Dead Zone

My first Stephen King book was Dead Zone, his tale of a man who awakes from a coma to discover he can predict the future. I had picked the book randomly at an airport to pass the time for a delayed flight. I read about half of it during that wait and put it away for some time. Fast-forward about two years and I'm organizing my bookshelf. 

Dead Zone pops out of the pile.

I open it up.

The book is finished by dawn the next day.

It’s tough to describe why I enjoyed the book so much. It wasn’t scary. In fact, I’ve come to discover that most of King’s books aren’t scary in any traditional sense. The plot is pretty adolescent (a guy who can read minds? Come on). Yet, I enjoyed it and for a long time I didn’t know why.

After reading several of King’s books, I now feel like I can answer why I enjoyed Dead Zone.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of a good Stephen King book is character development. King is a master at creating real human characters. Even in his weakest book, King still manages to create characters that stick out in a reader’s mind. In fact, this is probably the thing that filmmakers just can’t seem to grasp about his work and that is why his adaptations are either cheesy horror movies (Pet Semetary) with a focus on the macabre action of the plot, or movies that only rudimentarily use his material (The Shining) and instead go in a completely different direction than what the book intended. King’s best books are character-driven stories where the horror they face isn’t necessarily an evil monster, but their own demons and fears.

In Dead Zone’s case, the main character’s “monster” is his own struggle to adapt to a world that has passed him by during his time in a coma. It is his struggle to finally be able to make a difference in the world with his newfound powers. It is his struggle to live a normal life despite becoming an overnight celebrity.

Dead Zone was the perfect book to introduce me to the worlds Stephen King can create. Heartbreaking, unsettling and uplifting all at once, it captures the attributes that make a good Stephen King book in a way that grabs new readers and pushes them forward into the other mysterious worlds of Stephen King.