- Hardcover: 624 pages
- Publisher: Scribner; Reissue edition (Mar 20 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0743211383
- ISBN-13: 978-0743211383
- Product Dimensions: 23.9 x 15.7 x 5.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 680 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (664 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #352,472 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
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
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.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
And people don't think Harry Potter 5 drags on???,
By RICK "rdthomp17" (Somewhere) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Dreamcatcher (Mass Market Paperback)
This book is simply astounding. I see a ton of reviews here stating this book drags on takes a long time to read blah blah blah. I stayed up for TWO HOURS reading this book! It is astounding! The characters are totally realistic, the aliens are scary, and, even though the aliens come out of people's rear ends, it is even realistic (At least in a sense) because the aliens wouldn't understand that it is gross! Sure, people also complain that the aliens live inside people's bodies is an idea already used, but this movie makes Alien seem like Winnie the Pooh.Like my title, people say this book drags on, at least it has a purpose. Sure, some of the parts in this book are insignifigant, but at least it's fun to read. Harry Potter 5 dragged on and had no purpose. One of the chapters were entirely about homework at Hogwarts, but here, it would usually be about Duddits and, in the end, it actually had an impact at the end of the story. I simply love this novel and I'm going to recommend it to everyone I know. And, I say, give it a shot. This book is simply astounding.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Long live the King!,
By Babyblue Kelly (Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Dreamcatcher (Mass Market Paperback)
This book came out after King's accident and he wrote it by hand, which goes to show his dedication since the book is over 800 pages. I really did enjoy this book, it's pretty fast paced, especially in the begining. Maybe towards the middle it slows a little, but not enough to take away from the books merit. The story is about 4 friends who grew up together (they're from King's uber creepy town Derry) and once helped an autistic boy from bullies back in their childhood. This event forever changed their lives and from on they had psychic abilities. When the 4 are on their annual hunting trip all hell breaks loose when aliens arrive and they have to deal with both them and the government trying to stop them. Very creepy and descriptive, one of the better sci-fi books I've read, especially about the "byrus" an organic alien material that gets on everything and continues to grow. This book is a little better than King's earlier attempt at a UFO/alien story (Tommyknockers) and is much faster. I would highly suggest you read this, even if you're not a King fan but more of a sci-fi fan, you won't be disapointed.
3.0 out of 5 stars
C'mon King...I know you can do better than this,
By
This review is from: Dreamcatcher (Hardcover)
I'm the kind of person who would not be able to go to sleep for days after watching a scary movie (hence I haven't watched one yet), so I felt pretty brave when I picked up Dreamcatcher from my local library. It was my first foray into horror literature. I had read King's less spooky books (The Long Walk, The Green Mile, etc.) before and found them very good so I was expecting to be scared out of my wits. I was sadly (and maybe luckily) disappointed.In the beginning it starts out promising. Beaver, Jonesy, Henry, and Peter are all lifelong friends who come together once a year in northern Maine to go hunting. However their friendship is more than what it appears to be. They all share the special gift of 'seeing the line' which they acquired after saving a boy with downs syndrome many years ago. Their fairly normal lives are shattered during a hunting trip, when a lost hunter comes in to their camp muttering about lights in the sky and strange sounds in the night. Soon they are fighting against extraterrestrial beings who have come to take control of earth and their only hope lays in their special gift. Sound interesting? It is. There are definetly some spooky parts when the friends first encounter the aliens and some typical bloody King violence. However the plot takes a dive for the worse as the story becomes increasingly metaphysical and less and less to do with aliens. As the book progresses King seems to be writing off the top of his head and changing the story as he goes. Although on the surface it melds perfectly on closer examination the plot seems a little clunky and stupid. The book also ends up dragging on way too long. I know King can do better than this. This book scared me less than The Long Walk. He is the numero uno horror writer and one of best writers of all time in many people's opinion. He can definetly do better.
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