Dreamcatcher by Stephen King

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
In one of his most haunting and suspenseful works to date, Stephen King proves once again why he is the reigning master of dark fiction. Dreamcatcher is King's first full length novel since Bag of Bones, and it marks his return to his own style of spellbinding horror as he tells a story of four men, the defining moment of their childhood, and how that act bound them together for the rest of their lives.

I have a simple warning for you: Do not start Dreamcatcher late at night unless you're prepared to read straight through until daybreak. I learned this the hard way. With just the first few carefully crafted pages King had captured me in his grasp, and I knew I was trapped. The prose is beautiful, haunting, and terrifying all at the same time. This novel is Stephen King at the top of his game, and I just couldn't put it down.

Every November, like clockwork, four men reunite at a cabin in the Maine woods to hunt and reminisce about their past. As children in Derry they stood up against an appalling attack. They also made a special friend who would change their lives forever.

This year's reunion is like any other until the storm comes, and with it arrives a man named Richard McCarthy, who is lost and delirious. Not only does he have a strange red mark on his face, but his teeth are falling out and he's lost all sense of how long he's been wandering. Although the men do not know it yet, McCarthy has brought something with him. Something that is very hungry.

The storm also brings reports of strange lights in the sky and rumors of a downed spacecraft in the woods. The military is quickly involved, led by a man who just might be insane. His troops come to kill the aliens and clean up the mess as quickly as possible, but once the existence of the "gray men" is confirmed, it becomes obvious that no one involved in the project will ever be the same again.

If they even live, that is.

Readers who enjoyed It (and The Tommyknockers) will find some familiar themes in Dreamcatcher, but those ideas are explored by an author with 15 additional years of writing and living under his belt. Most of all, the personal details gleaned from King's firsthand experience with alcoholism and his terrifying accident in the summer of 1999 help bring the book's characters to life.

In classic fashion, Dreamcatcher is a powerful tale of the battle between good and evil on an epic scale. There are scenes of gut-wrenching horror blended with a quiet sophistication that only King can achieve.

In many ways Stephen King has returned to his roots with Dreamcatcher. Fans of horror and his Constant Readers will not be disappointed. (Brian Freeman)

Brian Freeman is a novelist and online publicist who also runs one of the most popular Stephen King web sites and fan lists on the Internet.

From the Publisher

Once upon a time, in the haunted city of Derry (site of the classics It and Insomnia), four boys stood together and did a brave thing. Certainly a good thing, perhaps even a great thing. Something that changed them in ways they could never begin to understand.

Twenty-five years later, the boys are now men with separate lives and separate troubles. But the ties endure. Each hunting season the foursome reunite in the woods of Maine. This year, a stranger stumbles into their camp, disoriented, mumbling something about lights in the sky. His incoherent ravings prove to be dis-turbingly prescient. Before long, these men will be plunged into a horrifying struggle with a creature from another world. Their only chance of survival is locked in their shared past — and in the Dreamcatcher.

Stephen King's first full-length novel since Bag of Bones is, more than anything, a story of how men remember, and how they find their courage. Not since The Stand has King crafted a story of such astonishing range — and never before has he contended so frankly with the heart of darkness.

New York Times - Janet Maslin

King supplies enough spooky effects and space aliens to meet his usual quota of weird frissons . . . But beneath all that, there is also a new urgency. . . . It makes for great midnight reading.

Book Magazine

This is King's first novel since his near-fatal car accident, and it is characterized not only by the author's gift for suspense, but by an awareness of the vulnerabilities and strengths of the human spirit. The story centers on the lives of four disillusioned, middle-age friends, including a psychiatrist, Henry, who is preoccupied with the varied ways of committing suicide, and Jonesy, a history professor recovering from a car accident that nearly took his life. When the men embark on their annual, much-anticipated hunting trip to Maine, it soon becomes evident that they should have stayed home. This hunting season, aliens have landed on earth with plans to take over the world. The friends' struggle to fight off the invasion turns these flawed men into unlikely heroes. As the plot progresses, the dreamcatcher that hangs from the rafters of their Maine lodge takes on increasing significance, representing the bond between friends and the twisted progression of their lives.
—Jennifer Braunschweiger

(Excerpted Review)

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. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

KLIATT

King has done it again. This time four boyhood friends from Maine (where else?) reunite in adulthood for a visit to their favorite backwoods haunt. Since childhood, these four—Henry, Pete, Jonsey, and Beav—have been telepathically linked. Now in middle age, they are replete with mid-life crises. Henry flirts with suicide, Pete is drowning in beer, Beav has problems in love, and Jonsey is having premonitions that are freaking him out. Isolated in their cabin in the woods, the four become prey for an invasion of aliens—not sylph-like Spielberg creations but squirmy, furry, eel-like creatures with a nest of teeth that makes a shark look toothless. These aliens take over the bodies of humans and use them as zombie hosts. But the catch is that in order to do this they must share the mind of the host and struggle for control. There is lots of weirdness here as the aliens deal with strange human emotions and constructs and as humans struggle against the quite alien minds trying to gain control. Lucky we are, then, that these four dysfunctional buddies are telepathically linked. That is what saves the day. There is plenty of mayhem and murder, lots of blood and gore—everything a King fan desires. Few will be disappointed. KLIATT Codes: A—Recommended for advanced students and adults. 2001, Pocket Books, 882p., DeMarco

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 Cahners Business Information.

Internet Book Watch

Though at times the world seems more like a place filled with terrible marmalade, unselfish acts occur to remind everyone that good exists. Take the town of Derry where high school bullies regularly pick on Duddits, humiliating him in nasty ways like stripping him of his clothes and making him sit on or eat dog excrement. Four younger lads (Harry, Beaver, Jonesy, and Pete) rescue the Downs Syndrome boy from his tormentors and realize they like Duddits. For years afterward, the quintet formed a tight knight group to protect Duddits, who can telepathically communicate with them.When the awesome foursome grow up, they leave town and Duddits behind, but get together every year for hunting (minus Duddits). However, this time their get together is filled with danger as a spaceship containing unfriendly and dangerous passengers has landed. The government quarantines the area, planning to kill any living creature isolated in the infected zone. However one alien has snatched the body of Henry with plans to spread his fungi race around the globe.Stephen King provides his zillion fans with another exciting tale centering on hostile aliens threatening to take over the planet. Dreamcatcher stars heroic people especially Duddits, who is willing to die to stop the destruction of humanity so that his friends can live. Mr. King has written an entertaining suspense thriller that shows he remains a force in fiction.

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Copyright © 2001 by Stephen King