'These ideas called for a dangerously unstable politician, it seemed to me - a fellow who could climb the political ladder by showing the world a jolly, jes'-folks face and charming the voters by refusing to play the game in the usual way.' To achieve this, he needed to tip the scales in Johnny's favor by making sure his readers knew from the start that Stillson was a bad man. In his memoir On Writing, King explained that The Dead Zone arose from the question of whether a political assassin could not only be 'right,' but also become 'the good guy' in a story. Horrified, Johnny becomes convinced that only he can stop Stillson's rise and thus save billions of lives, setting the two men on a collision course. When he shakes Stillson's hand at a rally, he has a vision of the candidate rising through the ranks to become president, and then starting World War III. Johnny's retreat into relative obscurity happens to coincide with an upcoming election, and he becomes fascinated with politics, and with shaking the hands of candidates in an effort to see what kind of leaders they might be. After using this ability to help solve a string of murders, Johnny flees a potential life as a famous psychic, but remains haunted by his dying mother's plea to do something with his gift. The Dead Zone follows Johnny Smith, a young teacher who gains the ability to read minds and even see the future when he touches someone, or even touches something that person has owned. This taut, rather intimate story of obsession, intuition, and pure dread has somehow become a dark mirror for the way so many of us live now, and its relevance serves to further cement King's status as a titan of genre 40 years and dozens of novels later. King could not have known in 1979 how eerily prescient his novel would feel in 2019, but here we are. It's been four decades since The Dead Zone, King's fifth novel (not counting the ones he released as Richard Bachman), was published, and revisiting it now reveals that it has only grown more frightening with time.

Ambiguity can be a powerful element of horror fiction - is the house really haunted or are you just going crazy? - but mere pages into The Dead Zone, King wants to make it clear that a bad man with big ambitions is stalking the landscape. When he's sure no one is home, he gleefully kicks the dog to death. The very first time we meet Greg Stillson - the rising political star who becomes the villain of King's 1979 novel - he's selling Bibles door to door when he comes across a very loud dog. Stephen King makes sure you know that right away. There are not very fine people on both sides in The Dead Zone.

The dead zone king