Finished: The Dead Zone (King) This was definitely one of those books I just couldn't put down, with a main character that I loved! It's only my third Stephen King book, but knowing it was one of my hubby's favorites, I was anxious to read it. Reading Cujo years ago scared me to death! And, watching The Shining years ago through my fingers held up to my face....well, let's just say King was just too scary for me to read more, lol. Then, this year, per my daughter's recommendation, I read his 11/22/63 and it was soooooo good! Anyway, I'm still in that kind of surreal state after finishing a King book where I'm thinking back to different things that happened in the book and relating them to each other. The Dead Zone is about Johnny Smith, a young man who has the ability to see a future or past event associated with a person by simply touching that person or an object belonging to the person. It doesn't happen with everyone he comes across, but it happens enough to cause him to age before our eyes in incredible angst. It is NOT a power he enjoys having at all. It seems to begin when he's a six-year old boy ice skating on a frozen pond. When his forehead is accidentally slammed to the ice by a hockey playing older boy, Johnny blacks out for several minutes and wakes up muttering some seemingly nonsensical statement about battery acid and an explosion that no one can decipher. Nobody really hears what he says, but a few weeks later, the neighbor who rushed to his aid first on the ice and held him while he was unconscious suffers a battery acid burn to his face when he is charging his dead car battery. Fast forward many years later and Johnny, having finished college, is 23 and teaching high school. He has just begun dating a fellow teacher, Sarah, and he's pretty sure he's in love. Johnny and Sarah go to the fall festival and Johnny has another incident. This one involves the roulette game of chance, The Wheel of Fortune. In front of Sarah and a growing crowd, as Johnny grasps the wood rails of the game, he keeps picking the right numbers until he has won over $500. In a trance for most of the event, Johnny doesn't understand or realize what is enabling him to pick the right numbers. Finally, he and Sarah head home when she becomes ill with food poisoning. This had been the night that she was going to reciprocate Johnny's declaration of love. After a kiss at the top of the ferris wheel, she asks Johnny to come home and spend the night with her. If they had just skipped walking by that wheel of fortune, maybe things would have turned out differently. As it was, Sarah became ill and Johnny drove her home in her own car. Willing to stay the night and take care of her, Sarah doesn't want Johnny to see her so sick, so she allows him to hail a cab for home. As he walks out the door, she does manage to squeak out that she loves him back. On cloud nine, Johnny heads home in the cab not knowing that his life would soon change forever. A horrific head-on crash with a drag racing teenager takes the life of the teenager and the cab driver and puts Johnny in a coma for 4 1/2 years! This has a profound affect on his parents, as well as Sarah. They all wait with hope for months and months, but the doctors indicate that Johnny will probably never come out of the coma. Eventually after about a year, Sarah meets someone new, falls in love (but not like she was with Johnny) and marries. When Johnny miraculously wakes up at the age of 27, life has gone on without him, but his ability to touch someone and know exactly what is going on in their life...or what is about to, has become stronger than ever at quite a cost to his mental and physical well being. However, he does manage to save his therapist's home from burning down, and he helps to catch a horrific serial rapist and killer, and he manages to convince the father of a high school boy he's been tutoring that dozens of recent high school graduates will perish in a fire at the annual grad party held at a local establishment. The father has his son stay home and have whatever friends he wants come to their house instead. About half the graduates come, but the other half still go to the bar and they do, in fact, perish in a horrific fire. Each of these events throws Johnny into the media spotlight, the last place he wants to be. Most people think he's some kind of quack, but they can't explain how he could know these things. His last act of heroism is to try and put a stop to a dangerous politician, Greg Stillson, who has talked his way into the New Hampshire House of Representatives. Upon shaking his hand, Johnny sees the future with this man if he's left unchecked. He sees him as a charismatic president who leads the country and world into a destructive nuclear war. He can't see it quite as clearly as he saw the other visions because there is a blue and yellow filmy shield over the vision...but he knows that Greg Stillson is dangerous and must be stopped. Johnny tries to reason himself out of interfering, but he can't stop himself. He realizes that the only option is for him to try and assassinate the politician. After all...he thinks...if a person could go back in time, knowing what we now know, would that person assassinate Hitler if given the chance? Johnny goes through all the preparations of buying the gun, placing himself in the balcony of Stillson's next speech location and then he waits. When Stillson goes to the podium to begin his speech, Johnny stands up and begins shooting. He misses with the first three shots, giving Stillson's bodyguards enough time to start shooting at Johnny. Then, the unthinkable happens....Stillson, the unprincipled human being that he is, grabs a young boy from the audience and holds him up in front of himself as a shield! The boy's parka is blue and yellow. The whole vision becomes clear to Johnny as he is hit by two bullets causing him to plummet to the floor, breaking his back. As the life slowly ebbs from him, Johnny grabs the ankle of Stillson as he comes over to confront his shooter. Johnny sees none of the destruction any more...just an empty shell of a man. His job is done, though not the way he expected it. Johnny dies knowing that Stillson has ruined his own chances by being despicable and cowardly enough to hold a young boy in front of his body as a human shield. It's such a good book and I loved Johnny Smith. I was so sad to see him die, but life as he knew it was so miserable for him anyway. This is one of those books that I didn't really want to end though because I want there to be more of Johnny Smith!