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Ryan Roch

the Dead Zone

Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2022

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Much more emotionally and spiritually complex than I ever expected. It's politically a little all over the place but manages to reflect back the conflict in the protagonist. I found myself pleasantly surprised by the structure, which basically works as the creation of a holy warrior/saint who is essentially an nonbeliever. The things the book does with fundamentalism are way more interesting than you might expect from King, who tends to go all in on stuffing fundies in the trash and walking away. The concepts of all-powerful belief and the justifications that it creates are where the book is the most rewarding.

I feel like King started with 2 or 3 basic questions that were interesting to him, and married them up really well:
1. what would a miracle worker gifted with prophecy be like today? How would he be received?
2. What if a zealot or lone wolf nut job were actually right? What if he alone could save the world?
3. What does the rise of an autocrat look like decades before Americans embraced one in real life? What is the chemical mixture to create a cult of personality President in America?

This is a more somber, reflective, regretful King, and an examination of the way community and love strengthen our backs is a balancing aspect that really works.

SammyD55

Great journey. When I read a King novel, i feel so close to the characters, it's almost eerie.

Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2022

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Loved the depth of character backstory.
The only way I can describe what I don't like is by saying that King so perfectly delivers his antagonists that you actually hate them on an almost personal level. I didn't like the antagonist, but I loved to hate him. I gave this read a 5 star review because, as always, even though King's stories are rough, and full of harsh truths, and sometimes rather disheartening, i always finish them feeling like i knew the character, i rooted for them, i laughed and damn near cried for them, and that is something only a master of fiction can do. This was another great work.

Kenneth A. McKinley

What Would You Do If You Could've Stopped Hitler From Coming To Power?

Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2016

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The Dead Zone was a re-read for me, as many will be as I go through The Stephen King Challenge, and I forgot how powerful this book was. King was really in fine form during this period in the late 1970s.

Johnny Smith is a young teacher that has started to date Sarah, another young teacher that works for another school. They've started to fall in love and Johnny takes her out on a date to the county fair. They're both excited about the night. Love is in the air and Sarah has hinted that she'd like him to spend the night at her place for the first time. They have a great time at the fair riding the rides and eating all the fair food. As they're walking out, a carnival barker at the Wheel of Fortune lures them over to try their luck. Suddenly, Johnny gets a strange feeling that he knows what number the ball is going to land on and begins to go in a trance-like state. Sure enough, he hits...and hits...and hits, until he has over $500 in his pocket and Sarah mysteriously turns ill. Driving his sick girlfriend to her house, they decide that they'll have to postpone their special evening for when she feels better. Johnny hails a cab and heads for his house. He never makes it home. Two kids were drag racing and hit the cab head on. Johnny is the only survivor...well, kind of. Johnny, battered and broken, is in a coma for 4 and 1/2 years. The doctors had given up on him and eventually Sarah did too. While Johnny was withering away in a hospital bed, Sarah marries and has a little boy. Then, one day, she gets word that Johnny Smith has miraculously come out of his coma. What she was led to believe as impossible has happened. For Johnny, it's as if he's only been asleep for a few days. Instead, his whole life, as he knows it, has been ripped away from him and all he has to look forward to is multiple surgeries and an excruciating recovery. During one of his physical therapy sessions, he touches a nurse and a wave of visions flood through Johnny's mind. He goes into another trance-like state and tells the nurse that she has to hurry. Her house is on fire. She checks and sure enough, Johnny was right and the wary nursing staff look as if Johnny has leprosy and none of them want to get close enough to touch him. For Johnny, this newfound ability is a curse. Newspapers, tabloids, desperate people wanting to know what happened to their missing loved ones all come out of the woodwork and hound Johnny. Then one day, Johnny shakes the hand of Greg Stillson. Stillson is a local politician with big ambitions and Johnny sees what would happen to the world if Stillson is in charge. What would you do if you could go back in time and prevent Hitler from coming to power? This is the burden that Johnny faces.

The Dead Zone hit me like a ton of bricks. Johnny is a very likable character and you want him and Sarah to be a couple. You want his life to be wonderful. You want to see a silver lining. With one kick in the gut after another, it's painful to watch Johnny be forced to travel down the roads that he has to. The characters, storytelling, setting, it's all wonderfully laid out by King. This is King firing on all cylinders. It transports you inside Johnny Smith and makes you ask yourself, "What if this happened to me?" An excellent tale that should be a felony for all that haven't read it.

5 burning tires out of 5

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John Rinaldi

Good but not for a reread

Reviewed in the United States on July 6, 2022

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I read this years ago when it was first released and I liked it. But knowing what happens really lets the air out of a reread.

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Antony Simpson

Book Review: The Dead Zone by Stephen King (from: AntonySimpson.com)

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 15, 2017

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In The Dead Zone John Smith wakes up from a 4 year coma with the ability to see the past and the future of the people he touches.

Some people see this ability as a gift from God. But for John, he sees it as a curse.

It all started 4 years ago when John, a Teacher, took his date Sarah, also a Teacher, to the Fair.

John is also known as Johnny in The Dead Zone and these names will be used interchangeably throughout this review.

All was going well until John tried his luck on The Wheel of Fortune. The first time he wins. Then the second and third time to. Again and again he wins. He just can’t loose, despite his head feeling like somebody is going at it with a jack hammer.

Meanwhile Sarah has become ill and is being violently sick after eating a bad hot dog. Johnny takes Sarah home and then calls a taxi.

Johnny’s taxi journey home is where it all goes wrong. A car driving on the wrong side of the road crashes into the taxi at speed, causing the deaths of the boy driving the car on the wrong side of the road and the taxi driver. John is propelled out of the taxi through the windshield and goes into a coma.

When Johnny wakes up, he discovers that everything has changed. His body is weak, despite being exercised with physiotherapy while he was comatose. His mind has a Dead Zone, a microscopic part of his brain that has been damaged. This Dead Zone causes him not to be able to imagine certain things and is perhaps also causing his new found ability to see people’s past and future by touching them.

John’s father seems to have dramatically aged much more than the 4 years that has passed. His mother who was always a religious woman, has become fervent religionist. Sarah is now married to another man and has a child.

As Johnny works hard to recover and rebuild his life. As he does so, he makes some startlingly accurate predictions including: finding the location of his Doctor’s lost mother, preventing a fire from becoming serious in his Physiotherapists house, telling Sarah where her lost wedding ring is, identifying a serial murderer and predicting a serious fire caused by lightening. Johnny soon makes news with his predictions and rides out the media storms the best he can.

Johnny doesn’t really want any of this. He just wants a normal life and more importantly the normal life the car accident robbed him of. But he knows that this is not possible. Too much has changed.

Johnny does various bits of work and creates a little hobby of shaking politician’s hands to see the future of election results. That is until he shake that hand of Greg Stillson. John sees Stillson becoming President and what a dangerous one he’ll be.

John becomes obsessed with Stillson and starts getting head-splitting headaches. John finds himself debating whether he would kill Hitler if time travel was possible. He decides that he would and that the same action needs to be taken to prevent Stillson from ever becoming President.

Every element of The Dead Zone was excellent and enjoyable. The description pulls the reader into the story from the beginning and until the end. The characters were charming, cunning and crafty. Johnny was particularly appealing and interesting, with the reader feeling for and relating to this character from the start of the book.

The plot was intriguing, fascinating and full of unpredictable, but perfectly pleasant twists and turns. The pacing was perfect at all times and felt like a car with cruise control doing 70MPH on the motorway.

The only tiny criticism of The Dead Zone was John’s name. John Smith. The story makes clear from the outset that John is an average guy, who happens to have something that’s both bad and brilliant happen to him. So using such a common place name to represent that he’s an average guy was not required. It stuck me as either lazy or uninventive on King’s behalf.

The Dead Zone is without any doubt a King classic.

ThatBookGal

A lacklustre ending

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 28, 2020

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Halfway through The Dead Zone I thought, 'god I love this book'. Johnny had an excellent outlook after a terrible thing, and it really left you thinking about how you would handle something like that. However, it was around that point that I felt the book should have been coming to a conclusion. This is one of the few books I've read where the climax seems to have come in the middle of the book rather than the end. Sure the journey continues, but honestly, the second half paled in comparison to the first. As King books go, this is written in his classic style and was easy to read and follow along with. However, I really felt like it was lacking towards the end, so just 3*'s for this one.

H. Cross

King's The Dead Zone

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 30, 2016

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It's only once you finish The Dead Zone that you realise it isn't really a horror novel, although King's willingness to get his hands dirty keeps this story as real and gripping as any of his chillers. As ever, the plot is character-driven: everyone in the story is treated as a full, human character, so even bit-part characters help to map out a colourful and engaging world for the action to take place in. There are more of King's signature flourishes - spot-on colloquial dialogue, damages wrought by religious zeal - but there are fun accents too, as he references the work of his inspirations, most notably Ray Bradbury.

King is talented and disciplined writer, and The Dead Zone gives him an ample sandbox for to draw his ideas out. It's perhaps a little more low-key than some of his famous horrors, but it's as compulsively readable and, by the end, as affirming as any of the greats in his oeuvre.

Blah de Blah de Blah

Engaging read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 16, 2020

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My first King novel. And not a bad start, I've seen it written somewhere that this is his best. I spent most of the novel wanting to see how Johnny and Sarah would finally get it together - but the finale had a ring of truth, and the surprise of his underlying condition suddenly caused things to fall in place.

It's a very enjoyable read, and while it has strains of the supernatural, it's also very believable in many ways. Highly recommended

Amazon Customer

One of his best books.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 10, 2019

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Quite a hard book to track down. I'm glad I made the effort. The plot is tight and fast moving, especially in the second half of the book. The main character is believable and likeable. The plot is more relevant in today's political climate than it was when it was written almost four decades ago.

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