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.

In Progress: The Long Walk

September 6 (page 140): As this is one of the very few books I've read before, I can't say if the book is a natural page-turner or if it's just my familiarity with it. Usually I wouldn't let this many pages slip by without a check-in, but oh well. Over one-third of the book is done and about one-quarter of the Walkers are done as well. I'm surprised this book was, along with Rage, a "proto-Carrie" novel, mainly because Rage was such a lousy book and this one is compelling. If you scratch at it a little, you can spot some of the things that infest King's early writing, like a juvenile tone and some character-hate, but it isn't obvious. Around page 50, I thought of making a chart with each name and number and on what page they bought their ticket, but some OCD person already did it for me more or less.

September 8 (page 187): The halfway point of the book (in terms of pages, not Walkers!) seemed like a good time for an update. They just crossed mile 100 and it was only now, well into my second reading of the book, that I realized these guys eat a lot of "meat concentrate" for snacks. It's just another subtle reminder from the book that this isn't our world, but something slightly dystopian. Another observation with the quotes that head up each chapter: most of them are kind of dumb, usually just a familiar phrase from a classic game show (e.g. "Come on down!" - Bob Barker). Two of them stick out: (1) the Chuck Barris quote about the ultimate game show being where somebody gets killed, and (2) the Sale of the Century host discussing his TV persona.

September 15 (page 302): I've been really bad about updates, but in my defense this book reads pretty quickly. There has been some major character death (Olson) and the Walkers are down to the hardiest third or so. More slight-dystopia weirdness continues, as April 31st is mentioned twice and there are 51 states. I'm certain the latter was no typo, but I did a triple-take on the former. Especially since it was right next to a actual typo, where the word "blackout" was used instead of "backout", as April 31st is cited as the last chance for prospective Walkers to decline their invitation. I guess if some shady dude like the Major seizes the reins of power and wants an extra day in April, well damn it we're getting a 31st of April.

Movie: Cat's Eye (1985)

I exhausted most of my channels for finding free Stephen King movies, and I noticed over a month has slipped by since the last post. So with a newly repositioned router for the best streaming experience possible, I have started rent-to-stream through Amazon. While I can't say I'm too excited about spending any money on some of the dreck produced from Night Shift, I didn't feel too bad about throwing a few bucks out there for the privilege of streaming Cat's Eye for 48 hours.

Cat's Eye is a horror anthology film, a sub-genre that was enjoying a great deal of attention in the 1980's with titles like Nightmares (1983), The Twilight Zone: The Movie (also 1983), and Stephen King's own dream project directed by George Romero, Creepshow (1982), plus dozens of others. Unlike Creepshow, which adapted either brand-new or uncollected story content, Cat's Eye adapts two of the better tales from Night Shift, "Quitters, Inc." and "The Ledge", and packages them with a brand new story, "General", which holds the overall plot framework together. They are brought together through the multi-state misadventures of a cat (later christened "General") who is adapt at riding in trucks, boats, and trains across the Eastern seaboard.

All in all, Cat's Eye was an enjoyable 90 minutes and probably the best adaptation work to come out of Night Shift. It isn't the greatest movie ever and definitely shows its age in places, but perhaps they were smart to stick to turning short stories into short movies. As each story only got half an hour of screen time, the temptation to add a lot of filler was removed. That filler wrecked most of the other movies. On the other hand, the two adapted stories are very faithful to the original works. Neither one feels the need to warp its original plot to satisfy the needs of the anthology film. Normally, when it comes to novel adaptations, a faithful depiction means a more boring presentation, but both were fun and engaging. Neither story's depiction was too far removed from what I had pictured when reading the stories. The only real changes involved the presence of the cat, who obviously wasn't in the original unrelated stories.

The third and final story, "General", wasn't that great, although it seems like everyone remembers the weird little troll getting chopped up in the fan. "General" is serviceable though in that it ties the entire plot together, and darn it, I wish my cats were half as cool as General (I still love them, but come on, this is General the Hero Cat). Incidentally, General's meowing and hissing isn't actual cat sounds, but rather the voice talents of Frank Welker, who voiced Fred in just about every version of Scooby-Doo. He also did the troll voices for what it's worth. I've noticed my cats tend to ignore any non-authentic cat noises that come from the television, and that was certainly the case here, though through no fault of Mr. Welker.

Cat's Eye was released at what one may think of as the "golden age" of Stephen King, where the movies and books were coming out at a torrential pace and everything was safely in the realm of horror and pop culture. Therefore it is littered with references to other works: General is chased by a dog named Cujo and nearly hit by a car with a "Christine" bumper sticker, and later on the mom in the last story is reading a copy of Pet Semetery. This movie was filmed in North Carolina, as was the next King movie to grace the silver screen, Maximum Overdrive, so perhaps the drawbridge scene from "Quitters, Inc." foreshadows the movie yet to come. Who knows what else might have slipped in there.