The Dead Zone

Johnny Smith doesn't remember his childhood ice-skating accident. He doesn't remember being knocked unconscious, or the psychic vision he experienced upon revival, or the dream of himself in a hospital bed. He doesn't connect that crack on his head with the eerily accurate hunches that follow, even when, as a high-school teacher, he takes the woman he loves to the 1970 county fair and has an astounding run of luck on the Wheel of Fortune. Then he's injured in an automobile accident and spends the next four and a half years at the Eastern Maine Medical Center, lost in a coma, confined to the hospital bed of his dream.

Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman, but he knows he's destined for great things. He keeps a Flit gun for dealing with unfriendly dogs, and he keeps the gun loaded with ammonia. But it doesn't discourage one dog. Greg reacts to its bite by kicking the animal to death. Then he travels East, to find his destiny.

In Bangor, Johnny wakes from his coma to find a strange new world in which neurologists wear hippie hair and his girlfriend is married to another man. And his own touch sometimes brings vivid visions. He sees that his neurologist's mother, believed slain in the Holocaust, is living in California. He sees that his physiotherapist's house is on fire. And he sees the unknown butcher of several women and girls. When his power identifies the serial killer, the resulting media frenzy gets Johnny ejected from the new teaching job he hasn't even started.

Finding another job in New Hampshire, Johnny makes a habit of meeting the politicians visiting the state in advance of the 1976 presidential primary. Shaking hands with an obscure peanut farmer from Georgia, he foresees the presidency for Jimmy Carter. Encountering a local politician, Johnny has an oddly blurred vision of another future president. And he finds himself plunged into the dilemma of the hypothetical time traveler who can kill Hitler before the Holocaust and World War II can start. Johnny must decide whether his blurry vision of World War III and nuclear holocaust is true. Has his brain damage finally reduced him to a crazy obsessive who can't distinguish reality from fantasy? Or should he assassinate Greg Stillson?

Light in the darkness

The most important English-language author of the 20th century and one of the most influential of the 21st, Stephen King (b. 1947) is viewed around the world as a horror writer. But he also writes SF, fantasy, thrillers, crime fiction and more. Not surprisingly, his non-horror fiction usually has a dark edge. And that edge is particularly sharp in his classic dark fantasy novel The Dead Zone (1979).

A more accurate term for The Dead Zone might be "tragedy." Johnny Smith barely has time to enjoy his status as a man before he's cut down. He loses nearly every year of his adult life to a coma. When he awakens, he's lost the woman he loves and gained the hatred of people frightened by his precognitive powers. He undergoes numerous painful operations to straighten his coma-contracted limbs. He suffers frequent headaches, which grow more severe. And he must make a horrific choice: between inaction, which may doom the world, and action, which will see him either dead or incarcerated in a prison or asylum. The horror edge in The Dead Zone cuts deep.

The novel is a genre-bender: not only a dark fantasy, but a political thriller and one of the earliest serial-killer thrillers. As a political thriller, the book hasn't exerted much influence in the subgenre. But it's a likely influence on the legion of later serial-killer novels, from Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse (1996) to Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter series and the late Rex Miller's Chaingang series. However, unlike Exquisite Corpse, the Chaingang books, and the sequels to The Silence of the Lambs (1988), The Dead Zone has a grip on its moral compass. Dark as it is, King's novel makes neither its serial killer nor its future mass murderer a hero.

This leads to one of the reasons Stephen King has become a best-selling author--probably the world's all-time biggest, after the author of the Bible. Americans are famous for our hatred of unhappy endings, and King frequently ends his fiction on a downer, yet Americans are still pushing his books to the top of the charts some 30 years since his debut novel, Carrie (1974), first bummed us out. One reason we're doing so is that King's dark fiction frequently ends on a note of hope. And The Dead Zone ranks among the finest of his hopeful dark works.