The Deadzone Election 1976

You don't need me to tell you the Dead Zone is amazing.  What you might need is a prodding to go back and read it.  Tight, compact, well written, suspenseful are all words that can describe the Dead Zone.  

I was drawn to the Dead Zone by Chad Clark's book, Tracing The Trails. Clark's book about King and his work was so good, it actually made me rethink some of the older books I hadn't touched yet.  In particular, Dead Zone and The Dark Half.  His reviews made me hungry for vintage King.

Now, let me tell you what a Stephen King collection really is --

It's a Time Machine.

There you have it.  That's it.  It's like taking a trip back to specific periods of time.  You don't get to take these trips alone, though.  Your traveling companions, in this case, will be a man cursed with an ability to see into people; and a deranged politician.  I like the books from the seventies because they have a unique feel to them.  Sometimes King takes us back to an era.  Books like 11/22/63 and Joyland both returned us to other eras.  So did IT.  And King was masterful.  But it's those old books themselves, written in the time they were set, that really makes me feel the era.  Because King innocently tells us what's going on all around him.  He doesn't have to try and remember what was happening; he's just describing the world he lives in.

King mentions things that I think he wouldn't because a modern audience wouldn't know what he was talking about.  John Denver is playing on the radio. Remember him?  (I think the song was Country Roads.)  And my favorite not to another author came early in the book when King compared the carnival to Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury.  King once said that without Bradbury, there would be no Stephen King. 

In The Dead Zone, there is a wonderful scene in which Johnny Smith meets Jimmy Carter.  And he looks right in to Carters soul.  I loved it.  We forget that even politics of the late seventies were not as nice and clean as we remember them.  The smiling man from Georgia was a breath of fresh air after the corrupt Nixon years.  A man, some felt, who was just too good for Washington.  What I appreciated about the Dead Zone was King's ability to bring me back into the politics of that era, without a lot of heavy exposition.  

I also want to note that I appreciate King's flawed characters.  Johnny might be an all american nice guy, but he still makes decisions that leave me totally frustrated with him.  I don't want to give anything away, so no further comment, just that Johnny sometimes takes his own path.

Road Trip With Chad Clark, 1

I'm swept away.  If my favorite writer is Stephen King, my favorite kind of books are books about Stephen King.  There have been times that I've wondered if I actually enjoy reading books about King as much as I love reading King himself.  Nah.  Well, maybe. . .

I'm currently reading Tracing the Trails: A Constant Reader's Reflections on the Work of Stephen King, by Chad Clark.  And yeah, I'm pretty much in love already.  I was familiar with the project --  a plan to read all of King's work in order -- from the blog.  What I didn't know until the other night is that the blog had been transformed into a wonderful book.  And it's a gem.

What I love about some so many of the books about King is that they reflect and articulate my own journey with the author.  Moments I felt were solely mine turn out to be shared experiences.  We all shared 9/11.  But we also, we all knew we were sharing the moment.  In the introduction, Richard Chizmar shares how he first encountered King, at almost the same age I did.  And I too remember the day IT was released (I was a kid) and how the book was like stacked bricks in the bookstore. 

Clark's book gets to the point quickly.  Discussing the novels first, he opens with reviews of Carrie, Salem's Lot and The Shining.  Clark does take time to give some insights on the movie version of The Shining, only because it has become so controversial.  Like him, I enjoy the movie very much, and can simply shrug and say it stands as its own thing; its own art. 

It is when he came to The Stand that I felt the deepest connection to Clark.  Like Clark, I was introduced to the Stand in it's unabridged format.  For years it was not available in audio (my preferred avenue) so I developed other means of listening to the book.  In the 90s I became a member of an audio book store that had tapes of the original version of The Stand.  Later (when I had more money) I bought the tapes off the internet, sent them to a company, who recorded them digitally for me.  But imagine how happy I was when The Stand unabridged finally came out on Audio and CD. 

Clark's essay's so far are spot on.  You don't have to agree with him on every point to enjoy the road trip with him.  The book is like a long drive (or for me, listening while running, a long run) with a good friend who is familiar with every Stephen King book.  Clark doesn't try to be a scholar, he just shares simply what he likes or doesn't like about the book -- like your friend would.