Dreamcatcher: A Novel

I read some reviews by readers that just didn't like this book by King but that isn't me. I loved this book - but then I enjoyed TOMMYKNOCKERS too.

Four friends have gone deer hunting for years together but this year will be different. This year they end up in a quarantine zone after an alien craft lands in the forest, and all kinds of havoc ensues - alien and human.

My favorite part of the book was the fifth member of the group, whom the men met and rescued years ago.

This book was the first book King published after his near-fatal run in with a van and readers can see that influence in his writing of this book. That would have been a terrible thing to put behind you, if you ever could.

I highly recommend this book. I loved it. Be aware there are some gruesome parts.

Story 10/5 Narration 5/5

Dreamcatcher by Stephen King is in my humble opinion, a masterpiece! I loved it very much. I don’t know why I waited so long to read it. Maybe I was waiting for a recommendation, from the right buddyread. I knew nothing about this story when I started it, and I’m grateful about that. I had no preconceptions to pollute my enjoyment of this very good book. The story is very original in the manner it has been told. The reader follows what is happening to a group of five friends, bound by a unique friendship, when they come face to unexpected enemies. I loved the way their complex personalities and bonds, have been developed by Stephen King. I enjoyed the mystery, the action, the thriller and even the gory moments in this story. Duddits, my favorite character will stay with me forever. He is such a wonderful fictional character!! I highly recommend Dreamcatcher to people with a huge imagination, whom likes well written tales.

In "Dreamcatcher" King shows a mastery of the use of the vernacular that is the hallmark of his writing. Let us not be mistaken in that King has no intent on writing literature in his work, despite the surreptitious reference to "A Clean Well Lighted Place" while discussing the "Hemingway Solution" for self-termination. Nor is King's plot in this book original through the first 550 pages. And King makes no bones about it, he reveals outright through the dialogue of his characters that the plot is really just a basic science fiction movie, he most often compares it to "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers." But, it is neither King's intent to write literature, nor to create a unique plot in this case, but rather, to get a message across to millions of people through a masterful use of common language. His construction is such that his pictures are crystal clear mental images. And, behind all that imagery, is King's message. That message is interwoven in the intricate explanation of the mental processes that King dissects within the book. In fact, I felt the book read a lot more like "Insomnia" than like "Desparation" or "The Regulators." On a very basic level, King tries to express the idea of emotional telepathy and even some actual verbal and image telepathy. Except, as a vehicle to increase its reality to the reader, he uses the device of the foreign invader and its infection to increase telepathic levels to way beyond normal human conditions. In brief, most King fans will find the book enjoyable and rewarding. I would recommend it to anyone who is a fan of that genre, either by King or others.

Ah, DREAMCATCHER. A book routinely ranked in the lower eschelon of King’s oeuvre, with a coffin lid nailed over it for good measure, based on the even more deplorable (and well deserved) reputation earned by its excruciating motion picture adaptation. The thing is, though…DREAMCATCHER is actually a pretty decent yarn. There are at least a couple of far worse King books (ROSE MADDER, anyone?), to be sure, including his first foray into alien invasion sci-fi, THE TOMMYKNOCKERS. DREAMCATCHER comes off like a fusion of that book with his much-adored (if, in this not-so-humble reviewer’s opinion, somewhat overrated) IT, pairing a sci-fi mash-up of ALIEN, SIGNS and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS with IT’s story of a web of deep boyhood friendships in the fictional town of Derry which prove so powerful, they literally have the singular power to save the world. This marriage allows DREAMCATCHER to improve upon THE TOMMYKNOCKERS by providing a richer base of main characters, for whom we more greatly care than the broad cast of the latter, but hobbles it in comparison with IT, since the layered plot mechanics don’t give the relationships of the protagonists anywhere near the breathing room King afforded his core characters in his 1986 classic. In short, we seem to be expected to feel the same deep camaraderie with DREAMCATCHER’s group of fated friends that we did with the ones in IT, but the former doesn’t earn it because it’s more resolutely interested in the here and now, whereas IT was carried along by a better balanced variation between the present and how it was impacted by the past. King doesn’t usually allow his characters to suffer in service of plot, but he loses that command of his craft in DREAMCATCHER. Having said that, if the focus is going to be placed on plot, then I must tip my hat to DREAMCATCHER over IT in that regard. IT was a massive novel that could prove taxing in the reading, since it vacillated time and again between nail-biting terror-of-the-moment scenes and dry, tempered history-building moments; the rhythm of IT is nothing if not stop/start inconsistent. DREAMCATCHER, on the other hand, reaches a plot development at around the halfway point that pivots into an unbroken, relentless chase sequence which spools out for literally hundreds of pages pregnant with relentless tension. That is DREAMCATCHER’s greatest accomplishment…sprinting for a finish line that’s well in the distance and never once pausing to catch its breath. I would have preferred to have known the book’s core group of five friends in a more well-rounded way (as I recall, we only get to know the family members of one of them) beyond just their united interactions with each other; I would have preferred that King not make so many references to popular entertainment when referencing the pending alien takeover of our planet (at first, it seems like inspired commentary—if aliens really did attack in this day and age, wouldn’t our collective frame of reference be Will Smith and David Duchovny?—but after a while, it just feels like King is relying too much on a kind of literary shorthand, the equivalent of dismissively saying, “You know what aliens are like; we’ve all seen the movies and TV shows enough for you get the idea.”); I would have preferred the chief human nemesis to be drawn a little less broadly, so that he might more naturally integrate with the rest of the played-straight characters which populate the story; I certainly would have preferred that King excise the grossly overcooked, pretentious Epilogue, which reads like two characters shooting the proverbial poop over a couple of beers in unconvincing “purple prose” sentences pulled from some advanced course college thesis, as though King was desperate at the eleventh hour to give the entire piece some philosophical gravity and importance that the preceding 800+ of fun and ultimately basic “will the humans be able to save the planet from aliens in time?!” story don’t warrant. One of the characters even accuses his prattle in these closing pages of being so much “phony transcendentalism”, and he’s right. This book is a delicious, trashy Big Mac combo meal from McDonald’s; there’s no call to try to serve a glass of wine after finishing it off. All that said, each of the characters are a treat to get to know, the environment is richly realized (as someone who has a deep-seated hatred of winter, when King sets his mayhem on a stage of snow and ice, he’s already taken me halfway to his frightening destination before I’ve even gleaned what the plot is about), and the action/pacing is some of the very best in the history of King’s work. IT was a great book, overall better than DREAMCATCHER, but I felt every bit of its 1,000 page bulk; on the other hand, I raced through the last half of DREAMCATCHER like it was a short story. This is not grade-A King by any means (for heaven’s sake, it revolves around extraterrestrial creatures which incubate in our intestines and are violently birthed out of our colons—yeah, you read that right; those of you who long got over laughing at farts would be better suited with literally any other Stephen King novel), and surely (much like THE TOMMYKNOCKERS before it) doesn’t deserve its excessive length (what is it with King that, when he runs with an alien story, he turns it into a marathon?). He’s written more compelling characters, he’s created much darker, affecting horror and he’s used smoother, more artfully constructed prose, many times over before, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that I kept turning those pages with every increasing fervor from start to finish and, ultimately, that’s the basic requirement I want out of my reading experience—is it work for me to push through, or is it a delightful race to the end? DREAMCATCHER gave me that excited run all the way through and, for that alone, deserves more affection than it gets from the bulk of Constant Readers.

FYI, for those of you dreading reading this epic novel because the ending of the film version was the most gonzo, inexplicable, grotesquely nonsensical, intelligence-insulting ending of a major Hollywood film in possibly…well, yeah, ever, please know that the novel’s conclusion (pre-pompous Epilogue, that is) is an astronomical improvement. Literally everything the film got right, it got from King’s pages, and everything it got wrong, was totally its own insipid, brain-dead creation.

The more I read public reviews, the more I realize how little business some people have in reading a book in the first place. Before I even begin my analysis, allow me to warn anybody who was around in the seventies and eighties and is perhaps expecting a rehash of Cujo or Firestarter--this isn't it. This book is not bare gore and tension, as many people continue to expect King's writing to be. If you want that, you won't get it here. That said, for anybody still considering the book, I'm really not sure what my recommendation would be. Honestly, when I look at the writing and the story, I can see very little originality in it. Just for fun, I tried to construct a list of all the things that were taken from previous books, and I couldn't come up with one instance that didn't show up somewhere else. If you're experienced with King, think of this as something of a combination of It and Tommyknockers, with Tom Cullen tagging along just to keep things interesting. Of course, I should also say that this book is done better than any of those which it borrows concepts from. While some might call it bloated (I hate to tell you, but if six hundred and change pages is bloat, somebody needs to cut Robert Jordan's hand off), it is considerably leaner than its closest companion in the King library, It, which helps an awful lot. Doubtless the fact that the manuscript was written in longhand helped in that regard. The characters and the situation turns out to be very similar to what you'd find in Tommyknockers, but unlike the fellows in that clanger, these ones are actually likeable at least some of the time. Though the elements may be borrowed, the overall product is far superior to any of Stephen's previous "horror" stories. All of the usual caveats come with this book, of course. The characters are fairly two dimensional (although I must admit that Henry is one of the better rounded characters I've encountered in a King novel), you'll encounter more brand names in a night of reading than you would watching television, and the story itself carries a lot of ornamentation that takes up space (mostly about the protagonists' pasts). It would also be wise to note that this book does, at several points, deal with situations that King chooses to analogize with the image of dynamite going off in a person's corn chute. You can imagine, then, that this story sits a little on the offensive side of the fence, which means that if you're expecting something like Hearts in Atlantis, you'd probably better keep looking. I also have some issues with the plotting of the story, since I believe that King plays a rather poor trick in his attempt to resolve the story that is more confusing than entertaining. For all of its shortcomings, I have to penalize this book at least a star, but I still recommend it to anybody who's got a few afternoons to spend and isn't offended by a little explosive anal imagery. While it is not his best book by a long shot, this is probably Stephen King's best horror novel, and certainly the one which best exploits his talents as an author.

First off, I will admit to being an unashamedly loyal Stephen King fan. In my humble opinon, even the most medicore of King still makes for entertaining and enjoyable reading. The best of King is downright awesome. That being said, I was amused by some of the negative reviews of this book. Some feel that only die-hard King fans would enjoy it. I strongly disagree. I am most definitely not a sci-fi fan, and began reading Dreamcatcher with that in mind. But this is so much more than your typical alien-invades-earth-tries-to-take-over genre. This story is, in fact, a complex and mind-bending hero's journey epic. Knowing that King wrote this book while recuperating from his almost fatal accident could explain the deeply probing questions raised in the story. King himself was probably asking himself the very same questions. What does it really mean to be human? Is our humanity a good thing or a burden we must carry? It's true that the story takes some getting used to. It jumps back and forth in time, moving from character to character. The reader needs to become familiar with each character and their role in the story. Four childhood friends, bound together by an act of courage as young boys, find themselves once again bound together as adults in the face of the potential end of life on earth as they knew it. In this book, King has created one of the most incredible and deep characters in recent literature - Douglas (aka Duddits) Clavel, a simple boy with Down's Syndrome, who becomes a pivotal presence, the glue that holds everything together. The story is, to be sure, so complex that at times the reader can become somewhat confused. But I found that, for the most part, that confusion did not detract from the story, and, even if some parts didn't make total sense, I simply moved on and was able to pick up keep going. All the characters, good and bad, are brilliantly developed. There is no doubt that this story is more cerebral than some of King's other novels, and for that reason, will not be for everyone. I started it with the assumption that it would probably not be one of my King favorites, but in the final analysis, I discovered that it was. I suspect that most readers will either love it or hate it. The reviews tend to uphold that theory. It was for me, a deeply satisfying experience.