King of the Dark Episode 3: The Dead Zone

Welcome to episode 3 of King of the Dark, our special series celebrating and exploring the worlds of Stephen King.  Every week on this summer-long series we're opening a different door in the haunted mansion of Stephen King's imagination.   This week on the program our regular guests Liz Braswell and Louis Peitzman join B&N's Bill Tipper to talk about King's 1979 novel The Dead Zone. It's the story of Johnny Smith, whose strange clairvoyant abilities bring him into a confrontation with a threat to the fate of the entire world — a threat only he can perceive.  We'll talk about its political obsessions, including a cameo by a future U.S. President, the way it looks to nuclear war as the ultimate horror, and how it once again takes us into the territory of a classic horror short story.  
 
We're also joined by special guest Linda Holmes, the host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour and author of the new novel Evvie Drake Starts Over: she dropped in to talk about her affection for Stephen King's short stories, when he's at his most "I wonder what would happen if..."

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We're no longer producing new episodes of this show, but you can find us now at Poured Over on Apple Podcasts. Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today's most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.