Home :: Books :: Horror  

Arts & Photography
Audio CDs
Audiocassettes
Biographies & Memoirs
Business & Investing
Children's Books
Christianity
Comics & Graphic Novels
Computers & Internet
Cooking, Food & Wine
Entertainment
Gay & Lesbian
Health, Mind & Body
History
Home & Garden
Horror

Literature & Fiction
Mystery & Thrillers
Nonfiction
Outdoors & Nature
Parenting & Families
Professional & Technical
Reference
Religion & Spirituality
Romance
Science
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Sports
Teens
Travel
Women's Fiction
Dreamcatcher

Dreamcatcher

List Price: $7.99
Your Price: $7.19
Product Info Reviews

<< 1 .. 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 .. 67 >>

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Wonderful!
Review: For a man recovering from a horrible accident, this book was magnificant! I've read nearly everything SK has written, and this ranks right near the top. Finished it in 2 days. While it's not as gripping as the Talisman, it is definitely a page-turner and a must read for any true King fan.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: I got lost
Review: I have read every single book Stephen King ever wrote. Until Dreamcatcher. Around page 300, I gave up. The story of the four friends was very interesting and started to develop but then it sort of got lost in details and cryptic telepathic descriptions. Frankly, sometimes I had no idea, what and who King was talking about.
This is such a disappointment and I guess I will think twice before buying more books by Stephen King.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: King's Worst Book Ever
Review: I've read every Stephen King book. No lie, every damn one of them. And if you'd asked me a week ago which one I thought was the worst, I might not have been able to immediately choose; even the really bad ones, like The Tommyknockers and The Dark Half, gave me some amount of pleasure. Now, if you asked me, I'd immediately tell you: Dreamcatcher. It's the worst thing King has ever written.

Some think King's gift is in creating horror: not so. King's real strength has always been in his creation of real, interesting, identifiable characters; it's only through placing such fully-fleshed characters in jeopardy that the horror works. The characters in Dreamcatcher are flimsy sketches at best, carbon copies of other, better King characters at worst. There's the Jokester (who, in one of King's dumbest inspirations ever, is named "The Beaver"), the Alcoholic, the Sucidal Depressive, and the One Who Got Hit By A Car. I never once cared about any of them; I hardly even cared enough to keep track of which one was which. I was rooting for them all to be killed off hundreds of pages before the conclusion of this bloated, tedious book.

There are so many elements of other King novels rehashed in Dreamcatcher, King should sue himself for copyright infringement. You've got the aliens of Tommyknockers, the alcoholism of The Shining, the lone infected man who almost dies before infecting everyone else, straight out of The Stand, the premonitions of The Shining and The Dead Zone, the childhood flashback structure of It, the central evil figure who speaks in flippant colloquialisms, like The Stand to name just one, the out-of-control military man, the struggle against debilitating physical injury, the beatific "special" character, the battle for control of one's mind... King has re-used themes and elements often, but never have they felt so tired and hackneyed as in Dreamcatcher.

The central conceit of the novel, Jonesy's creation of an office space in his mind, in which to hide from the alien presence, is exceedingly stupid and poorly executed. And the dropping of Omens of Great Import or Hints of Past Heroics at regular intervals, purely to give the reader an incentive to keep slogging forward, is insulting. There are so many, spaced so regularly, that they completely fail to work as foreshadowing; they are merely signposts of the withholding of information, an entirely different animal, base and wretched and unworthy of King.

Dreamcatcher proves, above all else, that King desperately needs an editor who's not afraid to use his red pen liberally. King can still write successfully in ultra-long form, as he proved in Insomnia and Wizard & Glass; it's just that he has become so much better as writing short works, like The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Green Mile's installments, and the Low Men in Yellow Coats segment of Hearts in Atlantis, that it's a shame he seems to feel compelled to stretch things that would BARELY work at short story length (Desperation, Dreamcatcher, Bag of Bones) to a hyper-extended six, seven, or eight hundred pages.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Didn't We Already Read This?
Review: I am a dedicated Stephen King fan, and I will continue to read his works even after reading this lackluster, disappointment of a novel. Despite my love for King's work, I found this book to be a giant letdown. Just as everyone says about this book, it IS a lousy combination of many great King novels. It's X-Files meets It meets Tommyknockers, without any of the excitement. I had to give it 2 stars, because King writes well as usual, but the plot and the actual story stink. I found myself not caring if the characters lived or died, and instead, simply hoping that the book would end soon. Unless you're a dedicated fan, don't waste your time with this, the worst novel in the King catalog.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: I didnt even finish it
Review: This was the ABSOLUTE worst King book I have ever tried to read. I always finsh his books, even when he gets a little to long winded. I was so anxious to buy this book that I bought it the day it was available. I got half way through thinking OH MY GOSH this has got to turn the corner for the better. A few more pages and I gave up. This was the only King book i never have finished. When King's next book comes out, I will wait a few weeks and check out the reviews on amazon.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: SK writing sneaks up on you......
Review: I enjoyed this book, maybe not his best, but good nontheless. I find a lot of his books are hard to get into, but after a while you find yourself into the story and enjoying every minute. He seems to take a while "preparing" the story. As far as this book goes, by the end I was rooting for the good guys and running from the bad guys and at the end I was tired like I was actually there!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Stephen King returning to his roots, sort of
Review: I've read everything this author has ever written at least twice and will probably read everything else that he puts out no matter what because I'm a fan and he's just that much better than your average bestselling author. Compared to his other novels, this one is fair, not too bad, not all that great. I thought it was a bit derivative and it reminded me of The Tommyknockers, which is one of my least favorite. However, the theme (alien invaders) did remind me of the "old" Stephen King (old = pre-Gerald's Game -- great book, but to me this is when he started to change his style from balls-out horror to the more mundane, everyday psychological horror. Not necessarily a bad change, but a change all the same). Anyway, I appreciated this book for what it was, which is well written, imaginative and done in his own inimitable King style. I was just a bit disappointed that we had already covered the same themes in other works, TommyKnockers for one and all the mid-life pensiveness and nostalgia that seems to define most his novels these days is present here as well. I liked this book okay, but I sure do pine for those unapologetic horror novels -- It, The Stand, Skeleton Crew, Pet Semetary...

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Makes Tommyknockers look like genius
Review: I never thought I would say this, but this makes 'The Tommyknockers' look like a really excellent book... this is not up to par with King's recent offerings such as 'Bag of Bones' and 'Hearts in Atlantis.' King goes for the the gross-out in this book, and leaves the reader cringing with graphic images of various bodily functions. I am a big King fan, but I cannot in good conscience reccommend this book.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Stephen King Recycles.
Review: This is the first Stephen King book I have read in twelve years, after my elitist English professors convinced me to leave such commoner's books aside for fine literature. Having read It, The Stand and all his short story collections, I was really amazed at how blatantly King raided his past work to create this "new" book. The concepts of alien life traveling like a disease and transforming its victims was already done well in Tommyknockers; this plus the return to Derry, the use of a mute/retard/"special" to unite some boys together -- even a corpse the boys all see that binds them together -- all reused clearly and without shame from previous works. Perhaps King intends this as a nod and a wink to his long-time fans, but in this context it just seems tired and a bit shameless for a man who gets $40 million advances.

Overall the writing was choppy and the editing downright poor; I found several obvious grammatical and punctuation errors and as many word substitution problems ("spellcheck errors"). The multiple-voices style of writing is perhaps King's most modern effort, but it still feels clumsy and dated in his hands, like a grad student's first try at the technique.

And once again, women get the shaft in a major way in this book; all he can do is portray them as sideline characters or odd freaks of nature. At least they didn't have to sleep with everyone else, like in IT. Overall I would recommend this book only for a long airplane flight or car ride, because if you put it down you won't be motivated to pick it back up again.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: the King has no clothes
Review: The shame of Stephen King is that he is now a better writer than he was twenty years ago.His characters are much more fleshed out and have infinetely more depth.The problem is that he is flat out of ideas.He has become so predictable and repetitive and melodramatic it is disheartening.Maybe I've read one book too many of King.In fact I've read them all,and this one is down there with "Christine","The Regulators","Desperation" and "The Tommyknockers" as the worst and least inspired of his works.I guess King and his genre of writing wear thin once you've passed the age of 14 or so,because that is the last time his work gave me the goosebumps or made me think there was anything profound in his writing.He may be the bestselling writer on Earth,but it is certainly not on the merits of his literary prowess.He has become an institution and lifelong fans will buy anything he releases.I'm an old fan but the old King has become threadbare.


<< 1 .. 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 .. 67 >>

© 2004, ReviewFocus or its affiliates