![]() ![]() King hints at a debt to Brian Lumley's great short story "Fruiting Bodies" and tells how the red fungus (called "the Ripley" after Sigourney Weaver's character in Alien) represents all the ETs we have seen in films by Spielberg, Cameron, and others. This spine-shaking ability comes up against a huge psychic enemy: the invasion of the planet by a thinking fungus that means to take over all species. The five have literally dreamed Richie dead. Later, in a communal dream, the four boys and Duddits find Richie beheaded in a ditch, a horror revealed piecemeal over several hundred pages that turns out to be real. The four lads-Gary "Jonesy" Jones, Joe "Beaver" Clarendon, Henry Devlin, and Pete Moore-rescue retarded Douglas "Duddits" Cavell from gross bullying by big Richie Grenadeau. ĭreamcatcher may at first seem a falling off, as the opening pages crank up the plot and four lads in Derry (see It and Insomnia) exchange vulgarities, but by the halfway point an immense fluff of seeming irrelevancies coalesce into a tight storyline and King has well and truly roped readers for the big ride. King's first novel since Bag of Bones (1998) builds on the stylistic improvement begun with his splendidly well-written The Green Mile (1996). ![]()
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