It's not just a simple fact that this is Stephen King's final book of the 1970's. Even more interesting is that this is his parting tribute to the decade. Aside from the introductory material, the book begins in the first year of the decade and ends in the last. If we really want to run with this, King is saying we (as Johnny) spent the first half of the decade asleep and the second half wide awake. During Johnny's coma, King chronicles the progression of the decade, from Kent State through Watergate and the end of Vietnam. Even though long by coma standards, Johnny wasn't sleeping to Rip Van Winkle proportions, yet the slip from 1970 to 1975 is almost as jarring. And the world continues moving forward in the second half of the decade, in a direction that Johnny grows increasingly uncomfortable with. Although the novel is populated with a lot of recent history and current events, it is the fictional doomsday politician Greg Stillson that personifies everything Johnny fears.
As was definitely the case with The Stand, one could argue this is a double novel. It easily could have cut out the Greg Stillson plot and remained a tighter, more localized story about how a reluctant psychic gets recruited to fight crime and the very act of doing good proves to be his downfall. Needless to say though, the gift, unwanted or not, can't just be shut off at will. Everything Johnny dealt with until encountering Stillson was local in nature, and then suddenly he is confronted with a future national emergency that sends him back down the rabbit hole. He spins over the age-old question of "if you could travel back in time and kill Hitler, would you do it?" to the point where he cannot dislodge from what he sees as a modern-day version of the dilemma. All the while, the memory of his mother indicating his "gift from God" would guide him keeps him going through the elaborate plot of assassinating Stillson.
Some tendencies that were particularly noticeable in the later stories of Night Shift show up here. Unlike his earlier novels and stories there isn't a lot of blood and guts in this one. In fact, some of the plot points are downright tender, such as Johnny's doomed relationship with Sarah. Or heartbreaking, such as Vera's downward spiral into pseudo-science cults masquerading in the name of the religion she built her faith on. Also there isn't a lot of wild unexplained paranormal stuff flying around. Greg Stillson is a bad man, but he isn't Randall Flagg. Johnny isn't blowing things up with his mind, he just gets partial reads off people and is constantly frustrated by the "dead zone" preventing him from getting the complete picture.
The resolution of the novel is also clever on the scale of all of King's novels thus far. He could have had Johnny carry out the mission successfully, but in the end somebody like Greg Stillson doesn't have to die. They just need to be bumped off course. Kind of like paying off an art gallery owner to sponsor Hitler and divert him from the whole Third Reich obsession. I'm not sure Johnny intended to resolve things in this third way. From the letters of the final chapter it is clear he knew this was a suicide mission, but he probably also realized his brain problems would bring his life to an early conclusion even if he did nothing at all. Having gotten to know Johnny over 500-plus pages, any reader will know it is very good news that in his dying breaths he can no longer get a read on Stillson. Mission accomplished. No martyrs were created. You did well, Johnny.
