And we, as readers, are left with a third of the book to go, and a question about exactly where it goes from here.

Johnny's powers help him solve a crime that has eluded the police for years, but he's not a hero: he's just a man who wants to do the right thing. And he does help: what seems like it will be the main thread of the novel – finally! an antagonist! – is solved quickly and efficiently. So, when he's asked by Sheriff Bannerman of Castle Rock to help with a murder – there's a raincoat-wearing serial killer on the loose, whose modus operandi is to murder one woman a year, terrifying a small town – we want him to succeed. He wants peace, and his life back, and we want to see him get those things. He's possibly King's most likeable protagonist thus far, a really nice guy who tries and who wants others to be happy. This is the biggest sign that something is up (in the best possible way) in King-land: we're allowed time to grow into knowing Johnny. This takes us up to the halfway mark of the novel.

Some people find out about his power, but it's subtle and quiet.

He has operations on his legs and arms and neck, where the muscles have atrophied. Some are unreachable from him, like memories that can't be recalled he calls this blank space in his mind the Dead Zone. It's flaky and unexplained, but that makes it better: you're never sure what he's going to tell people. Oh, and Johnny has woken up with a new ability: he can touch people and read them, almost, telling them something about their future. When he wakes up, nothing is like it was: Sarah is married, his father has been praying he'd die, his mother has found a cult-like branch of Christianity to join, and the world has moved on. Long story short, there's a car crash, and Johnny ends up in a coma for the next five years. They have a potential future together – it's tentative but brewing – until they go to a fair one day, and Johnny wins a lot of money playing Wheel of Fortune. Johnny Smith is a teacher, dating a fellow teacher called Sarah. Not that it's any the worse for that, mind you … (Into the dead zone?) Why? Maybe because, structurally, it's easily the strangest book King had, until this point, attempted to write and maybe because, unlike other King (not Bachman) novels of the time, it doesn't really have a bad guy to focus on and drive the narrative. I had read it, though – I still have the original copy to prove it – but it had slipped from my mind almost completely. It's the first book that is totally different to my memories of it to the point where I even doubted that I had read it, and hadn't just watched the (admittedly excellent) David Cronenberg movie adaptation too much. The Dead Zone was the strangest experience of my rereading experiment thus far.

The dead zone stephen king book