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Dreamcatcher
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...dreams age faster than dreamers...
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Dreamcatcher
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Cycling up: this is the phrase I use to describe Stephen King’s prologues. As far back as ’Salem’s Lot, King has used the device of a few introductory pages to establish mood, character, and setting before bursting full-throttle into the novel proper. In Dreamcatcher, we are treated subtle – if spooky – look at four lifelong friends who seem to share a psychic gift. As adults, they have moved away from each other, getting together only once a year for their annual hunting trip. King introduces his people – Pete, Jonesy, Beaver, and Henry – slowly, carefully, offering slice-of-psychic-life vignettes and hinting at an important event in their childhood that changed them forever.
Then, the aliens come.
By this point in the story, King has cycled up and is ready to do some serious damage. The aliens which invade – where else? – upper Maine during hunting season don’t come in battalions, and they don’t come armed … at least not in the usual way. They land proclaiming words of peace, mimicking voices that Americans know and are comfortable with: Bill Clinton is one voice, Sarah Jessica Parker another. Their pronouncements, heard over military and government radio feeds, assure the populace – in both English and French – that "There is no infection." Il n'y a pas d'infection ici.
Unfortunately for our heroes, this could not be further from the truth. Dreamcatcher crawls with infection, a particularly virulent strain that grows over the body in the form of reddish moss. One interesting side effect is that the moss – known as either ripley or byrus, depending on your military status – renders the infected psychic. Another is that the byrus can sometimes mutate into a tapeworm-like creature with dead-black eyes and a lethal set of teeth … a creature that grows inside warm bodies until the bodies become too small to contain them.
One of these bodies – in the form of a lost, delirious hunter named Richard McCarthy – comes across Hole in the Wall, the cabin that the four semi-psychic friends retreat to every November. The first to stumble upon the McCarthy is Jonesy, a man still recovering from a car accident that nearly killed him months before (the realism King brings to these memories is painful; that King himself lived through this type of pain lends these passages an urgent, clawing intensity). Jonesy, as we soon discover, is immune to the byrus’s deadly effects … but not to the byrus itself. Instead of the tapeworm-creature, an entirely different form of life inhabits Jonesy, a sinister, alien presence known only as Mr. Gray. While Mr. Gray seems incapable of harming Jonesy (due to a metaphysical stockade Jonesy has locked himself in inside his own mind) he is perfectly able to make Jonesy harm others – sometimes lethally.
On the other side of the coin is a special forces unit of the US Army, lead my a man named Abraham Kurtz, a great leader now tottering just on this side of sanity. His orders: to destroy the alien presence and to round up all civilians in the area who may have been infected with the byrus and hold them in a local barn. One of these civilians is Henry, whose often-dormant psychic power is now at full power. He is able to hear what Kurtz’s real plan is: not only to slaughter the aliens, but to also slaughter the penned-in civilians. He can also hear the voice of the dangerous Mr. Gray, who is planning something even worse. Desperate to save the lives of the incarcerated – and to stop Mr. Gray – Henry calls out to Kurtz’s right hand man, an officer named Owen Underhill. Henry senses that Owen not only fears Kurtz, but that he (Owen) is haunted by the guilt of something he did a long time ago, and that he still wants to make up for it. He offers Owen a chance to be a hero, not realizing at first that he is really offering the chance to himself.
Long ago, Henry and his friends Jonesy, Pete, and Beaver did something great, something that would put the rest of their lives in stark relief. In a scene very reminiscent of King’s novel IT (and not simply because it takes place in Derry), the boys band together to help someone else, a child with Down’s Syndrome who calls himself Duddits. Slowly, through passages that are alternatively touching and scary, Duddits becomes the central figure of Dreamcatcher, the unifying force that holds the other four friends together. Like Owen and Henry, Duddits gets another chance to be a hero, even though, like them, he is dying a little more each day.
Dreamcatcher is a very interesting book for Stephen King at this phase of his career. Since Bag of Bones exploded onto the literary scene, we’ve been treated to a writer who had become somehow more mannered in his approach to both writing in general and horror in particular. This was not to say King had weakened his literary voice; just that the voice was subtler. The appearance of The Plant in installments on the internet seemed to be a shift back to more visceral horror, but as that was begun in the 80’s, perhaps the existing storyline was simply more gruesome, not really reflective of King’s current output.
Not so. With Dreamcatcher, King is definitely back on the turf that most fans and critics associate him with: knock-down, drag-out horror, with a flair for precise characterization and a dash of something slightly spiritual. What most readers won’t realize, though, is that just because King is revisiting some of his earlier plot devices (the term splatter can only begin to describe some of the more gruesome scenes) doesn’t mean he has left behind his newfound voice. What Dreamcatcher has to offer – and I believe this to be a rare thing – is the marriage of "early King" and "later King," the successful union of extreme terror and literary tone. It’s as if Cujo met Hearts in Atlantis and they decided to paint the town red.
Dreamcatcher is bound to merit some comparisons, the most obvious of which is IT. Not only does a good portion of the novel take place in Derry, but the way the past and present thread together as the novel steams along also recalls the earlier book. (Of note to IT fans: there’s a special, terrifying treat midway through the novel that will have readers talking for years.) Bringing up The Tommyknockers is often enough to make any King fan cringe, but here the comparison is favorable. Dreamcatcher is what The Tommyknockers could have been minus a few hundred pages; reading the two back to back gives one a sense of an author in a period of evolution. The more recent Bachman novel, The Regulators, gives readers a glimpse of Jonesy’s mental barricade against Mr. Gray: in the previous book, the character Audrey is able to hide from a demon named Tak using similar methods. In both books, these people trapped in their own minds are able to reach the outside world through the use of telephones – both times to spectacular effects.
Other than these minor points, though, Dreamcatcher is truly its own novel. King’s characters are developing more and more shades of gray – pun definitely intended – and sometimes the Good Guys and the Bad Guys are not as readily identifiable. The final hundred or so pages of Dreamcatcher details one extended car chase, a multi-part, multi-viewpoint sequence that kicks up the tension level up a few notches each time the chase advances – an ending utterly unlike anything King has ever done before. Even in closing, King doesn’t quite play nice. Before the cycle-down, the quiet resolution after all the carnage, King throws in a couple of spikes of ambiguity. As we close the book, thinking over King’s clever little anagrams, we are left to wonder: what portion of evil came from the skies … and what portion was already here, just waiting to go on a cathartic killing spree? There are no definite answers, and that might just be the most chilling part of all.
First, the News
Once upon a time, in the haunted city of Derry (site of the classics It and Insomnia), four boys stood together and did a brave thing. Certainly a good thing, perhaps even a great thing. Something that changed them in ways they could never begin to understand.
Twenty-five years later, the boys are now men with separate lives and separate troubles. But the ties endure. Each hunting season the foursome reunite in the woods of Maine. This year, a stranger stumbles into their camp, disoriented, mumbling something about lights in the sky. His incoherent ravings prove to be disturbingly prescient. Before long, these men will be plunged into a horrifying struggle with a creature from another world. Their only chance of survival is locked in their shared past -- and in the Dreamcatcher.
Stephen King's first full-length novel since Bag of Bones is, more than anything, a story of how men remember, and how they find their courage. Not since The Stand has King crafted a story of such astonishing range -- and never before has he contended so frankly with the heart of darkness.
This thing seems to be of IT-esque proportions (set in Derry, no less!)nd I, for one, cannot wait to read it. SOOOO exciting!
Quabbin is in literary limelight
Friday, May 12, 2000
By Nancy Sheehan Telegram & Gazette Staff
HARDWICK -- Just when the courts say it's fine to drink unfiltered Quabbin water, there's talk that it's contaminated by spores from outer space.
But watershed officials are not worried about building a huge filtration plant to remove the alien seed because the source of the speculation is the delightfully warped imagination of horror novelist Stephen King.
Mr. King has toured the vast woodland surrounding the 25,000-acre reservoir, doing research for an upcoming novel, some scenes of which will be set in the Quabbin woods. Joseph M. McGinn, director of the watershed management division of the Metropolitan District Commission, was one of a handful of officials who took the four-hour tour with Mr. King in March. He said the author did not reveal details of the plot, but talked in general terms about its other worldly drift.
From what Mr. McGinn could gather, the aliens chose Quabbin because it's the water supply for 2.5 million people in Greater Boston, and they're looking to influence the minds of residents of big metropolitan areas.
"They've determined that getting something into the water supply is perhaps one of the most innocuous ways of accomplishing that objective," he said. "But their plans go awry."
The prolific Mr. King, 53, already has completed a first draft of the novel, which will be titled "Dreamcatcher." It is the first book he has written since a devastating accident last June, when he was hit by a van as he walked along a road near his home in Maine. During his ongoing recovery he also published a novella, "Riding the Bullet," on the Internet and put finishing touches on another novel, said Susan Moldow, his publisher at Scribner.
"The next is 'From a Buick 8,' which he was working on just when he had his accident," she said. "We're going to publish that, then we're going to publish 'Dreamcatcher,' but probably not until 2002 or something."
Ms. Moldow said she hasn't yet finished reading the draft, but has been told it has a dazzling conclusion set at the Quabbin.
"The part I read so far involved a bunch of old buddies -- four guys who get together every year and go hunting over Thanksgiving," she said. "Clearly, what they find in the woods isn't what they think they're going to find."
Watershed officials found Mr. King a congenial visitor, with a down-to-earth nature uncommon among publishing superstars.
"He was very pleasant," Mr. McGinn said. "He's remarkably intelligent and just a very personable, friendly guy."
Quabbin Superintendent William E. Pula had brought two Stephen King books with him on tour day, thinking that, if the author seemed approachable, he would ask him to autograph them for his children.
"The minute he got in the car and saw them he picked them up and asked me how I wanted him to sign them," Mr. Pula said.
Throughout the tour, Mr. King was very inquisitive, posing questions with a quirky twist one would only expect from a master of the horror genre. He also liked the area's the dark and spooky spaces best, especially a dank old diversion tunnel inside Windsor Dam.
"You go way down into it and there's this big, loud metal door you clang shut behind you," Mr. Pula said. "He asked 'What if somebody got stuck in here?' He brought that kind of thing up everywhere we went: 'What if somebody fell in there? What would happen?' Obviously his mind works along those lines."
His guides drove Mr. King along the old roads that wind through the oak and pine forests around the reservoir, unpaved remnants of four towns flooded when the Quabbin was built in the 1930s. He was especially interested in the roads that lead from the Goodnough Dike to Shaft 12, on the reservoir's Hardwick shoreline. The shaft, valves and pipes enclosed in a stone building, is an intake which draws water from the Quabbin down into an underground aqueduct bound for Boston 65 miles away, via the Wachusett Reservoir.
"We took him up there and he said 'Oh, this will be good,' " Mr. Pula said. "He could picture the guy driving through the woods. He has this Jeep that he has the body stuffed in the back of and he's going to drive him up then stuff him in Shaft 12."
But it's not just any old dead body.
"It's supposed to be infected with alien cysts or parasites or spores," Mr. Pula said. "This guy is going to throw it in Shaft 12 so he can infect the whole water system."
Mr. King took pictures of Shaft 12, which apparently will be a key location in his novel.
It won't be the first time the unpretentious building has been a literary edifice of evildoing.
Mystery novelist Jane Langton had one of her characters stuff a body down Shaft 12 in her 1984 novel "Emily Dickinson is Dead," Mr. Pula said.
The surrounding Quabbin woods figured in several scenes of former Gov. William F. Weld's first novel, "Mackerel by Moonlight." An upcoming Weld book will focus on the history of the Quabbin and the 2,500 people who were displaced as it was built.
"All of a sudden we're quite the literary location," Mr. Pula said.
Mr. King was moved by the story of the dissolution of the Quabbin towns and the sacrifices the residents made. "He was very open and attentive to that kind of detail," Mr. McGinn said. "I really think he was astounded at the scale of the Quabbin's creation and the kind of human and social impact it had."
Members of the tour group said Mr. King's health is improving after months of physical therapy, which he still occasionally undergoes.
He walked around, but with an ever-available cane hooked over his left arm. He was able to walk up and down stairs, but has lost a lot of weight.
"He's still, I think, in the healing phase from that accident, but his spirits were good," Mr. McGinn said.
Mr. King spoke freely with his tour guides about the real-life horrors of his accident, which happened when a motorist lost control of his van because of a dog that was loose inside.
He said he just caught sight of the van out of the corner of his eye and the next thing he knew he was on the ground," Mr. Pula said. "He was down and his hips were facing in the wrong direction, the way they shouldn't have been facing."
Long before Mr. King's visit, ways to prevent possible contamination of the reservoir were much discussed among those who oversee the watershed. A judge ruled last week that a $441 million filtration plant was not needed to clean the water, something the federal government had pushed for against strong state opposition.
Filtration plant or no, contamination on any kind of Stephen King scale is about as remote as the Quabbin is from Boston, Mr. Pula said.
"If somebody really wants to do something to the Boston water, it's not worth putting anything in the Quabbin," he said. "We're way out there and it's a huge body of water. To bring chemicals in you'd need tractor trailer trucks." But what about spores from another planet? Maybe you would only need a few to taint the whole water system. "Maybe," Mr. Pula said. "Nobody knows what would happen with those."
