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Summary: Your Normal Psychic Dude, Johnny Smith
Review: Johnny Smith is a seemingly normal guy -- who becomes psychic! He's an English teacher in a small Maine town called Castlerock, and he's one of those guys that more straight-laced teachers tend to dislike as a fellow teacher, but the kind'a guy that the kids really love. He's funny, sincere, sensitive, intelligent -- something of a goof -- but an all-around really great guy. "The Dead Zone" is a very readable melodrama of his descent into a world where he can see people's future just by touching them. If he touches you and sees that you are gonna die in four days!....he can tell you not to go into work -- because he knows a gunman is gonna open fire on you and your fellow employees!That is his dilemma. And the engaging depth to The Dead Zone is that it becomes a moral dilemma of severe proportions. Because when Johnny touches a state politician and sees that this buffoon of a politician will get elected president and will cause a massive war -- the question becomes: is it better to kill this one person and save the lives of millions, or to let nature take its course and let millions and millions of people die. And of course no one would understand Johnny if he explained that he saw the future and saw that this politician was gonna cause a nuclear holocaust. King builds to this crescendo of a moral nightmare by constantly showing Johhny being torn between living up to his gift and being viewed as a tabloid psychic, a total hokester, and a creapy guy whom people don't even wanna get near. It's the story about living with an abnormal mental gift. One of the more compelling sub-plots involves Johnny's love story with Sarah Hazlett -- a woman herself torn between waiting nearly five years for Johhny to come out of a coma and getting on with her life with the very normal Walt Hazlett. It this respect, The Dead Zone blends the elements of a psychic phenomenon story and a compelling love story. All-in-all this story reads like the perfect synthesis between King's "The Shining" and "Shawshank Redemption." And may well be a great place for folks who wanna read a King novel but don't want the blood n' guts of Cujo, Pet Semetary, Salems' Lot. On the other hand, if you want a real nightmare story The Dead Zone is not the place to start. Now, go ahead, and click that "helpful" button! Afterall, one of my major concerns in writing this review is knowing that I am helpful:~) Peace, love, and happy reading! Stacey
Rating: 
Summary: Stick to the TV series!
Review: How in the world can this book get 5 stars?????
I enjoy Stephen King material, but I seriously sense biasness from most reviewers. Boring from the beginning to the end, it drags, well maybe a few paragraphs here and there are interesting, but in this novel, King is too invested in the passing of time and all of its events and detail that make no difference whether or not it's included. The story could have easily been 50 pages!
Then again, the book was written in '79 so i'm sure his style changed considerably.
All I know is that I love the series with Anthony Michael Hall as Johnny Smith!
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Summary: edge of your seat thriller
Review: This story will have you on the edge of your seat. It's a little bit different than kings normal style of writting but i definitely recommend it to all fans of SK. If you enjoyed the story "Road Work" then i think you'll like this book.
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Summary: Let me correct myself...
Review: I wrote another review about this book before, but I have to change one thing on it... Since I read this book, and wrote the review, I've thought a lot about this book, and I've realised one thing....This is one of King's best books, probably 2nd only to The Stand. The way that Smith was feeling the way he did in the end...what he must have felt has put me in this feeling, that Smith really DID want to try and change history. This is an amazing book, featuring a lot of thought, and hard work by King. It just goes to show that King doesn't always have a gory, supernatural monster-filled mind.
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Summary: The Stephen King Book for People Who Don't Like Stephen King
Review: There are always those who do not want to read Stephen King because they simply do not like horror novels. They do not want to read about killer cars or killer clowns, vampires or the walking dead, or any of that fun stuff that many of us absorb like candy on Halloween night. Fortunately, King does right other tales from time to time, which, ironically, tend to get their names changed when they are made into major motion pictures that refrain from prominently mentioning the authors name in their television commercials (which, of course, is how we know when it is a "good" movie of a Stephen King story). Of all those "safe" Stephen King books (relatively speaking), "The Dead Zone" has the virtue of still being fairly representative of King's entire body of work. That is why when people shy away from reading his work, I insist that "The Dead Zone" is the Stephen King book for people who do not want to read Stephen King. Like King's epic "The Stand," the story of Johnny Smith takes as its genesis the idea of "not the potter, but the potter's clay." Johnny Smith is just a young school teacher out on a date with Sarah Hazlett at the cheap carnival that has come to town. Things are going well for the couple when they stop to play the wheel of fortune and Johnny predicts the number that is going to up next, time and time again. The experience upsets Sarah, but things go from bad to worse: on the way home Johnny's cab is in a horrible accident and he goes into a coma. When he comes out of it five years later he discovers the world has changed: Nixon has resigned, Sarah has married someone else and there are strange new devices called Flair pens. But Johnny has changed too. Now when he touches somebody he can tell them things, such as where they lost their wedding ring, that their kitchen is on fire, that their long lost mother is alive and well. Johnny Smith is an ordinary man with an amazing gift that terrifies not only others but himself. Certainly, this is an engaging premise: if you were a mind reader what would you do? But what makes this one of King's best novels is that he ups the ante for his reluctant hero. At a chance meeting during the New Hampshire primary Johnny shakes hands with Greg Stillson, a political thug who is running a low brow populist campaign. In that moment Johnny knows, he absolutely KNOWS that Stillson is going to become President of the United States and start a nuclear war. "The Dead Zone" now becomes about the fact that with great power comes great responsibility as Johnny has to convince himself not only that he should act, but that doing so would be any good. The narrative/argumentative structure of this novel is one of King's best as events concerning Johnny's power lead him step by step to his fate. This is a compelling tale, well told (with the exception of an unnecessary mention of "Carrie"), and more than adequate evidence of why King is one of the best selling authors on the planet.
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Summary: The Dead Zone: A fast-paced tale of a psychic phenomenon
Review: The Dead Zone is an excellent book about Johnny Smith, a young man who wakes up from a four and a half year coma and has the ability to se the future, or know unknown things about people. There are many subplots in this book, some of them including a disturbing serial killer and a psychotic politician named Greg Stillson. Stephen King makes sure we hate this man, for in the prologue he brutally kills a dog, and does other evil things. This book was very suspenseful and fast-paced, although it got overlongish in some spots, and when Johnny shakes the hand of Greg Stillson, it is not clear how Johnny comes to know about certain events, but overall The Dead Zone was an excellent book, and the characters are all likable enough: Sam Weizak, Sarah Hazlett, and Johnny's dad Herb. We of course hate the psychotic Stillson. Recommended
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Summary: The Lost Psychic Lover
Review: The Dead Zone is about a young teacher named Johnny who is in love with a fellow teacher named Sara. After going out one night, Sara gets sick. So they go home. Johnny asks if she would like him to stay, she says no. THe last words spoken are I love you. Then Johnny leaves in a cab. On the way home they are in a terrible accident. Johnny is in a coma for 4 1/2 years. When he wakes up, he realizes he has been somehow acquired an abnormal talent. When he touches people, he is now able to feel what they are feeling, see their past, and even their future. The rest of the book is about his tirals and tribulations with Sara, politics, murder cases, his god obsessed mother, reporters, fanatics and so on. Johnny's mother's last words to Johnny were that God had blessed him with this gift because he had a task in life. And when Johnny is told he only has a year to live, he knows he has to complete the task before it is too late. This book was great, and it really keeps your attention. It's a fast speed mystery that makes you go OH MY GOD, JUST DO IT, OH NO HE DIDN'T, and AHHHHHHH! READ THIS BOOK!
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Summary: Really Good...
Review: But is it a good novel?? That's what I've been asking myself since 3 A.M. this morning when I finished reading it (though that was only because I had bought 12 books and still had another one to get to from the library). It definitely has some of that emotional and psychological aspects which made books like The Stand the best books in the world. But when I think back to the rest of the novel, I don't see enough of a plot to make it a good novel!! Now don't get me wrong, there IS a plot, actually it's more like there is 4 or 5 plots in the book...almost like a number of novellas in one novel, all dealing with the same character. The main point of the book is only brought up in the very end of the book, maybe the last 100 pages. Nonetheless, Stephen King made us fall in love with John Smith. If King had wanted to make a major impact in the literature world, and (especially because of the previous books he had written at that time, all horror except The Stand, maybe) shock his fans, he could have made this a romance as much as a thriller, which I referr to it as...not a horror book. Also, I'd liked to point out that although there are kinda four or five plots, this book is more deserving of a four-and-a-half out of five, rather then a straight four. This is a good novel. If you liked Bag of Bones (The Dead Zone is pretty much a very early prelude to that one) you'll like it, definitely. Even, any other fan of Stephen King should enjoy this book!!
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Summary: Not Stephen King's Best Book!
Review: After reading The Shining and Firestarter and liking both books I read The Dead Zone and was very disappointed, it was slow and boring and the story itself was very unpleasant especially the horrible creepy villain.
Rating:
Summary: one of the best books ever
Review: There's not much more I can say about King, or anything that you haven't already heard about this book. I've read many of his books, and I have to say this one really grabbed me. I saw the movie when I was younger, and it was decent, but it couldn't bring the character of John Smith to life the way this book does.
Simply amazing, horrific in parts, but ultimately touching. Even knowing what would happen to the character after seeing the movie, I still had remorse for him throughout the story. The only book that has ever made me feel like crying.
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