The Dead Zone (Audiobook Review)

2017 Simon and Schuster Audio
Written by: Stephen King; Read by: James Franco

Johnny Smith is living a lovely life. He's enjoying his small town high school teacher job, his new girlfriend, Sarah, might just be the one, and he's just won an enormous stack of cash from a carnival betting wheel. Everything changes on a taxi ride back from that carnival, when Johnny's car is hit head on. The driver dies, and Johnny enters a nearly five year coma. When Johnny awakens, two terrible things have happened: Sarah has moved on and started a family with an ambitious politician; Johnny can now, simply by touching someone or an object close to that someone, see that someone's future. Most regard Johnny as a freak or a fraud, but Johnny just wants to get back to a somewhat ordinary life. Unfortunately, his extraordinary ability makes that an impossibility. First, the local police come to Johnny to help them catch a serial killer. Then, Johnny makes the mistake of touching hands with a local populist politician (not Sarah's husband) and finds that not only will this man become President...he'll also be the person solely responsible for the nuclear war-caused end of the world.
The Dead Zone often ranks high on Stephen King "best of" lists but is not one of my favorites. While The Dead Zone may not come in as one of King's longer tomes, the 400+ page novel still takes quite a while to get going, and meanders quite a bit when it does. King spends quite a bit of time detailing Johnny's school environment, creating his trademark fall landscape, only to pull the rug out and never revisit it after the shocking twist of Johnny's car accident. Then you've got page after page of Johnny in a coma, then Johnny awakening and trying to rehabilitate, then the serial killer storyline, then finally, in the last 100 pages or so, the evil politician storyline. Then you've got a side romance that doesn't really go anywhere, or add much, as it's dropped about halfway through. I don't mind a sprawling King narrative if it's something like It, where every small bit adds to the larger living world of the novel, but The Dead Zone often feeling like an overflowing handful of tangents. Still, it does have its moments, particularly in the way King subverts his usual "I'm always right" central protagonist for a guy who literally knows almost everything, and yet only gets to experience the smallest of victories throughout. I also love a late book twist during the climax, which goes in a far different direction than expected, but achieves the same expected goals in a more satisfactory way. Overall, while I found some things to enjoy, I don't see myself ever revisiting The Dead Zone.
As far as The Dead Zone's audiobook goes, it's a fine way of experiencing this flawed novel. James Franco might currently be persona non grata, but I can't argue that he doesn't do a fine job reading The Dead Zone. He's animated and his inflections are great. Franco also takes a pretty big risk in attempting several character accents, which can generally derail an otherwise good book reading, but I think he pulls them off with aplomb. Perhaps the biggest worry here, after the accusations leveled against Franco, is that he'll sound creepy reading romantic passages from an author whose romantic passages and general handling a female characters is often considered fairly icky. Thankfully, those moments are few and far between and generally only come early in. My personal concern with Franco as I began listening is that I prefer when King's works are read by an older, folksier sounding reader. However, for any issues I had with King's overall narrative, Franco's reading of it is nothing but a strength.