James Nicoll Reviews

Stephen King’s 1979 The Dead Zone is a stand-alone paranormal thriller taking place in King’s Castle Rock setting.

1970: life is going well for Castle Rock’s John ​“Johnny” Smith. Johnny has a teaching position, he has pretty girlfriend Sarah, and he has rudimentary precognitive abilities so minor that he’s never really noticed them. His precognition is not enough to keep him from getting into the wrong cab on the wrong night.

One catastrophic head-on collision later and a badly injured Johnny is in a coma. His prognosis is dire.

Four and a half years later…

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There’s a process that TV Tropes called ​“adaptation displacement”:

Adaptation displacement is the phenomenon by which a derivative work becomes successful enough to overshadow the original work completely. 

Jaws, for example. Anyone mentioning Jaws probably means the movie, not the novel. They may not even know there was a novel or if they do, they may think that the novel is a novelization of the film. 

Now, it’s possible that Stephen King is immune to this process, being a sales behemoth, but I think not. And I am not the only person to think even King is victim to adaptation displacement. Take King’s 1974’s debut novel Carrie: mention it and people are likely to think you mean the 1976 Brian De Palma film or maybe the 2002 Bryan Fuller adaptation (which I have not seen) or the 2013 Kimberly Pierce adaptation (which I have also not seen). Or even the Broadway musical (!!!).

I read the novel first and so for me, Carrie will always be the Signet mass market paperback about an unpopular girl: her first date, how she was transformed from outcast to queen of the ball, and how in the end she finally embraced her inner potential. 

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