Dreamcatcher

What might be done to human beings by the "Other"--whether the "Other" be vampires, demons or creatures from outer space--is always in competition for absolute horror with what we do to ourselves. Stephen King has, in his time, played with both sources of the nightmarish and in *Dreamcatcher*, the first complete novel since his near-fatal accident, he gives us both.

Four childhood friends, united by secrets, are caught in the quarantine zone when something crashes into the remote forests of Maine; and the question becomes who will avoid being eaten alive by alien fungi, torn from the inside by alien ferrets, possessed by alien minds or menaced by a psychotic military commander to whom ruthlessness has become a macho ego trip?

The Earth is in peril as well, needless to say, but most of our attention is taken up with a few men caught on the edge, and where the most important thing in the world turns out to be the fact that four small boys saved a fifth from a beating.

This has the hall-marks of a good King novel--memorable catchphrases whose meaning we only gradually learn and a sense of how it feels to be human. --*Roz Kaveney*