Rating: 
Summary: Gregory Lions, author of "A Tangled Web" says: AWESOME
Review: I was drawn inescapably into the tale that King told. The four life-long friends, Beave, Jonesy, Henry and Peter as well as their adopted pal "Duddits". The story is so multi-faceted it was a reader's amusement park.
I was especially impressed by Mr. King's exploration of the mind itself and our own perception of who/what we as beings really are.
The villains, Mr. Gray and Kurtz were particularly odious.
The pacing of the story was high-speed and Stephen masterfully employed his cliff-hanger technique from chapter to chapter building my expectations to a frenzy then always satisfying them.
Anyone who dares dismiss Stephen King's "Dreamcatcher" as mainstream fare has obviously not read it. This is a book that will gain him legions more fans.
(...)
Rating:
Summary: A beautifully crafted book!
Review: While I may be a teenager, I have read a great many books in my life so far, but this book ranks best. It is wonderfully put together and combines suspense, terror, melancholy, humor, and so so much more into it. It made me cry, laugh enormously, shiver, and think. I love this man's writing and this great book. I would recommend it to ANYONE if they didn't mind listening to a few swears.
Rating: 
Summary: return to form without being boring
Review: anytime someone gets deeply into any one given artist, be it a musician, actor, or author you start to pick up on simularities in their works. sometimes it get's trite like the artist doesn't have a strong point of view or it seems that their creative wells dry up. this isn't the case with King. As fans of his works we are all familiar with King's common themes. He loves to use telekenesis or physcic phenomenon, others realms or dimensions, and childhood friends and the loss of innocence, dark humor and great classic rock songs. Dreamcatcher is no exception and have we read books by King with these themes before? yes. King seems to live by the motto if it isn't fixed don't break it and stick with what you know best. King is definately mature enough in his career that he knows where his talents lie and uses them extremely well. Dreamcatcher may not be his best but it sure isn't bad by any standard. His prose is very kinetic and flowing with substance and although this book was over 600 pages, i read it in less than a week. i recently read updike's run rabbit run which clocks in at a mere 200+ pages it took me almost 3 months to read! It also has a lot of his male dark humor that makes me laugh out loud in public! You can never go wrong with a good buddy story and if gore's your thing there's plenty of it to nauseate even the most iron stomached readers. Just let me say I will never look at ferrets or weasel the same again! Dreamcatcher also has good villains like Kurtz ( with a definate nod to apocalypse now!) and the graymen. He also approaches the subject of alien life without dismissing the concept of god or spirituality that sometimes goes with that. It's also a good thing that King seems to crank out the product without sacrificing quality. No sooner than i finished Dreamcatcher than he a Peter Straub released the sequel to The Talisman. I admit that i haven't read the Talisman yet. It seems to be the handsdown fave of Kings fans and I can't wait to read it which i will very soon. Thank god for Stephen King. He's a constant joy for me and I hope he stays around for a long, long, time hereafter.
Rating:
Summary: Keep your mind open and let your imagination go!
Review: Yet another story of terror from one of the greatest writers of that genre, Stephen King once again pulls it off nicely. The story is fresh proof of the fact that he loves to write. You can sense his excitement as the story builds and witness his imagination flow wildly within the entwined happenings and memories of the four friends: as children in Derry, Maine, all the way up to their hunting escapades at 'The Hole In The Wall', where the chilling episode actually begins and the terror branches out and escalates. Watch out for Mr. Gray!-This thought mysteriously invades Jonesy's mind. That was just a premonition of events to come. For when the close knit group gets together for a little vacation of quiet solitude and hunting, Jonsey, Henry, Pete, and Beaver end up on a trip to end all trips. The hunters become the hunted. Mr. Gray will make you feel humble and frail as the 'byrum' fungus and alien weasels infest and grow; meanwhile, telepathy umbrellas the area leaving nothing out of terror's reach as devastation engrosses and closes in. It is a story of the love between friends, their growing process in life and maturity, intuition and endurance, tests of strength and fortitude-just to see it all draw attention to, and reach back at, the love of the fifth friend-the special friend-the one who understood most of all:
'Duddits' holds the key. Although a bit drawn out in places, and hugely far-fetched, it was a different kind of alien invasion tale full of unrestrained and very imaginative situations, hysterical at times as well.
Rating:
Summary: Quite long, but eventually it gets back on track!
Review: 4 childhood friends, Henry, Beaver, Jonesy and Pete, all have branched off and done many different things, from selling cars to going into psychiatry. One is even unsure if he wants to live anymore. BUt all their natural fears are put aside for an annual get together out in the MAine woods, at Hole in the Wall, a cabin they went to back when their fathers took them deer hunting. However, this year, will be different from any year before. Through the blowing snow, a stranger appears at their doorstep, in a rather strange sense. But worst of all, he's brought "Something" with him, and what it is will confuse some, but rally others. STranger still is the rapid migration of the animals in the area, and strange lights in the sky. As everything begins to unravel, these men now know that if they choose to live, it will not be by their wits alone. Their thoughts will take them back to the summer days, when they found a very "special friend," and his gift to them that they have taken for granted, until now. Stephen King first intrigued me on an airflight when I bought "Four Past Midnight" at an airport bookstore. The stories kept me turning pages and I found myself caught up in many more of his works. "Dreamcatcher" is a story that has been compared to "The Stand," which could be notable due to it's page length. The story starts out slow, then begins to build you up, then, drops you before building you up again. It's basically a rollercoaster ride, and the ending had me tense til the bitter end. The characters for some strange reason or other will seemingly blank out of reality and traverse through their minds to the past, such as when you daydream of your past. This can be both enjoyable and annoying. Also, just when you think you know what's going, it's all turned around for ya.
Rating: 
Summary: Waiting for the Next One
Review: There have been good ones in the past. The Body. The Stand. Bag of Bones. This is not one of them. And that's okay, because prolific writers, like career rock stars, have to release some filler with the doozies. King seems to have been pretty miserable during his recovery period following the accident. We are here treated to his convalescent bitchery. If you enjoy lengthy descriptions of farts, of course, you've found your bible. Overall, however, the strongest thing coming out of the book is an overwhelmingly juvenile worldview. The "diabolical madman" character, a mishmash of Apt Pupil's Nazi general and Marlon Brando in "Apocalypse Now", isn't mad at all -- just good at what he does. The "innocent hunters" are portrayed as feebly-minded as the crowds in "Frankenstein" or any kill-the-beast literature -- easily swayed and hardly free-thinking. And the friendship of our four heroes and their Downs buddy is not believable in any sense -- nor does it have the depth to carry us through 600+ pages of anecdotal proof of their solidarity. I greatly respect King's talent. He can describe post-WWII America with an eye for detail that misses little and puts us right there with the characters. But when he tries to moralize or begins to ride the socially-conscious wagon, he loses his narrative thread and winds up sounding silly and empty. Usually, he balances these strains well enough to sweep us through a story and leave us with a quasi-believable sense that he has a healthily skeptical hope in the good of humanity. In Dreamcatcher, however, we don't get the descriptive power or the narrative oomph. We're left with ugly chaos and a kindergarten cutout view of the world.
Rating:
Summary: AWE INSPIRING
Review: First off, let me admit that I'm a King fan. That doesn't stop me making a critical review of his books (as I have on some other occasions), it just means that I acknowledge his supreme ability to draw his readers into his story with effortless ease. I guess it should be difficult to find a positive side for a near-death experience like Stephen King suffered, but if he has one reason to thank the driver who hit him, 'Dreamcatcher' is it. It is obvious that he drew on his own experience as he wrote, and that gives this book an added dimension, way and above even SK's normal high standards. 'Dreamcatcher' is the story of four men who's teenage years leave behind ghosts that eventually come to rest while they are out hunting over twenty years later. In it, Stephen King reaches new heights of fiction writing, surpassing even the best of those books that have come before. We're sometimes unfairly critical of King, judging him by his own standards rather than the standard of writing as a whole. As a result, we give three or four stars to a novel that, from any other writer, would deserve ten. 'Dreamcatcher', even by Stephen King standards, is a masterly work that proves again that he is the master of modern commercial fiction. I hear, too, that his work isn't of high literary merit. Rubbish! High literary merit doesn't mean you can't use words that don't appear in a dictionary. High literary merit doesn't mean you can't unscramble the 'rules' of grammar for effect. High literary merit doesn't mean you have to choke your readers with superfluous adjectives and adverbs. High literary merit is writing that touches the reader; that stir emotions; that drag the reader onwards through the story. So far this year, I have read five works that have been acclaimed by the pundits as being of 'high literary merit'. Two of them I couldn't even finish and two of them were as indigestible as stale bread. Only one succeeded in grabbing my imagination. What does that say of 'high literary merit'? It says that our definitions vary! My version of high literary merit is something that makes me stay up reading till three o'clock in the morning; something that lingers on after the last page is turned; something that makes me say 'Wow'; something that digs my ribs and makes me envious of the talent that held the pen. 'Dreamcatcher' is one of the finest books I have EVER had the privilege to read. It is stimulating. It is intelligent. It is though-provoking. And it's a darn good read. IT IS POSITIVELY EXCELLENT !
Rating:
Summary: CALLING FRANK DARABONT
Review: Several of Stephen King's novels and stories have been filmed. Arguably, the best are Director Frank Darabont's versions of the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (The Shawshank Redemption) and the serial novel The Green Mile. Darabont's genius is that he compresses King's wordy literary style into polished scripts that give just enough detail to carry the story. Stephen King is a master of the story, whether working in his traditional horror genre or moving into more subtle fields. As King himself has admitted ("I have this disease, literary elephantiasis") his work suffers from overwriting. Nowhere is this more evident than in Dreamcatcher. The story line is simple and elegant: Four childhood friends (remember IT) are telepathically linked through their friendship with a mentally challenged young man. The four are trapped when an alien spacecraft crashes in the Maine woods (remember The Tommyknockers). Though some are killed, the power of their love for this young man with Down's Syndrome saves the human race. Strong character development would have moved the story in such a way that we care for the people we meet. Instead, King's predilection for overdescription bogs us down. A sled ride turns into a plod through ever-deepening drifts of detail. Even more annoying is King's tendency to get the details wrong. In an early scene a man wearing a face mask is seen to smile. Oops! The first time I noticed this was in reading Christine. King described a 1958 Plymouth four-door sedan as a "sport coupe." The sports coupes of that era all had two doors and no window pillars. Perhaps even King's editors get lost in his verbosity. Dreamcatcher could have been as elegant an exploration of the persistence of evil as Christine, a much shorter novel. The story is there, even the theology is there, but we become weary of trying to find them amidst the heap of detail. King has a wonderful imagination, perhaps the most vibrant of any writer in history, and that's the problem. We readers have imaginations, too, and King leaves nothing for us to imagine. A less prolific, and underrated, contemporary is John Irving. In the afterword to his gorgeous The Fourth Hand, Irving says that all novels begin with a question: "What would happen if.....?" I hope that in King's next work he offers us readers less weight to carry about and more space to imagine. I slogged through this one, but I'd advise you to pass on it. Instead, go to the library, a used bookstore, or this website and find a copy of King's 1978 novel Christine. If King had followed the example of J.D. Salinger and written nothing else, his reputation would have been assured. At least in Frank Darabont, King has found his director. John Carpenter wrecked Christine on the screen. But no matter. Curl up with it this fall. Savor it slowly through the winter. Then ponder the persistence of evil, evil which uses not exotic spacecraft but the most ordinary of objects, like,say, cars or airliners,and the most ordinary of people,like, say, Arab immigrants or teenage boys.
Rating: 
Summary: Capable of doing better!
Review: Stephen King is one of my top five favorite contemporary writers (along with John Irving, Richard Russo, Neil Gaiman, and Bruce Alexander, in case you're interested.) However, Dreamcatcher is one of my least favorite Stephen King novels. There are traces of the things that have made me a devoted SK reader, but they are scarce. Perhaps the best part of the novel is the character Duddits and the role he plays. A major weakness is the impression that much of the novel seemed to be written with Hollywood in mind. And while we have all reluctantly learned to expect grossness in SK novels, Dreamcatcher carries it to new extremes, and seriously hindered my ability to enjoy the novel. Don't expect anything approaching the greatness of The Stand or It or The Dark Tower series.
Rating:
Summary: Dreamcatcher
Review: AWESOME book!Vintage Stephen King.I have read all King's books,and this was one of his best.
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