Dead Zone - The Assassination
Dead Zone - Das Assassatat is a novel by Stephen King and marks the beginning of the so-called Castle Rock cycle . The novel was published under the original title The Dead Zone by Viking Verlag in 1979. The first German translation by Alfred Dunkel was published in 1981 by Arthur Moewig Verlag. The first complete translation into German was published in 1987 by Heyne Verlag . It comes from Joachim Körber , created on the basis of Dunkels translation.
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The story is about the teacher Johnny Smith who, after a trip with his girlfriend Sarah Bracknell to the Castle Rock fair, had an accident and fell into a five-year coma. When Johnny wakes up, nothing is as it used to be; his girlfriend is married and has given birth to a child. Much more important is that he has developed clairvoyant skills that he is slowly learning to use. Together with George Bannermann, the sheriff of Castle Rock, Johnny later uses his skills to identify a wanted serial killer .
At a rally he shook hands with the politician Greg Stillson and foresaw that he would later trigger World War III as US President with a first strike against the Soviet Union . Johnny Smith is faced with the difficult decision of whether to look the other way and wait for judgment day or to incriminate his own conscience with murder. Smith eventually prepares an assassination attempt on Stillson. During a political rally, Johnny can point his rifle at Stillson, who uses a nearby child as a shield. Smith is killed by the politician's security forces. As he dies, he touches Stillson and sees that he could change the future. Stillson's photos, holding the child protectively in front of him, mark the end of his political career.
Links with other works
- Vera Smith is admitted to the Cumberland General Hospital, which is above Jerusalem's Lot , after her stroke .
- Sheriff George Bannerman will lose his life in Cujo .
- Richard Dees is a reporter who Johnny expelled from his home for tired of the sensational press. He's the one who tries to track down the “night flier” from the story of the same name in nightmares .
- Chuck Chatsworth's friend Patty Strachan accuses Johnny of "starting the fire with his mind, like in this book Carrie " because she believes that pyrokinesis caused him to burn down a pub, although the cause was a lightning strike and Johnny had foreseen the disaster.
Film adaptations
The book was filmed in 1983 by director David Cronenberg with Christopher Walken as Smith and Martin Sheen as Stillson. See: Dead Zone - The Assassin
Television series
See main article: Dead Zone (TV series)
Based on the book, Star Trek producer and screenwriter Michael Piller and his son Shawn Piller developed a television series that ran in the US from 2002 to 2007 over a total of six seasons. The main roles were played by Anthony Michael Hall as Johnny Smith , Nicole de Boer as Sarah Bracknell and Chris Bruno as Sheriff Walt Bannerman . The character of Walt Bannerman is a combination of two characters from the book, namely George Bannerman , the sheriff, and Walt Hazlett , Sarah's husband.
literature
- Stephen King: Dead Zone. The assassination. Heyne, ISBN 3-453-00704-2
Web links
- The Dead Zone (film) in the Internet Movie Database (English) (English)
- The Dead Zone (series) in the Internet Movie Database (English) (English)
- "Visions of the Dead Zone" - German fansite
- News and entertainment page about The Dead Zone ( Memento from November 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- Detailed table of contents in KingWiki