A Zona Morta

Frequently asked questions

• What ability does Johnny Smith develop after his coma?

  After waking from a five-year coma following a car accident, Johnny discovers he can see fragments of a person's past, present, or future by touching their hand. The gift is erratic and comes with severe physical cost. Johnny calls the affected part of his brain 'the dead zone'—the area his psychic visions originate from and leave blank afterward.

• Who is Greg Stillson and what is the novel's central moral dilemma?

  Greg Stillson is an ambitious congressional candidate whom Johnny foresees becoming president and triggering nuclear war. The novel's central question—whether it is right to kill a man for what he will do, not what he has done—is stated plainly and never resolved simply. King presents Johnny's dilemma as a genuine moral problem rather than a genre convenience.

• Was The Dead Zone adapted for film or television?

  David Cronenberg directed the 1983 film starring Christopher Walken as Johnny Smith and Martin Sheen as Stillson. The novel was also adapted as a long-running television series starring Anthony Michael Hall, which aired for six seasons on USA Network from 2002 to 2007.

• What political anxieties inspired the novel?

  King wrote The Dead Zone during the late 1970s in the aftermath of Nixon's presidency and the general crisis of trust in political institutions. He has said Greg Stillson was not based on any specific politician but was a distillation of the demagogue type—the charismatic outsider who channels populist anger toward catastrophic ends.

• Is The Dead Zone set in King's wider universe?

  Yes. The novel is partly set in Castle Rock, Maine, and Castle Rock is central to several other King works. Johnny Smith's psychic gift is one of many King characters with unusual mental abilities, a thread running through Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter, It, and eventually the Dark Tower series.

• Does this book connect to other stories by the author?

  This novel is the first work by the author to feature the fictional town of Castle Rock, which subsequently serves as a recurring setting for many of his later stories.

• Are there screen adaptations I should know about?

  The book was adapted into a 1983 feature film directed by David Cronenberg and later inspired a television series that ran for six seasons beginning in 2002.