Rating: 
Summary: Stephen King: Back in the Saddle Again
Review: DREAMCATCHER shows Stephen King writing what he writes best: atmospheric, visceral horror peopled by strongly developed characters.There are seven main characters who are developed here. Four men, close friends since childhood, who go to a remote hunting cabin; a mentally retarded man who has been, in many ways, at the center of their lives; Kurtz, a madman about to make a bad situation worse; and one of his underlings who realizes that he must change allegiances. In addition there are many minor characters who are well fleshed out. In some ways, this is a sequel to IT. Much of the flashback action takes place in Derry, Maine, and there are references to the way that children disappear in that town. I find it interesting that King wrote the first draft of DREAMCATCHER by hand, using a fountain pen. Hmmm. Maybe I should back off on my addiction to word processing. Thanks, Steve. Good to have you at the top of your form again.
Rating:
Summary: Superb King
Review: DREAMCATCHER
AUTHOR: Stephen King
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster
REVIEWED BY: Barbara Rhoades BOOK REVIEW: Stephen King writes another great novel about the macabre. Four boys come to the rescue of a Down's Syndrome boy. After bringing him home, they all become fast friends until high school graduation changes their lives. Yet, one thing stays the same. Each year the original four boys (and later as men) go on a hunting trip to the Maine woods. Some 25 years later, they still go to the cabin but this year a stranger comes into camp. He is raving about strange lights in the sky and this stranger brings a terrible danger with him. How these four boys - now men - handle this danger and the flash backs of their lives since high school all come together to create The Dreamcatcher. Do you LOVE King? If so, don't miss this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Thank goodness I only listened while driving
Review: I have no problem with lengthy and intense narrative or rather good narrative but this book just drones on and on and on - and it isn't the reader - Jeffrey DeMunn does a wonderful job - it is a shame that the material is so poor. I hope that Mr. King has now worked through his demons and that his next book will have a plot. Not up to his usual standards - dull, long and ultimately pointless.
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Summary: Another King Winner
Review: I've read some of the other reviews and I guess that it's a good thing that I haven't read IT, The Tommyknockers and some of the other stories that Dreamcatcher supposedly took liberties with. I've only read The Girl that Loved Tom Gordon, Carrie and Bag of Bones. Dreamcatcher stands right with those as a winner in my opinion. The characters each had their own three-dimensional qualities and the bad guys (Kurtz and Mr. Gray) held their own without being stereotypical. I'm ready to read more of this master's masterpieces, but thanks to the other reviews of Dreamcatcher I will probably steer clear of the above mentioned books.
Rating:
Summary: A GREAT BOOK
Review: ANOTHER GREAT BOOK FROM STEPHEN KING. IT'S SUCH A GREAT STORY I WOULDN'T BE ABLE TO STOP IF I STARTED TELLING YOU ABOUT IT, SO LET'S JUST SAY IT'S DEFINETLY ONE YOU SHOULD READ. I COULDN'T STOP READING IT.
Rating:
Summary: alright, what the heck is this
Review: After I was done chugging through this crap, I felt naseous, delirious, and wondering why I just wasted 5 days of my life. Stephen King apparently wrote this while he was recovering from a car accident, and you can definitely tell from the 500 pages of incessant rambling that is a pathetic excuse for character development. The other 200 pages are actually used for good scary plot development, which is not much, but it prevented me from burning this damn thing. In this 700 page monster chalk full of gore and utterly repulsive images, I could sense a trace of good ideas smothered under meaningless words which is why i give this 2 stars instead of 1. To anyone interested in literature: I do not recommend this. To anyone who likes to read about gross things and is good at skimming: do as you wish.
Rating:
Summary: well, two and a half.
Review: Stephen King just messed up here--the book does have good points (the mental battle between Jonesy and Mr. Gray is probably one of the better bits he's ever done, adn why it got 2.5 stars) but on the whole, the books is flatter than a can of soda that's been open for a month.
Normall, his characters seem to be derived from stock characters but then fleshed out and made better, more real--here they're not. Kurtz is just a one dimensional killer. He's easily forgotten,and really almost comid and for a writer who makes his villians (and over all character writing) his strength, that's fatal. With the exeption of Jonesy, the four hunting buddies never really get to grow on you , and neither does Duddits. With the main characters in a thousand page book that takes a screwup of magnificint proportion.The subplot involving Duddits (semi-retarded, and a sufferer of Downs) just feels....well, too sugary to me. I liked The Stand, and IT, and the Dark Tower series...so length isn't a problem for me, when the books is well written. But, here, the length is. There is some decent writing, but on the whole, it's a cut or two down from his normal prose, several more from his normal character and plot development, and the effect is just terrible.
The only King book that's worse is Eye of The Dragon. Go read something else, and skip this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Flawed
Review: The first 200 pages of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher are without a doubt the best part of the book. Action and suspense fill the story, and the characters interest you as we come to learn who they are, and what is bothering them. Then the aliens land, and the stranger, McCarthy stumbles upon Jonesy, and we have the rest of the novel. This consists of 400 pages of waiting, traveling, and flashbacks that are needed for the story, but unliked all the same. The theory of the novel is nothing new, but King again tries his best to tell us a good story. At 620 pages, Dreamcatcher is far too long, and this is coming from someone who's read IT and The Stand and as enjoyed both thoroughly. Not terrible, but not great either.
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Summary: best king i've read since the stand
Review: funny, grotesque, ironic, spooky and fun in all the right places.
Rating:
Summary: Don't 'Catch' this one.
Review: I have been a fan of King for years, reading anything and everything he writes. From the description of Dreamcatcher, I had decided that I was not going to read it; as another reviewer said, it sounded as though it had been done before (in both books and movies). But I purchased it anyway, and found that my initial instinct had been correct. I could not get involved with the any of the main characters, especially since only two of the boys are in a majority of the story and the Kurtz character is laughable and easily forgotten. The event that happened when the men were young is uninteresting and weak. The storytelling is not the best; I thought it was choppy and sometimes even confusing. I was just disappointed with the overall effort. I know King had the accident and wrote this one by hand, but he doesn't need to publish everything! Why King would choose to write about aliens (too similar to the movie Alien(s)) after writing Bag of Bones, Hearts in Atlantis, and On Writing is beyond me. I thought a new King was emerging and was excited for his future endeavors, but somewhere along the line King got an idea for aliens, and unfortunately decided to go with it. This book should have been written early in his career, not at this point in his career. He is too talented a writer to tell a story about aliens and telepathy. Overall, low rating is for poor storytelling, poor concept, and for King losing some of that writing maturity I had been waiting for.
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