I recently finished Stephen King’s 1979 novel The Dead Zone and could not have enjoyed it more. The celebrated author comes through greatly with one of his earlier novels.
King, who has written characters with psychic abilities several times throughout his career, had me engrossed with the novel’s main protagonist of Johnny Smith, a teacher who lapses into a five-year coma and awakens with psychic abilities. Although no stranger to writing characters with this sort of power (most notably that of Carrie White in his debut novel, Carrie), King really makes the character of Johnny Smith intriguing.

Johnny Smith can truly make you feel the emotions he is having. Whether it be his sorrow, his anger, his joy, his horror, whatever it is, you as the reader feel it too.

The story spans the turbulent years of the mid-late 1970’s, and Stephen King did a wonderful job portraying those times of political confusion using the fictional characters he created, but also referencing important figures or exploring the real-life happenings of the time.
Something that grabbed my attention the most, however, was King’s prose. King has had both acclaim as well as criticism for his style of writing. To me, however, the way he writes dialogue in particular is incredible. He doesn’t dress his words up to make his characters seem superior; his characters speak like real, regular people.

All of this culminates to make The Dead Zone one King’s finest works and I would recommend it to anyone who loves horror, suspense, or a great story well-told by the King of Horror himself.

The novel was also turned into a TV series as well as a 1983 film starring Christopher Walken and Martin Sheen. But in my opinion, the book will always be better.