I eagerly anticipated Stephen King's newest novel, Dreamcatcher. I'd already devoured his two latest online efforts, "Riding the Bullet" (which I didn't like) and "The Plant," (which I do, so far) and I couldn't wait to get my hands on a new full-length novel from the Master.

After finishing it, I have to say that King doesn't do it for me like he used to. Sure, he's still good. No doubt about that. And I'll continue to buy his books and enjoy them. But somewhere along the line he went and did the same thing Dave Barry has done recently: become something of a parody of himself. Maybe it's that he's gotten older and more "literary," sacrificing a good solid thrill ride for a "deeper" story, I don't know. All I know is that his newer novels (including The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, which was okay, and Bag of Bones, which I've been unable to get through despite three separate attempts at starting it) just don't have the same kick to them as the older ones like Carrie and The Stand and The Shining.

Dreamcatcher begins with four friends, Beaver, Pete, Jonesy, and Henry, heading up to their annual hunting trip at Hole in the Wall, Beaver's cabin. They have been doing this since their childhood, and from the beginning we are given the impression that they did something great as children, something that both defined them and changed them. I was getting serious IT vibes off this part of the book, but that was okay because I loved IT and King writes childhood trauma and heroism like not too many other authors.

From the time the strange hunter McCarthy stumbles into the guys' camp things start getting weirder. In scenes of graphic gore (nobody does gore like King, with the single exception of Graham Masterton) McCarthy is soon dead and the friends are plunged into a nightmare that no one would have expected except in a King book: the aliens have landed in Maine.

Before we're done the U.S. Military has become involved, led by the megalomaniac Kurtz, and we've seen via flashbacks what happened to the four boys in their childhood that bonded them together and will ultimately save at least some of their lives. We've met Duddits, the retarded boy with something extra and the catalyst for the change the kids experienced in more ways than one. We've also met Mr. Gray, the unwelcome bodysnatcher who takes over one of the characters and who has a diabolical plan to claim the earth in the name of his strange spore-based race despite being increasingly tempted to go over the wall and "go native". Thrown together in a massive 600+ page novel, these characters and situations veer from fascinating (the flashbacks of what happened to the kids, the references to other King novels, the temptations of Mr. Gray, the implications of telepathy) to dull (the entire subplot with the insane Kurtz and his cronies, the protracted chase scene between Kurtz and the character hosting Mr. Gray) to vintage King (the "sh*t weasels" and their MO, the memory warehouse, the strongly drawn child characters). By the time I finished the story I realized I had enjoyed it but that it probably could have been a lot tighter if some of it had been left out. It seemed very much like a mishmosh of IT and The Tommyknockers, stirred around and put through the filter of an older, more world-weary Stephen King.

While I do recommend Dreamcatcher, I advise anyone who doesn't have any experience with Stephen King to start somewhere else and return to this novel after getting a better grounding in the "classics."

Recommended: Yes