(We can only marvel to learn that it took King six and a half months to write a 600-page novel in longhand.) This isn't showy or self-pitying instead, Jonesy's exasperation with his faltering body is one of the details that ground the book. The author sustained grave injuries, and one of the characters in 'Dreamcatcher,' an assistant professor called Jonesy by his buddies, has had nearly the same experience it leaves him with a broken hip and foggy memories of having cheated death. 'Dreamcatcher' is also King's post-accident novel, written by hand as he was recovering from being hit by a car while walking on a road near his home. In short, it's a more reliable genre vehicle, with the kind of panoramic framework, large cast of characters and grandiose themes that work so well, in entirely different trappings, for Anne Rice. The fate of the world hangs in the balance, with a breathless race leading up to a denouement designed to induce nail-biting. It will make you see bacon and the mold that grows on food left too long in the fridge in a whole new and unsettling light. 'Dreamcatcher,' his first full-length novel since then, features more explosions and car chases, more gore and more skin-crawling horror. 'Bag of Bones' was a solid Gothic, but the fans didn't bite, or at least not in as great a number as they have in the past. The famous King formula - the teaming of stuff as mundane as rusty cowlings with mind-blowing über-evil - took a little vacation with the 1998 novel 'Bag of Bones,' King's shot at an intimate psychological creepfest. Gray.' That's when you know Stephen King has returned to form.

The natural world fills with signs and wonders bodies begin to corrode a powerful, megalomaniacal madman goes on the rampage and then a snowmobile comes careening down a mountain road with 'some terrible black energy' at the controls, leading one of the heroes to think, 'Every bad thing he had ever suspected was now coming toward him, not on a pale horse but on an old snowmobile with a rusty cowling.

A few slightly off occurrences - beginning with a man who stumbles up to a hunting cabin with a story about being lost in the woods that doesn't quite add up - soon balloon into the rumblings of full-fledged menace. Then there's the rural Maine setting, all too easily cordoned off from the larger, saner world, a place where terrible things can transpire unnoticed. There's something noble yet scary, uncanny yet quintessentially childlike, in their shared past. It starts with a quartet of boyhood friends, regular guys with failed marriages, unrealized dreams and a few too many beers under their belts.

Stephen king dreamcatcher review