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Summary: No other author can...
Review: One of the reviewers here confesses: Although he has some complaints, he admits that "no one can draw me into a book better than King". What a wise and true statement! My first SK was Skeleton Crew and then many. There were times of immense joy with It or Pet Sematary or Wizard and Glass but also so-so times such as The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Needful Things or Gerald's Game. Dreamcatcher seems to be among the immense joy group. But it does not matter. As that reviewer says, no one can make me plunge into a book better than SK irrespective of whether the story is so-so or not, horror or not, too wordy or concise. Hey it is the way the man tells anything, his way of humor, it is his voice I keep hearing in my mind when reading his books. So Dreamcatcher, which would be otherwise a total flop in any other writer's hand turns out to be one more gem taken out from the huge treasure called Stephen King, with all its flows, dragging moments; but the one telling the story is King and that is enough! And when I understand the source ofthis charm he has on me, I know that I have grown old
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Summary: Rick is wrong!!
Review: This is the King of old. This is a masterpiece. Ranks right up there with "It", and "The Stand." Rick stated that you can't rip the CDs, but he is wrong. I ripped the 20 discs using Nero without any problem. The results is 2 discs in Mp3 format. BTW, I just bought The Talisman in Mp3 format. First book to be recorded in that format by Simon and Schuster.
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Summary: Audio CDs are Copy Protected
Review: I thought the story was great. Jeffrey DeMunn does an excellent job reading and acting it. Be advised though - you will not be able to listen to these 20 CDs on your computer nor will you be able to rip them down to a single MP3 CD.
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Summary: BAD!!!!!
Review: I'm a pretty dedicated fan of Stephen King, and even though I don't expect to like ALL his books as much as I liked The Stand or It, I do expect some originality which is totally missing from this book. Axtualy, this book is so bad that I couldn't make myself read any more than the first 150 pages or so! I only managed to read that far because I kept thinking that it just HAD to get better... The book tells of four friends who had once saved a Downs Syndrome boy in Derry, and as a result became telepathic. These concepts are already unoriginal: the Stand had a charming but powerful retarded boy (Tom Cullen), and the dreams of Mother Abagail / the Dark Man that were equivalent to telepathy, while It had a bunch of Derry kids with special powers 'save the day'. An alien spaceship roams near their hunting cabin having already abducted a few humans (and planted a weasel like embryos in them), and spread some nasty orange grass / fungus everywhere. Now this is your basic X - Files alien stuff, and also reminds me of 'true stories' of people who claim to have been abducted in the past. Of course the group's special 'powers' (or rather the 2 friends who hadn't been horribly killed in the first 50 pages) help them save the world and overcome a government cover up of this stuff (X - Files basics again). I peeped in the last pages of this book, and it seems they eventually got their way, and got out alive... The book seems to promise a lot: the friends are originally from Derry, which supplied great plots in the past (It and Insomnia). It deals with the values of friendship and kindness towards weaker people in our society, which have their own special powers (The Stand, It). It also deals with spaceship and aliens, which is a subject that fascinates many people and is a great way to introduce horror into a story (like the lost spaceship in The Tommyknockers). All the books mentioned in this paragraph deal with these subjects a lot better than the Dream Catcher, and these are books I definitelly reccomend to people interested in reading stuff that made Stephen King what he is. It's pretty well known that Stephen King wrote this book while recovering from a pretty bad accident, and he mentioned in the preface for this book that a lot of his physical pain and discomfort went into this story. Writing might be a great way to deal with this pain, but maybe a non - horror book (such as Hearts in Atlantis) would have been a better scope for such a battle...
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Summary: Dreamcatcher?
Review: The post roadkill comeback from Stephen King, Dreamcatcher is, to put it simply, disappointing. Basically, King simply rewrote IT and Tommyknockers: Boyhood friends, unrealized dreams, aliens. Perhaps Dreamcatchers biggest eye-rolling inducement is the semipsychotic special forces commander who runs amok through the novel: Kurtz....It had to be Kurtz. And no, it doesn't matter that the character chose the name knowing how silly it sounded. Dreamcatcher is also surprisingly short on the creep factor. Nothing really scary here. But then again, when you come across lines like "Even his Perco don't help. His throat make sore and his body shakes and his belly make hurty kind of like when he has to go poopoo...", you don't really feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. A ponderous 600 pages, King of course indulges in his favorite pastime: over writing. No stone is left unturned in King's world. For several years now, Stephen King's books have become more and more like a roller coaster ride: fun for awhile but you get off right where you got on. In other words, you haven't gone anywhere.
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Summary: A Real Fingernail Biting Kind've Read
Review: Dream Catcher is a real nail bitter kind've read--as with most of this gifted writer's stories you will be hanging from the rafters in delicious suspense. The book itself a tad too long for my taste but none-the-less Mr. King's best effort in my opinion.
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Summary: A great read
Review: Once again Stephen King delivered, with a book I could hardly put down. If it wasn't for my work, I probably wouldn't have. But even so I managed to get through the 600+ pages in less than a week. A very exciting story, with characters you get to care about, and characters that you loath. I must admit though that there were a few little areas where the story dragged, but on the whole it ranks up there with his best. I certainly cannot understand those reviewers who only gave it 1 or 2 stars. The final chase scene was very "edge-of-yer-seat" stuff. I sat up past midnight when I had to be up at 6, just to see how it ended. The only reason I don't give it 5 stars, is because there were other King novels I enjoyed more, such as "The Stand", but I don't think that too many people will be disappointed with this story.
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Summary: Edge of Your Seat Reading
Review: This book had me hanging on each next page, waiting to see what would happen. This is one of those books where you really don't know if good or evil is going to win.
I felt the characters were fun with all their vices and problems.
One of the villians was a cliched evil man from every other cliched evil-man story, but most of the people were interesting, even when limited to a very short part of the story.
The story does jump around a bit, but I never lost track of what was going on (I think that there were times were I was confused, but going straight ahead brought things back together for me.)
The classic good vs. evil, with good as the underdog, has always captured me and this was one of those stories. The good people having only their wits and strong, special bond of friendship to use against the tremendously capable and equipped forces of evil.
While not a deep story, it is a straightforward swashbuckler of sci-fi adventure involving the everyman hero.
Bacon!
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Summary: Insight on memory in an appalling packaging
Review: Dreamcatcher is one of his recent books written right after the near-fatal accident where Steve King presented a very interesting concept on how our brain works. Good, if not for the appalling packaging. Snip: (...)
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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.
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