In Progress: Firestarter

With Firestarter we continue (and probably end) a trend of knowing less and less about a particular book going into it. Unlike The Dead Zone, this book is far less likely to be a response to "name one Stephen King book". In a recent ranking of every Stephen King novel this one comes in at #12, lacking the hallowed status of The Shining (#1), but also the notoriety of, say, Cujo (#39). Perhaps it the bias of the list author, but the earlier novels completely dominate the top ten, so it may be a wild ride ahead for his project.

February 6 (Page 87): So far so good, but it feels like King took a step back for this one in terms of plot. Since Carrie he's been rolling out increasingly complex works and here we have something that reads closer to Carrie than any of the previous books: a child with powers she cannot control and doesn't fully understand. At least it seems like her parents are a bit better adjusted than poor Carrie's, but come to think of it, outside of the flashbacks to 1969 we don't know where Mom is. (The book nominally takes place in 1981, but the Padres didn't make the World Series until 1984. Bah, nobody's perfect.)

February 9 (Page 198): If you needed some kind of demonstration of just how bad Charlie's pyrokenesis can be, you get it here in the "Incident at the Manders Farm" chapter. One sinister character (Al Steinowitz) turned out to be a paper tiger, and an inflammable one at that, while a new psychopath (John Rainbird) is getting ready to start his vision quest. Rainbird reminds me of the psycho Native American from the second season of the TV show Fargo, so I guess it's a trope now to have these guys that are extra dangerous because they can use their special Native American skills in the most horrific ways possible. All the while, am I the only one who find it strange that two normal people take a trial drug that not only give them psychic powers, but all can then pass it off exponentially to their offspring?

February 11 (Page 289): This must be one of those books with a definite mid-point, or at least an act came to a close. From the bad guy perspective, it looks like Rainbird made a power play on Cap, and managed to become even more creepy in the process. From the point of view of our heroes, I guess all good things must come to an end. It turns out the shelter in Vermont was all an illusion pretty much from the moment Andy and Charlie arrived. I've already sneaked a peak at the start of the next chapter and it looks like the chronology advances further. Add to this the lengthy flashback to what started the whole chase, plus the season spent at the cabin, and it shows a broader perspective than a Carrie-type novel would have. So although I still contend this is a step back for Stephen King, it isn't all the way back to basics.

February 15 (Page 431): Any time you encounter a chapter called "Endgame" you know things are about to get real. Taking a really long term perspective, even not having finished the book yet, these government dweebs never had a chance against fully-aware Andy and Charlie. Even Cap seemed to indicate that the Shop had more than a little Keystone Kops flavor to it when he was pushed/hypnotized by Andy. The only thing keeping things from being a blowout already is that these special powers don't come for free. More on this for the main post coming soon.

The Dead Zone (1983)

Welcome to the movie version of The Dead Zone, one of the last movies I watched in 2017 and my first blog post of 2018! As time permits I will include the remaining movies tied to Night Shift, and I'm sure when the next story collection hits there will be plenty more to review.

I know I've steeled myself in the past for bad movies based on at-least-not-awful books and short stories, but The Dead Zone left me disappointed. First off, although the novel was Stephen King's shortest work since 'Salem's Lot (and about a third the size of The Stand!), it carries a more epic feel to it, spanning a whole decade. Aside from some stray preludes or codas, the previous novels, even The Stand, were far tighter on timelines. Nevertheless filmmaker David Cronenberg squashes it into just over 100 minutes, which actually is a little longer than average for King adaptations. Of course many of those were based on shorter works, either by page count or timeline. As we'll see, this fundamentally alters the flow of the movie.

As I had noted after reading the novel, The Dead Zone is an end-of-decade novel, a chronicle of the 1970's. The movie, on the other hand, is virtually divorced from any historical backdrop. The beginning part, before Johnny's accident, is very rushed and features a truly strange date at a seemingly abandoned amusement park, or at least it featured a roller coaster nobody wanted to ride except for them. There is no Wheel of Fortune, something key enough to the book that it only warranted naming the entire first half after it. The coma also passes in a snap. Maybe Cronenberg wanted viewers to feel like Johnny had have no record of what happened for five years. And for five years, nothing much looks different except for Johnny and Sarah's hairstyles, being wilder and shorter, respectively. Also, everything before and after still looks like 1983.

As with the book, Johnny's psychic journey takes him into an extremely brief but ultimately unsatisfying career in law enforcement (psychic services division), before he retreats into a life of private tutoring. This is about the time we finally meet Greg Stillson, who is background-free in this movie and comes off as somewhat unhinged and Trump-like, but not the sociopathic nutjob from the novel. I mean, this is Martin "President Bartlett" Sheen, after all. Just to add a really poignant twist on things, Sarah is now an active supporter of his campaign. I don't think it was long after this that I saw the writing on the wall. The kid that Stillson uses as a human shield will of course be her child and she will witness Johnny's final showdown. Finally, it feels like some subtlety from the novel was lost when Johnny gets one final read on Stillson and sees the "suicide scene" in his future, thereby knowing that the Stillson-initiation nuclear war threat had been averted. In the book he just gets no read at all and that's enough for readers to know the future is safe. Even in the movie earlier, with the weird fatal hockey accident vision, Johnny's confirmation of a no-read is used, so I guess the filmmakers just wanted everyone to be really sure Stillson was finished.

Unfortunately, I fear that Christopher Walken may have undermined his career through extensive self-parody. Check out this classic Saturday Night Live skit which is nothing short of a full-on hilarious mockery of this movie: Ed Glosser, Trivial Psychic. The unfortunate side effect is that it also causes a serious work like this one to come off a little silly. I'll be the first to admit this is not the fault of Cronenberg or Walken (at least not for another few years), but my own challenge as a viewer that must come to grips with the notion that the early 1980's are now "historic" in terms of film. Otherwise there was nothing too out of the ordinary about the acting, although Martin Sheen as Greg Stillson, as my wife notes and I concur, comes off as a proto-Charlie Sheen.

This movie and book set the groundwork many years later for a six season cable TV series. Mainly due to my annoyance-bordering-on-open-hatred toward the Under the Dome TV series, I've decided that I really don't need to watch TV shows based on Stephen King's work that go beyond the miniseries level.

The Dead Zone (1979)

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.

In Progress: The Dead Zone

We've finally made it to the final Stephen King book of the 1970's! For the first time in his publishing career he actually wrote a novel that is shorter than the one that came before it, but this one is still a pretty hefty tome. I know next to nothing about this book, and probably less about this book than any of the previous ones I have read, so this should be interesting....

November 9 (Page 17): Prologue complete. Authors, if you want to establish somebody as a truly evil bastard, then have them kill a dog. Greg, I hate you already. Meanwhile, who knew that a head injury could give you ESP? John, I'm expecting great things from you!

November 14 (Page 92): Dang it, Johnny, when I said I was expecting great things from you I didn't mean get into a car crash! But seriously, this speaks to me going into this book so blind I didn't even read the back cover, so I thought when it said Sarah didn't talk to Johnny again for four and a half years that she must have eaten a cyanide hot dog or something.

November 21 (Page 279): Almost halfway done and so far this has mainly been the story of Johnny. Greg shows up from time to time just to show he's still a jerk, albeit a jerk with considerably more power each time we see him. Those who have no faith in politics shouldn't be surprised to learn he became the mayor of some unfortunate town in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, I hear that a psycho killer is still on the loose....

November 27 (Page 379): Part One, which is considerably over half the book, is in the bag! While I lack the psychic powers of Johnny Smith, going into the final chapter of this part I got to thinking that the serial killer plot would be resolved by the end of this part. Needless to say my non-psychic prediction did not anticipate how it would resolve. However, it seems fitting that the first part of the book should end with Johnny's greatest accomplishment to date, which also puts him into the lowest place he's been in so far outside of coma.

November 30 (Page 422): If there's going to be an epic Stillson-Smith showdown, it better happen soon! I think we may have witnessed the first appearance of a historical figure when Johnny meets pre-President Carter in New Hampshire. Of course he gets vibes off Carter that he will be the President, but strangely gets no read from Reagan. I guess even in 1979 that was considered a bit too strange? Back in the fictional arena, and speaking of seeming far-fetched for its time, is it me, or does Stillson reek of Donald Trump?

December 4 (Page 561): The battle has ended and the loser depends on your definition of what losing entails. If you say "death", then goodbye Johnny. If you say "irrelevance", then goodbye Greg. I feel like the novel is effectively over at this point, but like any normal person, I did a quick preview of the final, small section ("Notes from the Dead Zone") and perhaps the text of the letters Johnny mailed out prior to his attack on the town hall will shed a little more light on things.

Movie: The Stand (1994)

Will we ever see a theatrical release of The Stand? Until that day arrives, or if it ever does, we have the somewhat-flawed miniseries from 1994 to tide us over. As I've been conditioned previously by some of the other made-for-TV content featured here, I give this one a fairly large degree of latitude. Only until recently have TV production levels been anywhere near those of the big screen, so I was prepared for all the signs of poor aging when revisiting this almost-25 year old series.

With King's longer works the TV miniseries was, back in the day, the only practical mode of adaptation. In our post-Lord of the Rings world this seems a little narrow. Nowadays it seems more plausible that some kind of multi-movie approach could be used (think the new IT), or a more extensive TV series with a big budget (think Under the Dome). Prior to The Stand, network TV had shown adaptations of 'Salem's Lot, IT, and The Tommyknockers, all with middling amounts of success. With the 1990 re-release of The Stand in it's uncut/overwritten glory, which officially made it King's longest work ever, there must have been a renewed interest to finally get his magnum opus to the screen, even if it was the little screen. By 1994 it was actually one of the very few non-Bachman non-Dark Tower novels that remained unadapted (for comparison, Christine the movie hit theaters just a few months after Christine the book).

About halfway through watching this miniseries (my second time around), I realized that the production strongly caters to fans of the book. In fact, if you haven't read the book some parts probably seem incomprehensible. Some of the motivations of the characters that were more evident in the book are glossed over, likely for the sake of squeezing over a thousand pages of material into eight hours. Even with a teleplay by King himself, who unsurprisingly tends to be faithful to the source material, edits and changes were necessary. For example, the character of Joe is relegated to almost nothing and passed off to Lucy, who is also diminished. This is because Nadine, who found Joe in the book, is merged with the Rita character, wiping out the Joe origin story. Also, in general, the characters seems to cross the country with great ease. Even Stu and Tom's epic journey back to Boulder doesn't seem that onerous here.

Given this is television, the acting is all over the place. Some do a great job (Bill Fagerbakke as Tom Cullen, Gary Sinise as Stu Redman), some miss the mark (Jamey Sheridan as Randall Flagg, Adam Storke as Larry Underwood), and Molly Ringwold (playing Fran Goldsmith) delivers one of the worst performances of her career. The production work shows a lot of corner-cutting, like it was all filmed either on soundstages or within a ten square mile patch of Utah. The cornfield scenes were particularly jarring, and I later learned that they actually grew their own cornstalks to save money because the prop cornstalks were a total ripoff. Who knew corn was such a big deal in Stephen King movies?

While The Stand was successful enough to spur on the burgeoning Stephen King television presence that bloomed in the 1990's and continues on, the Mick Garris/Stephen King director/writer partnership showed considerably more weakness when they returned with an adaptation of The Shining, that was far worse than the 1980 movie. They would later do another miniseries, Bag of Bones, in 2011, as well as a bunch of made-for-TV movies along the way. We'll be seeing more of these; after all I don't have a choice, do I?

Movie: The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Let's be clear right from the get-go that The Lawnmower Man movie has nothing to do with the "Lawnmower Man" short story. This didn't stop them from apply Stephen King's name to the original movie title, in a sad attempt at a cash-grab. Only after a threatened (?) lawsuit did they end up dropping King's name. Since I have shown a great resilience in watching bad movies for the sake of this blog, I figured what the hell, why not watch this one anyway.

Well, this movie is pretty damn awful. I won't quite go to the point of saying this is as bad or worse than Graveyard Shift, but at least that one tried to capture the gist of the short story and primarily failed because the source material was so weak. In all fairness, if they had tried to stick to the original short story here, it probably wouldn't have been any better than this. I mean, was anyone clamoring to read about a naked freak who mowed lawns by eating them and killed all the animals in his path?

In perhaps its only smart move, this movie completely rejects the short story and instead tells a tale of science gone haywire. Pierce Brosnan in pre-007 mode plays Dr. Frankenstein Lawrence Angelo, a frequently-shirtless scientist who somehow invented a way to make people smart a la Flowers for Algernon though the use of virtual reality. Needless to say, a few of the middle steps between "put on VR helmet" and "become smart" are hidden from the viewer. After a monkey goes completely...uh...apeshit...after a little too much time on the VR machine, he does the safe thing and takes advantage of a gardener's assistant who can barely live independently, but is able to build lawnmowers, to take the monkey's place. Predictably, he gets fabulous initial results, but then the Lawnmower Man becomes smarter than him (and apparently more virile) and eventually self-brain-transplants into the machine. While the quasi-government lab in charge of these experiments that never would have passed any unbribed review board is officially horrified by Dr. Angelo's actions, some secret government dude named the Director sanctions it all as a way to, you guessed it, fight better wars. In the end, the Lawnmower Man is able to slip out of not only his flesh body, but also his computer body and infiltrate the "network" (this is before anyone knew what an "Internet" was). Add this to Dr. Angelo finding an unauthorized way to continue his work, and you can already see the plot of the sequel, Bride of Lawnmower Man. Of course I made that title up; they went with Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (yawn), which from what I can tell had little in common with the original in terms of either plot or cast.

As for the cast, Pierce Brosnan turns in a decent performance, given the material he was working with. His accent kind of falls somewhere in the middle of the North Atlantic, a little British, a little American. Jeff Fahey bugged me through the whole movie as I racked my brain wondering where I remembered him from. I felt kind of stupid because he's been in zillions of movies, but the connection I was grasping for was the TV show Lost, where is in older and grayer, but unmistakably Jeff Fahey, with his unique face and voice. The only other interesting cast note is the appearance of Dean Norris, sixteen years before Breaking Bad, who was bald even back then, and I won't even begin to attempt a rationalization for whatever accent he was employing.

I think the movie probably got a better reception back when it was released because stuff like "virtual reality" was still considered pretty exotic circa 1992. Then again, considering this was released the same year as Terminator 2: Judgement Day, it suffers a lot in the special effects department. Whereas that movie still seems pretty edgy and cool today, this one seems especially corny. The other day I referred to this as "opposite Tron" is that nobody could figure out that movie upon release, but times caught up with what it was trying to depict, whereas Lawnmower Man feels increasing like reading old science fiction where scientists used slide rules to plan trips to Mars.

The Long Walk (1979)

I've run a marathon. It was five hours, and much of it was grueling. Arguably, walking 26.2 miles would actually be harder, because it means far more time on your feet than running. Walking more than a hundred miles nonstop is just plain inconceivable. Welcome to the world of The Long Walk.

After the clunker that was Rage it wasn't long before I was back to Bachman. Before going anywhere with this, I do want to point out that this was one of three Stephen King books I had read prior to last year, so, other than forgetting the finer plot points over time, nothing here shocked me. But the first time? Oh my....

To the best of my understanding, the original intent of the Bachman alias was to allow King to publish more than one novel a year, which was and still remains the industry standard. Initially it gave him the freedom to dust off and introduce some of his pre-Carrie work. This is the case with this book and Rage, as well as Blaze if you believe the back story behind it. Since you may know how much I despised Rage, I likely would have gone into this book with very low expectations had I not read it before.

Fear not, The Long Walk is no Rage and thank God for that. Where the previous book was blunt, this one was clever. In fact, this book was so clever that I awarded it a higher rating than anything I've read on this project. I think this partly has to do with the nature of the story being more science fiction and less horror. Don't get me wrong, the plot is absolutely horrifying and downright nihilistic, but there is a subtlety, found in the very gentle exposition that clicked very well with me.

What makes The Long Walk so great is that is makes the blunt rules of the event very clear, but the world in which such as event could happen stays vague. No reality show in our world would be so harsh as to kill the losers. It is a poorly kept secret that those unlucky folks that don't win The Amazing Race or Survivor don't actually go back to their vanilla lives, but instead are whisked off to some luxurious destination where they are sequestered in comfort for the rest of the show. This is why, except for acute embarrassment, those initial losers don't exactly seem crushed about their failure. They are probably wondering how many mai tais they can drink before blacking out while the host delivers the bad news to them. Our world is built on the mantra "it was a privilege just to make it here."

Something went seriously astray in the world of The Long Walk. It is made clear pretty quickly that the world in which is takes place is not our own. There is nothing complex about the Long Walk. One hundred teenage boys walk from the northern tip of Maine to the southern point at which only one is left standing. The only rules are that you cannot drop below four miles an hour. You get three warnings and the fourth comes in the form of a bullet, euphematically called a "ticket" much in the same way the soliders bought farms in Starship Troopers. Oh, and there is another rule: no quitting. You either win or get a ticket. The ticket comes with no warnings if you try anything goofy like attacking the soldiers watching your every move or slipping off into the crowd. Readers don't get any clear exposition about the state of the country or the world. This makes perfect sense, as teens are not likely to spontaneously discuss American history and political affairs in detail, even if they aren't walking for their lives. Little clues pop up along the way: April 31st, German bases in Chile, 51 states, and meat concentrates. Bigger clues are there for your consideration as well: The Major, a Khadafi-esque character who is clearly in charge in spite of his modest military rank, and a heightened sense of militarism throughout the book. Even the grand prize is fairly open-ended: anything you want. In the final pages you wonder how the survivor will be in any condition to even ask for anything other than a month-long nap in a hyperbaric goo-filled sleep pod to repair all the damage. The creepy thing about all of this is that in spite of the vagueness, for the most part the boys featured in the book have lead familiar-sounding lives. Most of the common social structures are the same in our world and that of the novel. People have families, jobs, and routines, but they all exist under a different political super-structure than ours.

We will revisit the Bachman books a few tomes down the road with Roadwork. I get the sense from various criticisms I've read, that The Long Walk may very well be as good as it gets for Richard Bachman. The next three were written while the secret of his identity was safe, while the later ones used the name out of convenience. By the early 1980's, as we shall see, Stephen King was able to generate enough heat under his own name to publish about as frequently and diversely as he wished.