Change-the only constant in this crazy universe. Sometimes change can be exhilarating, and sometimes it can be catastrophic, but the big ones rarely come without some sort of strong emotions attached. Such was the case for Bart Dawes, protagonist (?) of King's 1981 novel Roadwork, written under his pseudonym of Richard Bachman.

Bart was a loyal husband, and a loyal employee of the laundry service he'd worked for most of his life. The first blow to Bart's sense of the world comes when the laundry is bought by a large conglomerate, reducing him from a person to a number. Then, the state decides they need to build a new highway-right through Bart's neighborhood. This will displace both he and his wife, as well as the laundry he works for. Bart denies the reality of these changes as long as he can, at least consciously. Unconsciously, he plots revenge against the people he sees as responsible for the changes that are upending his life. He is determined to stop the march of progress in its tracks. Slowly, George unravels mentally and emotionally, fighting an ultimately futile battle against corporate and government might.

If you've seen the movie Falling Down with Michael Douglas, you are already familiar with the mood and tone of Roadwork. Bart Dawes is one in a long line of King characters who do terrible things, but whom you can't help feel sorry for (more on that when I write my review of Cujo). Obviously, Dawes is meant to represent the idealized past, a time when loyalty and hard work meant something, and when people were more important than profits. Of course, as anyone who's studied history knows, that idealized past never really existed; at least, not for long, and never for everyone. But Dawes does represent a certain type of middle class white man; men like my father, actually. My dad literally started in the mail-room of ComEd in 1970, and eventually worked his way up to management. He worked for the company for over 30 years, with a pension plan and Cadillac insurance. Admittedly, that sort of job is basically a unicorn in the 21st century. Now, people go from job to job every few years, dragging their 401K with them if they are lucky. But for white men working in skilled manufacturing and lower level management-type jobs 60 years ago, a certain level of stability, respect, and loyalty from their employers were expected. It was these men who were the most affected by, and critical of, the changes in the employment landscape and the social contract that led to where we are today. Suddenly, the world didn't make sense anymore; the basic assumptions under which you've operated your whole life suddenly turn out to be false.

One of the things King likes to do is explore is what happens when you put ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Some, like Jack Torrance and Bart Dawes, slowly go insane. Some, like Stu Redman and Larry Underwood (The Stand), rise to the occasion. While what happened to Bart Dawes was not nearly the terror-filled insanity of Jack Torrance in The Shining, the loss of his identity and his grasp on reality was the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to Bart. And like the factory-workers, coal miners, and steel-workers of the late 20th century who fought and fought to save their dying industries, Bart too is unable to stop the inevitable march of progress that led to his demise. Unfortunately, because Bart Dawes is such an entitled, white male character, longing for the days when he and people like him were on top of the societal food chain (spoiler alert-they still are), I couldn't really relate to him as a character, especially as his desire to keep things from changing led him to basically sacrifice anything and anyone else (including his wife) to his cause.

All of the Bachman books are pretty dark, and this one is no exception. You don't exactly get a happy ending in any of them. Unlike Rage and The Long Walk, which forecast possible futures (sadly, the school shooting has become all-too frequent since Rage was written), Roadwork looks backward, asking us to consider whether all this "progress" is worth the cost.

My Year of King, #7-Firestarter

Chances are pretty good that when you think about Firestarter, what you see in your mind is a very young Drew Barrymore, hair blown back from her tiny face, setting, well, just about everything in her path on fire. That movie, along with E.T., helped propel her to early stardom and created one of the many iconic images of the 1980s. So iconic, in fact, that the Netflix series "Stranger Things" references it, not literally, but through the character of Eleven and the shadowy government agency with nefarious purposes known as Hawkins National Laboratory. As movies made from Stephen King books go, I don't remember Firestarter being too awful, nor do I remember it straying too far from the events of the book, though I will admit it's probably been 20 years since I've seen it.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the basic plot, Firestarter revolves around Andy and Charlie McGee, a father and daughter who are on the run from a secret government agency called The Shop. When he was in college, Andy and his future wife Vicky participated in trials of an experimental hallucinogenic drug that left them with weak psychic and telekinetic powers. Those powers were magnified by a power of a lot in their young daughter, Charlie, who showed signs from a very early age of being able to move things with her mind, and, more frighteningly, set things on fire. This happened most often when she was angry or upset, giving new meaning to the phrase "terrible twos". Andy and Vicky did everything they could to keep her powers, and their own, a secret, but The Shop maintained covert surveillance on all of their past subjects, and when they saw what Charlie could do, they tried to capture her so they could study her with the ultimate goal of creating a super-weapon. Andy, obviously, wasn't really down with this plan, so he took his daughter and ran.

This is not the first time that King has explored the idea of telekinesis, nor the first time he has used a young person as his powerful hero (hello, Carrie!). Charlie is another in a string of children that King uses as protagonists. One of the recurring themes in his work seems to be that the more innocent you are, the more likely you are to have the imagination and bravery to confront evil. In this case, while Charlie is the one that can set things on fire with her mind, the evil is the government, another recurring theme in King's works, first appearing in The Stand. It is not always the main theme, but in many of King's books the least sympathetic characters have something to do with the power structure of the location of the story, whether they be a politician, clergy member, or wealthy citizen.

One of the things I liked about this story, both when I first read it and now, is the relationship between Charlie and her father. He is smart, a teacher (another recurring element in King stories), kind and gentle, and pretty evolved for a man who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite their dire situation, he tries to teach Charlie the difference between right and wrong, even as he sometimes has to tell her to do horrible things to help them evade The Shop. It felt more unusual when I first read it, but even now portraying the father as the primary caregiver of a small child feels is not that common. Unlike Jack Torrance, Andy McGee is able to be truly selfless, doing everything he can to ensure his daughter's safety despite what it means to his own.

The story does feel a bit unbalanced, with long periods of waiting in between action scenes, but oh what action scenes they are! The other characters in the novel; agents from The Shop, mostly; are written with just enough depth for you to understand their motivation, but without any real substance. They could be any shadowy government official from just about any book or movie that contains shadowy government officials. They are fairly shallow, that is, except for John Rainbird, the Native American Viet Nam vet turned assassin, who is tasked with getting Charlie to use her powers. His character is cunning and violent and sociopathic, but with an impressive, if scary, intellect. His main motivation for being an assassin isn't money or revenge or patriotism-his long string of murders are essentially his own twisted research into what you can see of a person's soul if you look in their eyes as they die. He is a truly chilling character, and one of the more subtly written King villains. He definitely adds a quality of menace to an already suspensful story.

Jumped In, Patrick Flores-Scott

"Don't judge a book by its cover." "Looks can be deceiving." "All the glitters isn't gold." "Beauty is only skin deep." We have quite a few sayings in English about using more than just appearances to make judgments about people. That idea is the foundation of the young adult novel Jumped In by Patrick Flores-Scott. The main character is Sam, a teenage boy who has perfected the art of slackerhood. He has learned how to keep his head down and avoid drawing the attention of teachers or his fellow students, thereby allowing him to drift through high school doing just enough to pass and escape the not-always-friendly scrutiny of his peers. But when he is partnered with Luis, a tough-looking Hispanic kid, for an English project, Sam's whole modus operandi is threatened. Sam is sure Luis is a gang member; his brother is infamous for his involvement in gangs, and Luis has a huge scar running up his neck. Sam knows there will be no slacking or hiding this time-if he doesn't do his part in their slam poetry assignment, Luis is bound to pummel him into the ground. But not everything is as it seems with Luis. Can these two boys from seemingly different worlds actually be friends? 

I love this book! Flores-Scott does an amazing job creating sympathetic characters, and the friendship that develops between these two boys is really quite sweet. Sam is the narrator, so his internal life and perspective are easy to see, but Flores-Scott uses Luis' poetry to give us insight into his character that proves his tough exterior is protecting a tender soul with depths of thought and feeling people wouldn't assume just by looking at him. I think that teens who have ever been misjudged by others based on the way they look, or because they are part of a stereotyped group, will completely get Luis and his internal struggle. 

Because Luis is so enthusiastic about the poetry assignment, he is able to inspire Sam as well. Sam has his own issues; his mom left two years ago, and he has a love of the rock of the Pacific Northwest (musical, not mineral) that none of his classmates seem to share. He feels isolated and alone most of the time, and he adopts his slacker persona as a cover for these feelings, and as a way to cope with feeling so out of place at school. The way he blossoms through his friendship with Luis is a reversal of the white savior syndrome that so many books about young people of color and their white teachers/peers fall into. Luis is the one that saves Sam, not the other way around. Though Sam does get his chance to repay the friendship Luis showed him; after a gang fight, Luis disappears, and Sam has to put himself front and center with teachers and peers in a way that he never would have if Luis hadn't become such an influence in his life.

The high-interest nature of this book, coupled with the easy readability, make it a good choice for inclusion in a readers' workshop or other independent reading activity. It would also make a good novel to use in middle or high school (with lower level readers) to explore friendship, assumptions, stereotypes, and overcoming personal challenges.

My Year of King, #6-The Dead Zone

...or, alternately, "John Smith's Unbelievably Bad Luck". The Dead Zone, one of King's earliest books, may be best known to some readers as the title of a show loosely based on King's work starring 80s teen movie nerd turned hunka hunka hotness Michael Anthony Hall. Like many movies and television shows based on King's work, the writers went pretty far afield from the source material, though the basic premise stayed the same.

In The Dead Zone, Johnny Smith, twenty-something high school teacher and genuinely nice guy, isevent, and sees the terrible future that awaits us all if the man is elected to office. John has a choice to make; ignore his vision, try to get people to believe what he saw is true, or take matters into his own hands.
feeling at the top of the world. He has a job he loves teaching English, and a girlfriend he is quickly falling in love with. He has a rather complicated relationship with his parents, especially his ultra-religious mother, but generally speaking, his life is going in what is, as far as he is concerned, the right direction. Due to a fall he took as a child, which he doesn't even remember, he occasionally gets flashes of insight (read: glimpses of the past and future) from people or objects that he touches. When he and Sarah, his girl, take a late fall visit to a visiting carnival, Johnny gets one of his flashes at the Wheel of Fortune (a bit on the nose, Mr. King), and wins $500, a fortune for a young teacher in 1979 (and frankly, 2018). But this good luck came with a price. On his way home from the carnival, he is in a head-on collision with a drag-racing teenager, and spends the next four years in a coma. When he wakes up, his girlfriend has married someone else, his mother's religiosity has become a mania, and his ability to see the past and future is amped up by a magnitude of a lot. Every time he touches a person or an object, there is a chance that he will see that person's future in his mind. This is a terrible burden, and his use of this ability to save a woman's house from a fire and catch a serial killer gain him notoriety he is neither prepared for nor happy about. But these events pale in comparison when he shakes a politician's hand at a campaign

It is impossible to dislike John Smith. He is a good guy. He's enlightened by 1979 standards. He is a teacher, a good one according to King's description. He treats his girlfriend with gentleness and loving care. And then, this thing happens to him that completely derails his life.  I spent the rest of the book feeling sorry for him in one way or another; he loses his girl, he loses his career, he's hounded by the media, his mother goes insane. This ability that he never asked for and doesn't want destroys any real chance at happiness that he had.

I did feel as though this book is almost three loosely related novellas rather than one cohesive book. The first is the period of Johnny's love affair with Sarah, accident, and recovery. The second, the hunt for the Castle Rock Strangler. The third is his plan and showdown with Greg Stillson, politician extraordinaire and sociopath. It surprised me how quickly the Castle Rock Strangler storyline was resolved. It seemed, from the way the character of Frank Dodd was introduced, that he would be the "Big Bad" that Johnny had to battle. When he was caught so easily, I wondered where the story was going. King is a known political junkie (very liberal, thank you very much), so I'm not really surprised by his decision to make a politician the ultimate evil in the book. He often portrays politicians as vain, venal, and corrupt in his novels. But it seems like the average reader would be more interested in catching serial killers than in stopping sociopathic politicians. But I guess I don't give the average reader enough credit, because this book was a huge best-seller just like almost all of his books are.

This is the first appearance of Sheriff George Bannerman, who works with Johnny to find the Castle Rock Strangler. Bannerman plays a much bigger role in later novel as the sheriff of Castle Rock, until his tragic death a few books from now. This is not the first book to mention Castle Rock, but it is the first book where Castle Rock is an important location in the arc of the story. One of the things I have always appreciated as a Constant Reader of King's work is the way he works references to his other books and stories into the novels and stories that follow. As someone who has read almost all of his work, it feels like a reward every time I understand a reference to some other character, event, or location and know that other readers who aren't as well-versed in King's oevre might not. I suppose that's super nerdy, but in these days when fandoms and nerdgasms are a regular part of pop culture, I'll own that label.