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.
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