Stephen King. The Dead Zone. Pocket Books, 2024 [1979]. 579 pp.
The last of our bi-monthly bonus letters for July is on the next King re-issue to show up on the supermarket shelf. (I’m just grateful you can still pick up mass market paperbacks at a supermarket, at least in some cases.)
In the period when Elon Musk was in Trump II’s court, he was often seen in public carrying his son on his shoulders. There are normal reasons to do such a thing: fathers have been known to carry their children around.
But many assumed this act was a deterrence measure against assassination. With that premise established it was inevitable that the climactic scene from Cronenberg’s 1983 adaptation of The Dead Zone would make the rounds on social media.
Dead Zone was King’s first novel after The Stand, and both stories feel bathed in the same angst over the political turmoil of the 60s and 70s. The logline of this book is essentially What if an all-American guy carried out a 1960s style assassination on a local politician, and you had no choice but to sympathize?
But we don’t support his actions simply because Johnny Smith is a decent man, which he is. It’s ‘cause he has near-absolute knowledge of the future!
After the car crash that leaves him in a coma for half of the 70s, he wakes up to find that Nixon has resigned and Vietnam is over. When he touches people he learns their past and future. But he is a modern-day Cassandra: his precognitive energy is viscerally repulsive to others: his trances are awkward and frightening. Why should anyone believe his prophesies?
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