Psychic Talent at a Price (The Dead Zone - Stephen King)

Member Name: amygdala

Product:	The Dead Zone - Stephen King
Date:	15/06/00 (19 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: King before he ran out of gas.

Disadvantages: You may feel sorry for the hero.

Whatever his shortcomings -- and he has some big ones -- Stephen King can tell a good story, and this is one of the best of them. But I think he has ambitions to be taken seriously by the EngLit crowd too, and there are themes in all of his books. The Dead Zone may represent the first appearance of a theme he more famously explores in Christine: the American cult of the automobile. The book's hero, John Smith, acquires a psychic talent in childhood when he injures his head skating on "cleared ice" at one corner of which "two rubber tires burned sootily". However, the talent lies dormant until Smith visits a fairground with his girlfriend and plays the "Wheel of Fortune" after which this part of the book is named. He has a flashback to the smell of burning rubber as he wins several hundred dollars. The same evening, travelling home from his girlfriend's house in a taxi, he is very badly injured in a car-crash and enters a coma that lasts for five years. He re-emerges with his psychic talent fully developed and his world startlingly changed. The most immediately obvious sign of the latter is that gas (petrol) is much more expensive and much scarcer.
Once he has left hospital, Smith's talent leads him to take an interest in politics: by shaking hands with candidates for Presidential and Congressional office, he is able to "read" their futures. One day he shakes the hand of an ex-travelling salesman called Greg Stillson. Stillson is running for Congress. He plays John Denver at his rallies, wears a yellow hard hat, and gives away free hot-dogs. Nobody takes him seriously, but the handshake tells Smith that he will be President one day and destroy the world. So Smith decides he will have to assassinate him.
Stillson's full name -- mentioned only twice, I think -- is Gregory Ammas Stillson. I don't think the initials are a coincidence: in part, The Dead Zone is intended to say something about the car. Bu
t it's more obviously intended to say something about an insane right-wing politician on his way to the White House, and one wonders whether John Hinckley came across a copy before he shot Ronald Reagan in 1981 -- and whether Stephen King likes to think so.

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