DREAMCATCHER by Stephen King(800+ pages)/abstract by Lurleen Playfair
A "
DREAMCATCHER"
is a native North American charm meant to keep away evil. Like any religious charm, it only works for believers. In King's huge novel the reader is asked not just to believe but to suspend disbelief, which is infinitely harder.
In this novel, as he does in all of his BIG books(other examples include
The Stand and
The Tommyknockers)King takes us and his main characters, always "ordinary" people, by the hand and leads the whole company out of our very "normal" world and into a situation that becomes increasingly bizarre. The skill is not in doing it but in doing it so well that we, the readers, rarely sit up and say, "Man, that is so unbelievable as to be stupid." See, King paints his fictional world so well that we are caught up in it completely and utterly.
Dreamcatcher is not "great" literature in the usual sense of the term but it is a great read as many classical "great" works no longer are. This novel grips us early and holds us for over 800 pages.
Four boys save a fifth(a boy of limited mental capacity)from a bully. It does not strike us as extraordinary, just an act of kindness, a Good Samaritan thing. Twenty-five years pass and the four, Henry, Beav, Pete and Jonesy get together in the Maine woods for their yearly hunting trip. The hunt quickly begins to go sideways when a stranger staggers into their camp. He is shook up and mumbles something about lights in the sky. Soon, the four are in a frightening struggle with a creature not of this world. This battle is played out while a freak late-fall snowstorm rages over New England.
The story is a series of escalating horrors. Accidents and near misses, hints of strange talents, and small and large terrors lead, as the end approaches, to a mass of happenings so horrible as to make most readers shudder and come close to casting the book aside in disgust. This is King's greatest talent, this ability to make us suspend our disbelief and think, if just for a nanosecond, that what the page holds is real and not the product of a skilled and very imaginative writer.
The madness builds and builds until the horror fills the four
friends' whole world. And then that horror spreads and sucks in more and more people until the reader is convinced it will take over the whole world. And it does. It takes over the reader's world and for the hours it takes to read
Dreamcatcher the reader is part of the awfulness that begins when the stranger(Richard McCarthy)stumbles into the hunting camp. A character referred to as The Gray Man appears periodically to reinforce the reader's sense of doom. Relief only comes long after the book has been read and put aside.
Dudditts, the Downs Syndrome man-boy makes scattered appearances(mostly in the thoughts of the four friends)and the reader soon feels that the fate of the world may lie in his hands . . . or his head.
The denouement of
Dreamcatcher is long, intense, and horribly complex. Henry, the only real survivor of the four young friends who began the story, emerges as the early hero who will save the human race. Jonesy, or at least a small part of him, is in the background and still part of the struggle with the aliens, who by now have mostly been killed. In one of those incredible races to an unknown climax, first the good guys are ahead, then the bad, then the good , , , and then Dudditts, the Dome boy who is now dying of leukemia comes out of the shadows and manages to become the surprise ultimate hero of this surprising novel.
After untold ups and downs, highs and lows, and joys followed by depairs, the reader is sorry to see the end of
Dreancatcher, Happy/Sad ending? Neither/Both. Of course, one is elated that the world has been saved. At the same time, the loss of these four imperfect fictional friends . . . Beav, Jonesy, Pete, and Henry . . . feels a lot like the loss of real friends.
You always learn a lot of stuff in a Stephen King novel. One of the more intriguing examples in
Dreamcatcher is that a phooka horse, in Irish mythology, is a ghost horse that spirits people away. What it does to them is surely not near as bad as what Kurtz, the phooka horse of the novel, does to his opponents.
There is magic in
Dreamcatcher and it is magic created by a master magician, Stephen King. There is much in here to make you think. Toward the end, I began thinking about J. D. Salinger's classic coming of age novel,
The Catcher in the Rye and Arthur C. Clarke's wonderful book,
Childhood's End. Perhaps, King was trying to weave bits of the two together in
Dreamcatcher. Perhaps, but perhaps not consciously.
The ending . . . well, no need to spoil it. For the seventeen of you out there who have never read a Stephen King work, this would be a good starting point.
ENJOY!