Dreamcatcher (Mass Market Paperback)

by Stephen King (Author)

Editorial Reviews

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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
In an author's note to this novel, the first he's written since his near-fatal accident, King allows that he wrote the first draft of the book by hand. So much for the theory that it's word-processing alone that leads to logorrhea. Yet despite its excessive length, the novel one of the most complex thematically and structurally in King's vast output dazzles and grips, if fitfully. In its suspenseful depiction of an alien invasion, it superficially harkens back to King's early work (e.g., the 1980 novella "The Mist"), but it also features the psychological penetration, word-magic and ripe imagination of his recent stuff (particularly Bag of Bones). The action shuttles between present and past, following primarily the tribulations of a band of five males four regular guys from Derry, Maine (setting of King's It and Insomnia), and their special friend, Duddits, a Down's child (then man) with telepathic abilities. The first chunk of the text offers a tour de force of terror bound in darkest humor, depicting the arrival at the four guys' remote hunting cabin of a man who's fatally ill because he harbors in his bowels an alien invader. Yet the ferocious needle-toothed "shit-weasel" that escapes from him is only one of three varieties of invader the protagonists, and eventually a black-ops containment force, face: the others are Grays, classic humanoid aliens, and byrus, a parasitical growth that threatens to overtake life on Earth. The presence of the aliens makes humans telepathic, which leads to various inspired plot complications, but also to an occasional, perhaps necessary, vagueness of narration is there anything more difficult to dramatize than mind-to-mind communication? Numerous flashbacks reveal the roots of the connections among the four guys (one of whom is hit by a car and nearly dies), Duddits and even the aliens, while the last part of the book details a race/chase to save the world a chase that goes on and on and that's further marred by the cartoonlike presence of the head of the black ops force, who's as close to a caricature as King has strayed in several novels. The book has flaws, then, and each of them cries "runaway author." Is anyone editing King these days? But, then, who edited, say, Mahler at his most excessive? The genius shines through in any case, in the images and conceits that blind with brilliance, in the magnificent architecture, in the wide swaths of flat-out riveting reading and, most of all, in the wellsprings of emotions King taps as he plumbs the ties that bind his characters and, by extension, all of us to one another. (One-day laydown, Mar. 20) Forecast: As King's first book-length fiction since the accident, this novel originally titled Cancer will generate particular interest commercially and critically. It may be nominated for awards; it certainly will top the charts. Film rights optioned by Castle Rock.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 896 pages
• Publisher: Pocket (November 27, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 074343627X
• ISBN-13: 978-0743436274
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 4.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (690 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #70,735 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stephen King's therapeutic alien invasion story, March 31, 2001

By	Lawrance M. Bernabo (The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This review is from: Dreamcatcher (Hardcover)

Because "Dreamcatcher" is the novel Stephen King wrote (in longhand) while recuperating from his near-fatal accident, it easily lends itself to all sorts of psychological interpretations. After all, one of the characters is hit by a car and breaks a hip. To me, the first part of the book comes across as a melting pot of familiar elements from King books: once upon a time there was a group of four boys who were best friends ("The Body"), who become involved in stopping a great evil as adults ("It"), because of a spaceship that has landed in the woods ("The Tommyknockers") and a horrible infection is spreading around ("The Stand"). Fortunately they have some psychic ability ("The Dead Zone") that will help them not only with the aliens but also with the psycho running the government operation ("Firestarter"). For good measure, throw in literary homages to the original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "Alien" with a generous twist of "The X-Files," while keeping in mind that not everybody gets out alive in a Stephen King novel, and you have the general picture of what "Dreamcatcher" is about.

The four friends--Joe "Beaver" Clarendon, Pete Moore, Henry Devlin and Gary Jones--are bound together in a way that they do not even suspect. Beaver is an inventive curser who owns a cabin in the Maine woods where the group gathers for the last time, Pete can find lost car keys or anything else when he puts his mind to it, Henry is a suicidal shrink who has a tendency to lash out at patients from time to time, and Jonsey is a college professor who just "knows" when students cheat on exams. The common link in their lives is Duddits (but I am not letting that particular cat out of the bag--read the book). When Richard McCarthy stumbles out of the woods, dazed and confused, not to mention the worst case of flatulence in the history of civilization, the group has no idea that they are on the edge of the end of the world as we know it.

"Dreamcatcher" is not a great Stephen King book and even while it rehashes some familiar elements once all the pieces are in place the guy knows how to tell a story. The idea that the right people are in the right place at the right time can come across as either heavy-handed coincidence or another instantiation of King's faith in the hand of the divine. Certainly, it does not work as seamlessly as it does in "The Stand." Be warned: this book contains some of the grossest scenes King has ever created (i.e., do not read parts of this book while eating). This is not a book for King neophytes, but for his fans. In the final analysis, the important thing is the man is up and writing again.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Subpar, March 10, 2004

By	Jeremy Ulrey "Bangyrmfhead" (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews

Critics jokingly refer to King's "loggorhea", his ability to churn out several lengthy tomes of new material each year, but the underlying implication is that this is one of the signs of his greatness. Pardon me for dissenting, but when every other novel (and sometimes several in a row) are of as poor quality as "Dreamcatcher" maybe it's time to take a laxative and kick off the shoes for awhile.

This book is cookie cutter King at his worst. Not only does he bite heavily from other writers and filmmakers, constantly quoting other superior works that deal with similar themes and plot elements, but he's guilty also of ripping off his own material. We have shipwrecked aliens that use mind manipulation techniques to control humans (Tommyknockers), recurring flashbacks to life altering events in the characters' childhood (It), an intellectual infant who turns out to hold the key to everything (too many books to count)... the list goes on. Unfortunately so does the book. I suppose it's King's matter-of-fact storytelling that makes some fans feel every word that spills out of his typewriter is priceless, but it's rather obvious to the more objective reader that very little he's churned out in the past 10-15 years (at least) couldn't use some judicious editing. Most of the back story in "Dreamcatcher" is mildly diverting but not at all necessary. Not to mention it smacks of that old "Moby Dick" ploy of heightening the suspense by tossing in chapters unrelated to the current narrative at key moments. Problem is, Melville employed this technique with expertise and finesse, rarely overstaying his welcome, whereas you get the impression with "Dreamcatcher" that King just doesn't have much of a plot to work with and is padding out the opening segments with excess exposition in a vain attempt to achieve some sort of balance with the later parts of the book. This "balancing" means the novel takes over 300 pages to really get going.

I hate to even expand too much farther on my thoughts here, since most people reading this review will probably be diehard Stephen King fans and the ensuing carpal tunnel syndrome will be all for naught, but when that "4 out of 162 people found this review helpful" eventually appears above the byline I want to make sure I've earned the right to protest (after all, rating a review is not supposed to be whether you agree with the writer's assessment, but rather how well they've elucidated their opinion and given someone who hasn't read the book an idea of what they might expect).

So what else do we have here? First of all, as others have already mentioned, King's penchant for namechecking pop culture icons and including snatches of classic rock tunes in his work used to be cute and quirky, but after thirty years of publishing it's now only indicative of his inability to get up off his laurels and try something fresh.

Furthermore, though King has long been known for his realistic portrayals of children (particularly teenagers), he also has a tendency to take advantage of their youthful uncertainty to make them do things that would seem plausible to an adult. In "Dreamcatcher", the pivotal event in the lead characters' life comes when, as 8th graders, they come across some high school bullies tormenting a mentally disabled kid and intervene. That in and of itself is not all that unbelievable, but the fact that they befriend this kid (Duddits for those keeping score) for life seems like an act of charity unbefitting these capricious youths. I say this because, frankly, Duddits as written is not all that endearing a character. I'm sure his enthusiasm and baby talk were meant to be cute, but instead he comes off as a complete caricature that is bordering on offensive in and of itself. The bottom line is he's portrayed as a challenged individual that would be more likely to be tolerated for his inadequacies than embraced as a joy to be around. Furthermore, I'm getting a little sick of these "innocence as salvation" motifs in King's work, but if it had to continue here he could have at least fleshed out the whole telepathy aspect a bit more, maybe explore the possibility that Duddits' mental deficiency is tied in with his telepathic abilities, etc. And speaking of fleshing out character arcs, one character's drinking problem is mentioned repeatedly but only serves to force him into making one dumb decision that helps to drive the plot forward (deus ex machina, anyone?). Another character's accident the previous year is introduced as a psychically tramautic event but only gives King an excuse to introduce the element of intrusive thoughts before the aliens swoop in and give them something of their own to think about.

I could go on but I'm held to 1000 words and I've gotta be getting close. Hopefully I've managed to convey the depth of inadequacies in this book without beating anyone over the head, but the various levels of failings in "Dreamcatcher" do warrant more than a brief "thumbs up/down" synopsis, especially in light of King's reputation and prior body of work. I'm sure he'll bounce back (and forth), but in the meantime he might consider the idea that not everything he sits down to write needs to see the light of day. There's another book entitled "The Lost Writings of Stephen King" that I was perusing recently, and I noticed that the lion's share of unpublished fiction was either written in his younger, pre-published days or in those first 5-10 years of semi-stardom, when his work was judged strictly by it's quality and not just because it had King's name on the cover.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Back To The Old Formula, May 20, 2001

By	Untouchable (Sydney, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Dreamcatcher (Hardcover)

Like quite a few other Stephen King books, (e.g. "Christine", "Needful Things", "The Tommyknockers", "Desperation" and even "Misery"), the story starts off with life going on as normal. We go from there to an uneasy feeling that not everything's as it should be. Then things start to get slightly skewed with the protagonists feeling just a little nervous. They don't know exactly what's wrong, but something's not right. Finally, all hell breaks loose and you are left with no doubt that you have just passed into Stephen King's realm, and through all the unreality, you still get the faint glimmer that this impossible situation just could be possible. We're faced with aliens in the woods, a possible threat to humanity and average guys who, on the surface, aren't really equipped for the fight.

You will probably want to read this book if: - You're a Stephen King fan who really enjoyed The Tommyknockers. - You want to read a new explanation for all of those supposed UFO sightings over the years. -You enjoy epic, save-the-world stories that, let's face it, could never happen - could they?

You probably won't want to read this book if: - You didn't enjoy The Tommyknockers. - You like the action at a sustained fast-pace. The book does tend to lose momentum mid-way through. - You have a thing about profanity.

Although the story is rather formulaic, this formula is the reason I read Stephen King books.