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In his mind, he has the power to see the future. In his hands, he has the power to change it.

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Synopsis

The hero of “The Dead Zone” is this guy named John Smith who’s been bopped on the head a couple of times. As a result of these boppings, he gets flashes of the future every so often when he touches somebody. And he’s shaken hands with this tinhorn politician and gotten a very bad set of vibes indeed—flashes of the pol being sworn in as the President of the United States; visions of nuclear war and universal suffering; the whole fascist ball of wax. So now Smith is thinking about assassinating the man; he’s researching his background and making late-night notes, like a regular old Sirhan Sirhan or Arthur Bremmer; and he’s going around asking all his friends, “If you could jump into a time-machine…?”

And I believed in Johnny Smith. I believed in him because I wanted to believe in him, of course; because the fun of a certain kind of fiction is asking, “What if…?” and then playing with the possibilities. But I believed in him most of all because Stephen King, who specializes in such scary hypotheses (“Carrie,” “Salem’s Lot,” “The Shining,” “Nightshift” and “The Stand”) and who seems to be getting better at them all the time, Stephen King makes it easy and fun and, above all, frightening to believe in John Smith. -- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times