I just finished The Dead Zone and Hollywood Crows. I don't have so much more to say about the latter; you could see the ending coming from a mile away, and, as I said before, the point isn't really in the plot anyway.
The Dead Zone is more interesting. In some ways it's the most downbeat King book I've read. Johnny Smith faces a horrendous moral choice at the end of the book, and the tension is palpable. But King also has a fundamental optimism that most people will eventually do the right thing. When Stillson is finally exposed, all the voters turn against him. In today's political climate, that really seems like a simplistic ending; I can just imagine Stillson going on the talk-show circuit and resuscitating his career.
It's also a very religious book. King pretty explicitly links Johnny to Jonah, who flees the word of God. Fate seems to play a role in a few of King's books, but here we see it almost bare. Johnny has been carrying around a time bomb in his head since he was nine, and what's kept him alive is fate/God's role for him to play in the last section of the novel. I think it's hard to give Fate/God such a large role and maintain a sense of conflict (if all is pre-ordained, why bother struggling?), and yet this novel is very powerful for all that.
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