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It would be a foolhardy and foolish reviewer who tried to suggest that Stephen King is other than an immensely talented and popular writer. Despite qualifying as a teacher with a Bachelor's in English, King stepped early onto the fiction highway by selling a short story soon after his graduation. He continued producing short fiction despite teaching during the day and in 1973 sold Carrie to Doubleday. What reader can forget this author's subsequent works which include , to name but a few, Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, Cujo, Christine, Pet Cemetary, The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption as well as the novels written under the nom-de-plume Richard Bachman : Thinner, The Regulators and The Running Man. As movie goers well know, several of King's books have also made it to the big screen with the talented writer doing the screenplay for some of them. Dreamcatcher - another title which has been selected to form the basis for a movie - has all the elements of horror : invaders from outer space, a fungus which takes over human beings and renders them telepathic, 'implants' causing Terrans both animal and human, to become host 'mothers' and so-called 'retarded' children possessed of awe-inspiring mental powers. Nonetheless, the true horror of this oeuvre lies within the human characters and the awful actions of which they find the power within themselves, uninfluenced by the invaders, to perform. Four young boys, Jonesy, Beaver, Henry and Pete, very good friends, save a Downs Syndrome boy, Duddits from cruel and humiliating bullying by older boys. From that day forward they take it upon themselves to look after Duddits, escorting him to and from school each day and generally being his protectors, much to the delight and gratitude of the boy's parents. Somehow, from the day of the rescue, the five are bound together by a form of telepathy which persists through to their adult years. Then Jonesy has his accident, an horrific occurrence from which he barely escaped with his life and which changes him. The other three men of the group of four also undergo life-changing experiences. Unbeknownst to them, Duddits has developed a form of leukaemia but his mental cries to them for help go unnoticed and unheeded. For nearly sixty years, United States authorities have been aware of incursions to Earth by extra-terrestrial beings. Any reports of these have been minimised in the world's press until a fateful time when the four friends have gone hunting to the lodge formerly owned by Beaver's father. An alien spacecraft is shot down and the area surrounding the vessel comes under military command. A hunter with a strange fungal growth on his cheek and an even stranger growth in his belly seeks help from the men in the cabin. The military round up as many civilians as they can capture in an attempt to limit the potential harm generated by the invaders. Their godfearing commanding officer, Kurtz, takes his crusade to a personal and terrifying level as a three-way battle ensues. It becomes obvious to the friends that only Duddits can save the world, but Duddits is dying. This is a very long book. Stephen King has not attempted to condense the action into few words. His writing, and the implicit lessons it conveys, is powerful but perhaps the same messages could have been transmitted in fewer pages. The author's terrible suffering following his traffic accident was put to good use in the description he gives of Jonesy's agony, descriptions which bear the undoubted ring of truth and authenticity. Writing fluent prose in two tenses, past for the present and present for the past, Mr. King never stints on his catalogueof horrors. The timid reader should be warned of this propensity of a talented writer. No doubt this narrative will win as many admirers when the movie comes to a cinema near you as have his previous works.
Reviewed by Denise Wels, July 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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