Forest Park Speculative Fiction Book Club

Dreamcatcher
by Stephen King
recommended by Sally

Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher follows the horrifying and terrible events experienced by five friends in the woods North of King’s favorite setting, Derry, Maine.  We don’t want to give too much away, but we will say the novel features psychic communication, aliens, the military, and only one (or two) female characters, neither of which gets more than a page or two of attention.  Our thoughts:

• Two of the characters, Duddits (a boy with down syndrome whom the other four friends spent a lot of time with as children) and Beaver (one of the boys who had a propensity for swearing in colorful ways) were our favorites, being both likeable and honorable.
• King’s concept of the alien was very imaginative because it had multiple forms, almost like the way some trees can reproduce by spores or by growths or by roots, so too does the alien presence spread by multiple means.  We also believe he was right to suggest that bacon would be a key piece of what Earth can bring to the table at any intergalactic meetup.
• The story in the novel develops in both the present and in flashbulb memories from the group of friends, and King keeps the down time in the story interesting by narrating those dramatic events, which of course determine or explain key things about the characters’ personalities.
• We discussed, a little, the overlaps in storytelling style between this book and some of his other work: IT also features a group of friends who grew up in Derry, experienced dramatic and traumatic events there, drifted apart, and come back together in the novel; “The Body” also revolves around a group of middle-school-aged boys and their friendship; The Tommyknockers also ponders the situation of aliens in the Main North Woods; The Regulators uses the narrative trick of having someone be secluded inside their own mind in a metaphorical room.
• This last point brought up our final discussion topic — the question of the mind/body problem.  Dreamcatcher aligns itself with the Cartesian idea of the mind, something distinct from the body in which it exists, an idea we all can relate to and the reason movies like Freaky Friday make sense.  But some philosophers believe we can’t actually conceive of a mind separated from the physical properties of the body itself — that the structure of neurons could not accommodate an additional mind, for example.  We didn’t resolve this age-old debate, alas.

All in all, the group liked the book, but we generally agreed it was too long, and that the story could have been told more quickly without loss of quality.