the ultimate good guy, and Stillson has become the assassin.
Despite Johnny’s death , the novel ends on a positive note – “If he could get into that corridor, he thought he would be able to walk.” This world was merely keeping Johnny alive for a short time, to do it’s dirty work and fulfil his purpose, and now it’s releasing him into another world, another dimension, where he will finally be able to be healthy and free. Somewhere, where maybe one day, Sarah will return to him. At least we know that he did not die for nothing, he was going to die of a brain tumour anyway, caused indirectly by his head injuries. It’s a relief to know that he did not have to suffer much at the end.
“Go then. There are other worlds than these.” (a quote from The Gunslinger, by Stephen King)
He will never really die, but just move on to that other, placental world of corridors with endless doors to step through. We are all a John Smith, we are all the common man, but we all have a purpose on this Earth, whether it is to write, or to give birth to the next King of France, or to become a nurse and help save lives. We all have the opportunity to change the world, just by being alive, even though hardly any of us actually know why we are here, and if there is a god, what he/she/it/them has put us here for.
