King's Dead Zone: To kill Hitler, whom would you trust? (TheUnknown285's King Write-Off)
Written: Aug 04 '01 (Updated Aug 04 '01)
Product Rating:
Pros: Captivating story emphasizes real people responding to unreal circumstances.
Cons: Minor: King undermines some of the uncertainty he creates.
The Bottom Line: Where the movie makes clear the story's central psychic vision, the book leaves interpreting it up to the reader. The effect is creepy and unsettling.
eplovejoy's Full Review: Stephen King - The Dead Zone
Stephen King poses the old rhetorical standard: If you could kill Adolf Hitler to prevent the Nazi Holocaust, would you? Does knowing what Hitler will do give you the justification to murder him before he does it? In The Dead Zone, King presents a character for whom the question poses more than a hypothetical challenge. King's formulation of the question raises philosophical issues that make his suspenseful novel interesting.
King makes his story riveting by raising another question, one we face regularly, a question with more significance and far greater potential gravity than the academic exercise about killing Hitler: Whom can we trust? Placing our trust in the wrong people can have deadly consequences. Any reader who has grappled with the nature of trust will find the choices that King's protagonist must make challenging and the chance to second-guess him compelling.
King's character, John Smith, faces a life far different than the one he lived before fate's cruel twist plunged him into a five-year coma. The woman he loved and who loved him has married another man. His mother's religious faith has twisted into a disturbing mania. His once-promising teaching career has slipped beyond his grasp. And the coma's lingering effects have trapped him in a body stunted, weakened and wracked with pain.
Worse, brain damage has given Smith the ability to see bits of the future. This psychic gift and curse defies Smith's control. It makes him a would-be savior to hordes of beseeching strangers while it makes him an unnerving freak to many who know him. He predicts several events with absolute accuracy. This enables him to save lives, but sets the stage for his having to decide how to handle a premonition that lacks clarity but could determine the human race's survival.
Smith must decide whether to stop a popular politician he believes will become president of the United States and spark a global nuclear conflagration. He will almost certainly sacrifice his own life if he tries to take that of the politician he does not trust. Up to the end, Smith wonders whether his thinking is sound or insane. As he grapples with trusting his instincts, readers must decide whether to trust Smith. If we don't, Smith's deluded plunge toward his fate can sadden us. If we do, the choice Smith faces becomes agonizing for us as well.
King sets his story in the United States of the mid-1970s, a place and time in which which deciding whom to trust is especially difficult. A country battered by the deceptions of its military and political leaders during the war against Vietnam now staggers in the wake of Richard Nixon's resignation following his betrayal of the people's trust. John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and company got it wrong about Southeast Asia. Nixon exploited their mistakes and then got it wrong about executive privilege. What if John Smith gets it wrong about predicting an apocalyptic future? What if he gets it wrong trying to prevent that future?
King tells us unpleasant things about the politician, things Smith doesn't know. But while that makes things a little more clear for his readers, it does not make them completely clear. King's questions haunt us and give his story power. King compels us to learn what happens to Smith, even as we dread finding out.
The Dead Zone has unnerved readers since 1980, but events since its publication have given King's story deeper resonance. In the book, he describes how one might recover from a near-fatal car accident. Knowing that King was almost killed in an accident in 1999 makes one wonder how close his imaginings came to what he suffered. And when John Smith's mother leaves her family to join strangers who share her belief that God is sending a spacecraft to rescue the faithful, anyone who remembers the Heaven's Gate mass suicides in 1997 can't help but shudder.
But even without the real-life amplifiers, The Dead Zone grips the reader. King has created characters we care about and put them in situations that provoke unease. King spins his yarn deftly and laces his writing with nice touches. His descriptions of what happens in a coma disturb:
. . . there had been a young man from Liverpool, England, who had been struck by a grappling hook while working on the docks and had remained in a coma for fourteen years before expiring. Little by little this brawny young dock-walloper had severed his connection with the world, wasting away, losing his hair, optic nerves degenerating into oatmeal behind his closed eyes, body gradually drawing up into a fetal position as his ligaments shortened. He had reversed time, had become a fetus again, swimming in the placental waters of coma as his brain degenerated.
And his comparing the U.S. war against Vietnam to food poisoning has a succinct grace:
Well, they ate a bad hot dog called Vietnam and it gave them ptomaine. A guy name Lyndon Johnson sold it to them. So they went to this other guy, see, and they said, "Jesus, mister, I'm sick as hell." And this other guy, his name was Nixon, he said, "I know how to fix that. Have a few more hot dogs." And that's what's wrong with the youth of America.
Many critics subscribe to a fashionable view that King doesn't deserve serious consideration. They acknowledge his success, but dismiss his writing as something less than real literature. Several have used the phrase "mere storyteller."
That qualifying "mere" has crept into use only recently. For the rest of human history, we have revered our storytellers and accepted gratefully the gifts they share. Their talents have linked us to our past while illuminating our hopes for our future. Storytellers have satisfied needs deep, even instinctive.
As our history unfolds, human beings will reach places beyond our knowing. They will evolve beyond what we recognize as human. But even if our distant descendants don't resemble us and even if they live on worlds far from our galaxy, they will share our need to tell each other stories. As they sit around distant campfires, their storytellers will envelop them in a kind of magic as Stephen King and our other storytellers have done for us.
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This is an entry in the write-off organized by The Unknown285 to celebrate Stephen King's storytelling mastery. Other participants include:
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