Amazon.com.au:Customer reviews: The Dead Zone

Reviewed in Australia on 25 September 2021

Couldn't put this book down which is unusual for myself. The mix of politics relating to today's culture decades later, a fateful date, religious fevour, the unsuspecting killer, psychic abilities, the rich, the poor, the struggle to learn and enjoy reading all woven together masterfully.

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George

One of King's best

Reviewed in Australia on 21 January 2018

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A captivating thriller, populated by debased victims - now perpetrators of gross violence; and, characters of great strength, tenderness and kindness. Loved it.

One person found this helpful

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victoria darling

Our grandson thoroughly enjoyed reading this book

Reviewed in Australia on 4 February 2021

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The book was a gift to our grandson

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Amazon Customer

Poignant

Reviewed in Australia on 12 October 2019

Magnificent story telling and keeping in mind the lunatic currently in The White House,unbelievably poignant .
I first read this back in '82 and thematically it hasn't aged.

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Samrosie

Five Stars

Reviewed in Australia on 8 April 2015

Simply the best

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Antony Simpson

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

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 April 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.

12 people found this helpful

ThatBookGal

A lacklustre ending

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 August 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.

2 people found this helpful

Squeaky Joe

Another classic from the King of horror

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 January 2022

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With girlfriend Sarah in tow, Johnny Smith has a run of luck at the Wheel of Fortune, but after dropping his girl off at home, Johnny’s cab is involved in a head-on collision, killing the driver and leaving Johnny in a coma. Waking up almost five years later, Johnny is shocked to learn how much things have changed. Aside from his mother’s raging religious mania and his girlfriend’s new husband, he finds he is now cursed with the ability to see into the future. Though these ‘hunches’ have always been with him in some form since a childhood accident, these new experiences throw him into a confrontation with a dangerous and power-hungry politician.

I first read The Dead Zone as a teenager, though my memory of it tends to fixate on the movie version (starring Christopher Walken), so I thought it was time I gave it another look. Though it’s perhaps not one of Stevie’s best works, I really enjoyed it, particularly the depth he goes into with each of his characters. If you’ve read his book On Writing, you’ll know about how his writing has changed over the years and might notice some early mistakes in this one – such as an over-reliance on adverbs. But apart from that, it’s a great read and kept me going all the way through, even though I knew the ending.

Another classic from the King of horror (see what I did there?)

H. Cross

King's The Dead Zone

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 October 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.

7 people found this helpful

Blah de Blah de Blah

Engaging read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 October 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

One person found this helpful

5 star		70%
4 star		21%
3 star		6%
2 star		2%
1 star		1%

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