The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone is a science fiction thriller by Stephen King, published in 1979. Its protagonist, Johnny Smith, is a young teacher who wakes from nearly five years in a coma after a road accident and discovers that contact with other people now produces clairvoyant and precognitive impressions triggered by touch, and that some information is hidden from him until it is too late to use it.

The novel follows Johnny out of hospital and back into a life that has moved on without him: his girlfriend has married someone else, his job is gone, and his ability makes him useful to the police and unbearable to himself. The second half turns political, when his visions show him a candidate for public office whose election would end badly.

King published the novel soon after his first successes, and it is one of the few of his books organised around a single clear moral question rather than an escalating horror. It remains one of the more discussed of his novels from that decade.