Dreamcatcher
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From master storyteller Stephen King comes his classic #1 New York Times bestseller about four friends who encounter evil in the Maine woods.
Twenty-five years ago, in their haunted hometown of Derry, Maine, four boys bravely stood together and saved a mentally challenged child from vicious local bullies. It was something that fundamentally changed them, in ways they could never begin to understand. These lifelong friends—now with separate lives and separate problems—make it a point to reunite every year for a hunting trip deep in the snowy Maine woods. This time, though, chaos erupts when a stranger suddenly stumbles into their camp, freezing, deliriously mumbling about lights in the sky. And all too quickly, the four companions are plunged into a horrifying struggle for survival with an otherworldly threat and the forces that oppose it...where their only chance of survival is locked into their shared past—and the extraordinary element that bonds them all...
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)
Customer Reviews
Not Bad
I generally dislike Stephen King's writing, on more than one occasion I disliked his books so much I'd just put it down without finishing it, but Dreamcatcher is actually one of my favorite books. The characters are actually really interesting and the story isn't that badly written.
Amazing!
I absolutely love this book! I only wish I had started reading Steven King’s books sooner.
I liked the movie and the book
I’m often surprised that many people consider this one of Stephen King’s worst novels. Seriously?? I watched the movie adaptation of this book and it instantly became a favorite horror movie! Even though the book is pretty thick, I expected to enjoy it enough to read it fairly quickly... and it didn’t disappoint! Exciting, terrifying reading that moves at a slightly faster pace than readers would ordinarily expect from King! I wouldn’t blame anyone who wonders why I am a fan of Stephen King when I don’t usually like to read such huge books. This book explains why. I, of course, read it as a print book and, even at 879 pages, it’s a thrilling, sweet, sad, suspenseful story that, at the same time, is also a horrifying enough alien invasion tale to satisfy millions of fans of sci-fi horror! Well done, King!!!