Dreamcatcher: A Novel

Amazon.com Review

Stephen King fans, rejoice! The bodysnatching-aliens tale Dreamcatcher is his first book in years that slakes our hunger for horror the way he used to. A throwback to It, The Stand, and The Tommyknockers, Dreamcatcher is also an interesting new wrinkle in his fiction. Four boyhood pals in Derry, Maine, get together for a pilgrimage to their favorite deep-woods cabin, Hole in the Wall. The four have been telepathically linked since childhood, thanks to a searing experience involving a Down syndrome neighbor--a human dreamcatcher. They've all got midlife crises: clownish Beav has love problems; the intellectual shrink, Henry, is slowly succumbing to the siren song of suicide; Pete is losing a war with beer; Jonesy has had weird premonitions ever since he got hit by a car.

Then comes worse trouble: an old man named McCarthy (a nod to the star of the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers) turns up at Hole in the Wall. His body is erupting with space aliens resembling furry moray eels: their mouths open to reveal nests of hatpin-like teeth. Poor Pete tries to remove one that just bit his ankle: "Blood flew in splattery fans as Pete tried to shake it off, stippling the snow and the sawdusty tarp and the dead woman's parka. Droplets flew into the fire and hissed like fat in a hot skillet."

For all its nicely described mayhem, Dreamcatcher is mostly a psychological drama. Typically, body snatchers turn humans into zombies, but these aliens must share their host's mind, fighting for control. Jonesy is especially vulnerable to invasion, thanks to his hospital bed near-death transformation, but he's also great at messing with the alien's head. While his invading alien, Mr. Gray, is distracted by puppeteering Jonesy's body as he's driving an Arctic Cat through a Maine snowstorm, Jonesy constructs a mental warehouse along the lines of The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. Jonesy physically feels as if he's inside a warehouse, locked behind a door with the alien rattling the doorknob and trying to trick him into letting him in. It's creepy from the alien's view, too. As he infiltrates Jonesy, experiencing sugar buzz, endorphins, and emotions for the first time, Jonesy's influence is seeping into the alien: "A terrible thought occurred to Mr. Gray: what if it was his concepts that had no meaning?"

King renders the mental fight marvelously, and telepathy is a handy way to make cutting back and forth between the campers' various alien battlefronts crisp and cinematic. The physical naturalism of the Maine setting is matched by the psychological realism of the interior struggle. Deftly, King incorporates the real-life mental horrors of his own near-fatal accident and dramatizes the way drugs tug at your consciousness. Like the Tommyknockers, the aliens are partly symbols of King's (vanquished) cocaine and alcohol addiction. Mainly, though, they're just plain scary. Dreamcatcher is a comeback and an infusion of rich new blood into King's body of work. --Tim Appelo

From Publishers Weekly

If you're ready to commit virtually a whole day of your life to this unabridged version of King's latest blockbuster, this is what you'll get: some of King's best storytelling, beautifully read by DeMunn, an actor of great skill and subtlety who knows that less is more especially when it comes to this book's ample blood, horror and ferocious little aliens. DeMunn quickly and expertly creates four very distinctive characters to fit the quartet of Maine men boyhood chums who gather for their annual deer hunt as their lives seem to crumble around them. One of them, the history professor Jonesy, is recovering from a serious accident an event on which King dwells heavily but which DeMunn downplays as best he can. The Maine accents are perfect: working-class for the Beaver, who does menial work; a slight overtone of aspiration for Pete, the car salesman; slightly more polish for Jonesy, teaching in Boston; and a definite aura of erudition for Henry the psychologist. Even the aliens are distinguishably different testimony to the skills of both writer and reader. Simultaneously released with Simon & Schuster hardcover (Forecasts, Feb. 12). Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Four childhood friends, each laboring under the burden of their own midlife crisis, agree to take their annual hunting trip to the north Maine woods. There they are quickly and violently drawn into the immediate aftermath of an invasive landing by a viral/fungal/parasitic alien race. Though one of the friends has always been slightly telepathic, "infection" by the aliens has the side effect of enhancing mind-reading ability in humans. The story becomes a race to prevent the aliens from conquering Earth by viral contamination of the water supply. On this journey, King demonstrates his prodigious writing skills, character development, and storytelling abilities, while leaving his audience more than slightly bewildered by some of the metaphysical and psychic aspects of the action and conclusion. Jeffrey DeMunn does a great job with an extremely diverse range of characters and some unusual vocal gymnastics. Dreamcatcher is a solid purchase on its literary and audio merits and will be extremely popular. For all fiction collections. Kristen L. Smith, Loras Coll. Lib., Dubuque, IA

Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Jonesy, Henry, Pete, and the Beav have been friends since junior high, especially since the day they rescued Duddits, a Down's syndrome kid their age, from a trio of high- school bullies. They stayed Duddits' fast friends and defenders through high school and have kept up with one another for some 20 years now, gathering for a week of hunting in the Maine woods every fall. They haven't been in touch with Duddits the last several years, however, and don't know he is dying of leukemia. When they go hunting this year, they resolve to see Duddits afterwards. But this year, a big, sick, befuddled man wanders into their camp, saying he has been lost. Before Jonesy and the Beav can figure things out, all hell breaks loose. A blizzard comes on, delaying Henry and Pete's return with food and beer, and the guy gets much sicker and then explodes, releasing a legless, toothy thing that \xc9 . Suffice it to say that this is King's alien-first-contact yarn, and it's a corker--blood, pain, and bodily fluids all over the place, concluding with a long, suspenseful three-party chase. Predictably, given King's sentimentality about friendship, Duddits turns out to be the telepathic key to the bond between the other four protagonists, to heading off the alien invasion, and to saving Jonesy's and Henry's lives. An important secondary character, the maniacal army officer in charge of the military effort to "contain" the aliens, is pretty cartoonish, and King doesn't know intellectuals well enough to make Jonesy credible as the professor of history he is. So consider this second-rate King, but allow that it may be the best alien invasion story since Wells' War of the Worlds.

Ray Olson

Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

The New York Times Book Review Fascinating...A frenzied, multilayered, ever-accelerating nightmare.

Chicago Tribune A tour de force -- has more passages of power and imagination than some writers produce in a lifetime...[An] entertaining must-read.

The Miami Herald Prime King at his most engrossing...[he] has lost none of his ability to mine terror from the ordinary.

About the Author

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection You Like It Darker, Holly (a New York Times Notable Book of 2023), Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.