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Dreamcatcher

Dreamcatcher

List Price: $49.95
Your Price: $32.97
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: good read
Review: I did like this book, graphic swearing, good plot I didn't read It. I liked Dreamcatcher it will be a movie can't wait. Pleasnt Dreams.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Not his most intelligent work.
Review: This is honestly not one of King's best written novels. The story has crude elements galore and was rated badly by quite a few of King's supporters. Despite these facts, I gave this story a 5 star rating. Why?

The book is entertaining. I had fun throughout the entire novel, had a laugh or two, and enjoyed myself throughout. The book starts the woods on a hunting trip and ends up in Derry, home of the novels IT (King's best) and Insomnia, both great novels. The story centers around 4 childhood friends (Ring any bells, IT readers?) and friendship, though not what it was as adults, still bound together through the miraculous events of their childhood (Sound familiar?) with a few twists of his book It. This time the binding glue is not a promise, yet through their friend Douglas, also known as Duddits, whom has down-syndrome. Duddits also has a psychic ability which he passes on to his friends after they grow up and move on, leaving Duddits to Derry.

The plot besides the past story line is of government cover-ups, UFOs, and aliens. The four friends that left Derry, Jonesy (Recently came out of recovery from a carwreck), Beaver, Peter, and Henry. They gather in the woods at Beaver's father's woods home to do some hunting, while primarily catching up and trying to keep their friendship together. Duddits is forgotten, mainly due to Jonesy's wreck. Two of the men stay at the cottage and face a lost hunter with extreme bowel problems and the others must face a woman sitting in the middle of the road during the snow. After this, possesion of one man whom must fight for his identity, another trying to save hundreds of lives, and the others simply casualties of the fight.The friend's bond breaks and yet it doesn't. All the answers are found in their past, Derry, and the Dreamcatcher.

This book is a fun read which likely did not require much research on King's part, yet it did have King's excellent writing styles to enable a story of friendship and the unknown. 5/5 for 1 day read that got me back in to Stephen King.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: absolutely fantstic.
Review: i can see some people being turned off by the graphic language, or the use of bodily functions, but this is reality, folks. its not excessive in my opinion (really, only the very beginning of the story involves any [bodily functions]), and it's presented in a way that it seems believeable. as for the language, well, adolescent boys and real people in hopeless situations will, believe it or not, tend to utter the occasional 'f-word.'

as for the story and characters, this is a genuine work of art. i felt so greatly for the four friends (no, make it five) at the heart of the story, and they all have their own distinct personality, and are all so greatly and so humanly flawed. Dreamcatcher is probably the hands-down most interesting and entertaining alien story i've ever read, seen, or heard. King weaves quite an intricate web (much like the dreamcatcher itself, no?) of plot and interaction, and although you have to make an effort to keep up with it all, you're by no means inconvenienced or put off - quite the contrary, you'll find yourself snatching up and devouring each new clue and detail as its revealed, and its extremely enjoyable all the way through. this is quite a sizeable novel - 800+ pages - but it will likely not let you go more than five or six sittings without finishing it.

all in all, this is a fantastic read, cover to cover. you'll get causght up in learning more and more about the friends, their powers, and their past, and it all makes you want to know more about whats happening in the novel's present, and most importantly, what's going to happen next. a thoroughly good read, in my opinion one of King's absolute best.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Back to the old King
Review: When I read Dreamcatcher, I was so excited to find that it was more in his old style, a style that made me begin reading his books so many years ago. It seemed that in a few previous books, King seemed to be losing what had always made his stories so enjoyable. I read this book as quickly as I did The Stand and It and will continue waiting patiently for more.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A Broken Leg, A Broken Pencil
Review: True, Stephen King had been hit by a van previous to this novel (you can see that some off his pain seeped in) and couldn't sit and concentrate for very long periods of time because of the pain, but this is still one of his worse novels. The story moves in a jerky way like a cats tail and seems to have very little of a point. The characters aren't fleshed out very well and sometimes you can't feel for them at all. The whole idea of aliens can be a bit stupid at times and the ending really makes the journey feel pointless and like you've wasted your time.
Still, this book did hold my attention to the very end and it does deserve some credit.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Good, not one of the best...
Review: King returns to familiar territory here, "Dead Zone" meets "Tommyknockers" meets "The Body." Still, though it lacks the relentless pulp drive of Harry Shannon's "Night of the Beast" it's worth grabbing for entertainment. Curious to see what the film will be like? So am I. Great cast with Morgan Freeman et. al. and like "Green Mile" it will probably beat the book for a change, instead of the other way around.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Dreamcatcher
Review: King's first novel since Bag of Bones (1998) builds on the stylistic improvement begun with his splendidly well-written The Green Mile (1996). Dreamcatcher may at first seem a falling off, as the opening pages crank up the plot and four lads in Derry (see It and Insomnia ) exchange vulgarities, but by the halfway point an immense fluff of seeming irrelevancies coalesce into a tight storyline and King has well and truly roped readers for the big ride. The four lads-Gary "Jonesy" Jones, Joe "Beaver" Clarendon, Henry Devlin, and Pete Moore-rescue retarded Douglas "Duddits" Cavell from gross bullying by big Richie Grenadeau. Later, in a communal dream, the four boys and Duddits find Richie beheaded in a ditch, a horror revealed piecemeal over several hundred pages that turns out to be real. The five have literally dreamed Richie dead. This spine-shaking ability comes up against a huge psychic enemy: the invasion of the planet by a thinking fungus that means to take over all species. King hints at a debt to Brian Lumley's great short story "Fruiting Bodies" and tells how the red fungus (called "the Ripley" after Sigourney Weaver's character in Alien ) represents all the ETs we have seen in films by Spielberg, Cameron, and others. Twenty-five years later, Jonesy is a history teacher, Henry a shrink bedeviled by suicide, Pete a car salesman, and Beaver a happy-go-lucky partygoer losing his wife. The men meet for a week of deer hunting up in Maine. What they find is the red fungus, escaped from a crashed UFO destroyed by the Air Force and spreading like superflu in The Stand . Only the seemingly retarded Duddits can summon the Dreamcatcher that draws them together and gives them the force to fight a human villain: Kurtz (yes, that Kurtz), a psychotic military officer killing "grayboy" aliens and all humans infected by the Ripley. Top suspense with a surreal climax you'd have to read twice if the epilogue didn't spell out its layered complexities.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Classic King
Review: This is an overall good book. Typical Stephen King. Although the plot is a little on the weak side, King's writing and storytelling is at it's best. There were almost 900 pages and there were very few places that dragged. Pretty impressive. Overall, in the better half of King books.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: A lot of recycled garbage ...
Review: For the first few pages I entertained the hope that SK might be back to something of his old form. However I soon noticed that no sooner had the story started to get interesting than King would switch away to another storyline, completely killing the suspense. The plot lacks originality and owes a great debt in particular to the Alien films. It is rambling and incoherent and I suspect that without the King name it would have never seen the light of day. He has managed the feat of writing a book which is way way too long yet failing to fill in many important details of the past which are hinted at all the way through the novel. The so-called plot twist at the end was just confusing and left me wondering why I bothered to finish the book.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not terribly satisfying
Review: "Dreamcatcher" is a tale that has many of the elements found in "Tommyknockers," and "It," (the four main characters are taken straight from "It," in fact,) but it lacks the more fully-developed plot elements of those two stories, and often times seems to lose its own place. There are moments of sheer, inspired brilliance, but there are also long passages that are dull and seemingly pointless. The characters, though, are well-thought-out and vivid, and there is an especially compelling character by the name of Duddits, a Downs Syndrome boy whom the four main characters rescue in their early childhood, and who ends up rescuing them in many ways - sounds a bit trite, perhaps, but King really got this part of the story right.

King moves us backward and forward in time, revealing bits of the characters' pasts, showing us the same experiences from different peoples' perspectives, and generally doing a good job of weaving together complex and seemingly unrelated strands of the story. The trouble is, something just doesn't work here. The ending isn't especially psychologically satisfying, as King tries to explain one of the book's many intriguing phenomenon, but fails to do so an in interesting, cohesive manner. He seems to struggle as he relates the significance of the dreamcatcher, as well; it's almost as if he's saying the same things over and over, just in a slightly different way, as if he couldn't quite nail it down. I understood what he meant, but he didn't ace the description and the conections as he usually does. In that process, he almost makes one of the main struggles seem superfluous, and this didn't sit well with me. ....

The plot of "Dreamcatcher" is much like "X-Files" meets "Stand By Me;" aliens have invaded the Earth, and it's up to four unlikely heroes to save us all. While the aliens *look* exactly like what we might expect ... they are in actuality something entirely else - a kind of intelligent fungus that infect their hosts through a red, moss-like growth, which can then develop into a legless, weasel-like creature with nasty teeth and a horrible appetite. While infected with the fungus, or when near the aliens themselves, people develop a form of telepathy, which of course leads to many interesting scenarios and adds to the overall suspense and depth of the story. King does a good job of describing telepathic communication and its shortcuts, and also does well describing the void that one of the characters feels when the telepathy leaves him.

Throughout the book, more and more of the boys' unusual childhood and their unique friendship with Duddits is revealed, we come to understand their lives intimately, and care greatly about what happens to them. Speaking of which, this is a very gruesome story, with graphic depictions of violence and pain, and in places I was fairly uncomfortable. ... The issue I had the most trouble with was the hapless border collie which becomes infected with the weasel creature, and goes through all of the associated suffering; as an animal lover, that was especially difficult to listen through. I believe King understood that dog people would have a lot of issues with this, so he mercifully allows the dog to become unconscious when his discomfort reaches levels that would have caused me to turn off the tape and never turn it back on again. But the gore and such don't wash out the story elements in the overall picture.

The aliens are not the only enemy in this novel; King introduces us to the evil, sociopathic Col. Kurtz, ... who only looks out for himself, at the expense of any who get in his way. He is intelligent, but superficial and largely a caricature of a totally wigged-out, high-ranking military man who's lost his mind. As his Top Secret military operation involving the destruction of the aliens goes horribly awry, he slips farther and farther off the deep end, until he finally begins a quest for revenge that clearly demonstrates the level of his sociopathy.

In between truly horrific moments, there are some snort-out-loud funny passages and dialogue, especially in the telepathic conversations between Jonesy and an alien learning about what it means to be ... human. Insane cravings for bacon, learning how to swear, and discovering emotions all provided moments of humor and interest.

Jeffrey Demunn nails his narration - his voice has pleasant tones, and his inflection is almost always perfect for the scene at hand. He comes up with convincing voice characteristics for almost every character, and does a wonderful job with Mr. Gray, one of the aliens.

Overall...I'm glad I "read" this book, but I find myself wishing that King had really aced the story, because it could have been great, and as it stands now, it's only "good." The premise was interesting, and carried out well about two-thirds of the way, but that other third...it just left me a little disappointed.


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