| Dreamcatcher | |
|---|---|
 First edition cover |
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| Author | Stephen King |
| Cover artist | Cliff Nielsen |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Horror novels |
| Publisher | Scribner |
| Publication date | March 20, 2001 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 620 |
| ISBN | 0743211383 |
| Preceded by | The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon |
| Followed by | Black House |
Dreamcatcher (2001) is a novel written by Stephen King. It was adapted into a 2003 movie of the same name. The book, written longhand, was the author's tool for recuperation from a 1999 car accident, and was completed in half a year.
Contents |
Plot summary
Set near the fictional town of Derry, Maine, Dreamcatcher is the story of four friends whose lives are altered when they save Douglas "Duddits" Cavell, a child with Down syndrome, from being bullied. The four friends have grown up and live separate, but equally problematic, lives. When they meet for an annual hunting trip, they are faced with an alien invasion and a near psychotic army Colonel Abraham Kurtz, who has patterned himself after Marlon Brando's character in Apocalypse Now, Walter Kurtz. One of the four friends, Gary "Jonesy" Jones, seems to be under the control of "Mr. Gray", an unpleasant alien who has a terrible agenda of his own. (“Bob Gray”, the name of the invading alien, is also one of the names of Pennywise the Clown in King's novel It, but could be nothing more than an anagram of Gary, Jonesy's first name.)
In the novel, Jonesy, an associate professor of History, was in an automobile accident similar to King's own in 1999. The alien invasion begins when Jonesy discovers a man walking in the woods who complains of stomach problems due to berries he had eaten. Jonesy then notices a red mold-like substance on the man's cheek, who exhibits dyspepsia and extremely foul flatulence. Beaver, another of the four friends, returns and they observe a large pack of animals who all have markings similar to the stranger's. When they return, the man is in the washroom, dead.
This man, the animals, and eventually a female all share similar symptoms, and learn that they are infected with a macro-virus. Army scientists originally nicknamed the virus "The Ripley" after the female character in Alien because it is intrinsically difficult to destroy, and as said by the general, "this disease is one tough mother to beat just like that 'Alien' chick (Ripley)". The friends discover that ingesting the infectious 'red mold' causes its host to form partially grown, worm-like aliens called byrum (derived by the true name of the infectious mold, byrus). They nickname these "shit-weasels", because they incubate inside the human body, exiting through the rectum and look like red weasels, albeit without legs. Byrus normally grows on the host's skin, and when sufficiently infested, the host develops telepathy. The aliens have a symbiotic relationship with the Byrus, as they communicate telepathically, presumably because of the byrus. If a human is dermally infected, the byrus will eventually die and leave the host, either from the host's immune system, or because of a terrestrial cause that life on Earth is already immune to. Ingestion of byrus can give a rise to a byrum, which is 100% fatal. Byrum are highly aggressive and whilst small, are more than capable of killing a human being.
The story continues as two of the friends are killed, and Jonesy is suffering from hallucinations caused by Mr. Gray, a full-grown alien. The characters then begin a fight to stop Mr. Gray from implementing a scheme to infect a large number of people with the virus and to prevent their annihilation by Kurtz and his followers. This task requires the help of Duddits, who grew up with the friends and is now an adult. Duddits, who is dying of leukemia, telepathically functions as the "Dreamcatcher."
Other information/links to other King novels
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Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles. (May 2009) |
- The original title of the novel was Cancer but King's wife talked him out of using that title.[1]
- A brief mention of The Dead Zone is made, in name only, on a talk radio station that Owen, Henry, and Duddits listen to.
- Mr. Gray thinks about his race "They always came in the ships of the old ones, those artifacts". The Old Ones are a reference to King's Dark Tower series, and H. P. Lovecraft's cosmic horrors.
- A brief mention is made to It when Jonesy and Mr. Gray reach the place in Derry that used to be called Standpipe Hill. Instead of the Derry reservoir (known as the Standpipe), there is only a memorial to those who died in the storm of 1985 and "to the children--ALL the children" from the primary member of the Losers Club, the heroes of the novel It. At the bottom of this memorial is a graffito that would unsettle any of the surviving members of the Losers Club (assuming they remembered what it meant)--"Pennywise Lives."
- "The old ones" appear to be simply a reference to the race that built the spaceships. Near the end of the book, surviving characters speculate that the infectious byrus-fungus probably did not build the spacecraft they use to travel to new worlds to colonize, and may have consumed the race that originally built those ships. "Mr. Gray" essentially confirms this when his thoughts reveal that the ships originally belonged to the "old ones." This may also be a subtle reference to the reason that the aliens attempt to colonize by spreading their infection, rather than coming in "ray guns blazing," as Kurtz warns they might someday do. The race that originally built the ships may not have had a military, and they might not have incorporated weapons into the ships, or built hand-held "ray guns" or other weapons. In any event, the byrus as a race are clearly driven by an imperative not to conquer by military force, but to colonize other worlds via their infection. The thoughts of "Mr. Gray" reveal that their race's cannot conceive of this method of colonization failing, and cannot conceive of another course of action.
- A possible brief mention is made to his novel "Insomnia" when he mentions scissors and scalpels possibly hidden in the man's coat.
References
- ^ author's note at the end of the book
External links
- Book review on Entertainment Weekly
Editions
- ISBN 0-7432-1138-3 (hardcover, 2001)
- ISBN 0-7434-3628-8 (mass market paperback, 2001)
- ISBN 0-7434-3627-X (mass market paperback, 2001)
- ISBN 0-7432-2188-5 (e-book, 2001)
- ISBN 0-7410-0369-4 (e-book, 2001)
- ISBN 1-58945-621-1 (e-book, 2001)
- ISBN 0-7434-6752-3 (mass market paperback, 2003)
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