The Michigan Daily-Sunday Page 2-Sunday, October 14, 1979-The Michigan Daily Hard Nox Books bt c., 2 "A11Nk Ytw J Wittj U .. ." , .;, .. :. .~ . 11 i~j~j) -ra AL T*E-eGe?7g F61tl i 4~wSo V4 IAAI* AM~O w6'Rs 6Ol - A HAVElb ~Ae A'FfL BY TERR YLaBAN to MiG jY1., Nt" Sy f rA, ,l 5 ~w', r Eces ui -Y t kc. attic464Au'Eofi T cL Z6A&Y r. v #e- Stephen King, paperback vN In 'The Dead Zone,' a promising story is smothered in the banality of King's prose. By Anne Sharp -- won m - -lasommmus s / sT S : 3 t WA I rr LA r COULD YOU-3uf wr / I I I F- r SundaV A CR OS TIC PUZZLE w z TT1 R E A X 2 M 2 L 2 E 29 A G 4 0 5 C 720G 7 D 74 W 71 V 16 D 63 P 86 n 109 70 N 691 P 92 0 93 U 9++ x 95 x 96 - .t - - C -, J 115 ju 116 1p 117 K 118 N 119 Q 120 G 121 Q 142 D 143 X 144 V 165 0 166 R 187 .1 18 U 189 J 122jS 123 V 124}G 125' SC 146 G 47 1148 A 145 E 167 B 190 K 103 R 104 105 M 126 B 127 W 128 K 129 V 149 J 150 L 151 172 E 173 I 174 B 194 C 195 P 196 U10P131 K 1S2v 1S I~1 jr 68 19s 7 K 191 !i I U - urn A Venerate B. Source; root M. Determined; crooked 5 48 107 67 145 87 7 194 38 127 203 190 59 137 126 25 C. Spanish Civil War (1936-39) insurgents D. Growing political philosophy in Spain after World War I E. Writing stationery that forms its own envelope (2 words) F. Frustrates: losses G. Leader of the army mutiny that began the Spanish Civil War (First and last name) H. General survey: critically examine . Desire; inclination; disposition 1. Site of the army mutiny of Clue G (2 words) K. Personified; incorporated 1 34 46 72 81 102 146 179 160 45 195 206 12 109 89 82 32 47 74 143 63 35 4 10 17 27 70 111 163 167 173 183 42 20 192 56 180 154 161 ." 22 136 37 147 49 168 73 61 83 99 79 105 112 121 125 N. Pier; embankment 0. Pathological bony outgrowth P. In another place Q. Gillis of TV series fame R. Supervision; inadvertence S. Spanish fascist T. Oppressively overworked and underpaid U. Spanish government at outbreak of civil war (2 words) V. Purple violet precious stone W. Famous Brigade involved in the siege of Madrid X. Almost; very nearly (2 words) BY STEPHEN J. POZSGA I Copyright1977 INSTRUCTIONS Guess the words defined at the left and write them in over their numbered dashes. Then, transfer each letter to the cor- responding numbered square in the grid above. The letters printed in the upper-right-hand corners of the squares indi- cate from what clue-word a particular square's letter comes from. The grid, when filled in, should read as a - quotation from a published work. The darkened squares are the spaces between words. Some words may carry over to the next line. Meanwhile, the first letter of each guessed word at the left, reading down, forms an acrostic, giving the author's name anc the title of the work from which the quote is extracted. As words and phrases begin to form in the grid, you can work back and forth from clues to grid until the puzzle is complete. Answer to last week's puzzle: There is no doubt that the Urals disaster was the biggest nuclear tragedy in peacetime that the world has known. It produced the largest radioactively con- taminated ecological zone in the world. It will not be gone even a hundred years from now. (Zhores A.) Medvedev Nuclear Disaster (in the Urals) 95 64 119 69 108 21 41 50 60 93 166 184 90 159 197 31 68 86 92 97 117 196 131 140 171 66 113 142 158 120 43 3 9 187 182 132 76 55 104 77 155 170 176 123 186 33 53 110 39 88 58 200 133 139 178 THE DEAD ZONE By Stephen King The Viking Press, 426 pp., $11.95 WHEN I was a mere slip of a girl, my main ambition in life was to be a writer - a real one, with an IBM Selectric and articles in Esquire and Harper's and a New York apartment with ferns and cats. Of course, I had no intention of becoming some cheap hack novelist who has a few fleeting weeks of glory on the bestseller list before plummeting into obscurity; I wanted to create lasting, innovative works of art, as James Joyce and Franz Kafka did, ,to be misunderstood, perhaps, but never to compromise my art for public approval. What an insuf- ferable snob I was! I knew a couple of other aspiring writers, both nice boys but with an orientation towards the world of letters which differed greatly from mine. They made plans, in a greedy, calculating way which I found disgusting, to get published any way they could, as often as possible, and for as much money as they could get, using whatever formula would appeal to the biggest possible slice of the reading public (i.e., the same sort of people who enjoy hours in front of the tube watching un- Kafkaesque drivel like The Love Boat.) My friends, who unlike me, thought about things like paying bills and sup- porting a family on their earnings, decided that the best way to start a career of jockeying for a spot on supermarket bookracks was to copy the pros. So, they carefully modeled their own writing styles after that of an author who shall remain nameless, a writer of certain lurid, immensely popular mass-market paperback thrillers full of lust and gore and ridiculously awkward prose. A writer who has come to epitomize in my mind that most shameless and calculating of all small businesspersons - the professional hack writer. Oh, what the hell, I might as well tell you: it's Stephen King. There's no use saying that Stephen King doesn't have talent. Yes, he has talent, but not as a writer, not as someone who creates characters and dialogue and situations in a way that is skillful or aesthetically pleasing or Anne Sharp writes about music and film for the DailyArts page.. even halfway believable. His charac- ters are discontinuous, half-baked amalgams of TV stereotypes. They talk to one another in a bizarre, stilted man- ner usually reserved for people who populate soap operas. Witness this bit of dialogue from King's latest novel, The Dead Zone: "What would your mother think if she knew you were seeing a lapsed Catholic?" "Ask me to bring you home," Johnny said promptly, "so she could slip'vou a few tracts." And, further on: "Oh, Johnny, I do like you." "I like you eren more than that," he said seriously. It's easy to pick on King for his dread- fully clumsy and pedestrian style, but hardly relevant to the issue. King writes to please a mass audience, and few of his readers are out to admire the beauty of his prose. What excites them and holds their interest, what made my friends study his books so closely (besides the fact that their own em- bryonic talents bore the mark of King's malformed syntax), is his capacity - one could call it a genius - for choosing and plotting a story. At heart King's creations are so clever, so juicily gruesome, so mired in the twilit fantasy world of Eros and Thanatos, so utterly marketable that one can overlook his shortcomings and place him alongside H. P. Lovecraft, Rod Serling, and Robert Bloch as one of the best modern- day practitioners of penny-dreadful literature. King, of course, deals in the arcane and chilling side of existence, in the seductively mysterious mechanisms of death and the living body. Scurvy horror novelist though he is, King has established quite a following, and his books have inspired no less than two major motion pictures by fairly distinguished directors: Carrie, which effectively made Brian DePalma's career, and The Shining, now in the works, directed by none other than Stanley (2001: A Space Odyssey) Kubrick. King's best books (i.e., the ones that sold the most) have a gut- level general appeal. Anyone who ever felt put down during high school can en- joy Carrie's telekinetic strafing of her tormenting peers and abominable, em- barrassing mother. Salem's Lot caught a wave on the public's recent fascination with vampirism. Although his last two or three novels haven't caused as much of a sensation, and the new The Dead Zone is nothing to rave about, one can assume that King still has his lucrative act together. F The Dead Zone is hardly up to scratch, it is at least an honest at- tempt to go beyond exploitation and seriously, if ineptly, build a mature piece of literature. Unfortunately, King hasn't allowed his stylistic talents to grow beyond the back-pages-of-Analog stage, and the book suffers as a result, but it's a good shot nevertheless. As usual, King falls back upon a horror- sci-fi theme: A young man named Johnny Smith awakens one afternoon after a bad auto accident to find he has been in a coma for four years, his new girlfriend has married another man, and his mother has become an hysterical religious fanatic. Most im- portant, a damaged area of his brain (the "dead zone" of the title) has been replaced by a new capacity for mental telepathy; he also can visualize past and future events with deadly accuracy simply by touching a person or object King 8 106 138 40 185 162 14 100 169 29 80 134 148 174 30 91 65 84 122 135 115 71 101 150 188 36 201 193 2 6 129 52 103 152 118 191 26 198 19 51 98 151 54 62 94 189 130 141 114 1721 to the fri politician knows, is wardheeb palling n and Gille the book that's hoi As w{ strangleh, voters in recovery and whe Stillson's vision tha someday World Wa grooming is, for a Stillson. nocent pa uncompl, himself ' trying to sci-fi fans since dea Machine. bead on discussec 199 116 177 202 related to them. His doctors notice this, and he becomes an instant minor celebrity. Johnny is the quintessential innocent victim of fate. Actually, despite his exotic powers, he is pretty dull, an am- biguous cipher without any apparent in- terests or motivations. His moral sense makes him indignantly refuse an offer from a yellow-dog tabloid to exploit his name, a la Jeanne Dixon, but he isn't above physically bullying a represen- tative of the tabloid, or getting it on with his married girlfriend, or, in the end, planning to murder a crooked politician in the vague name of the common good. That bit about the politician is the most pithy stuff in The Dead Zone. This country has lived through the traumatic assassinations of several of its leaders, but seldom has such a thing been proposed as an ethical alternative more mol his accid and I do wanted tc The De tense; it doom wit but its go of Johnny interestirn and King described murders lurid en recomme The Dead at being exploitati pulp ficti consideri of young be just li gqQdjob 16 28 44 124 11 181 153 165 18 75 15 23 57 156 78 85 128 149 205 164 175 13 96 24 144 157 204 L. Bordered; encircled r.