Dear Marjorie,
I’ve always admired Stephen King, too, in a kind of masochistic way. I came to him in the early 1990s when I was covering New York state government in Albany. I worked incredibly hard writing incredibly dull articles about things I wasn’t really interested in and people I found either prohibitively terrifying or laughably parochial. I had no friends and each night went home alone, through the cold and snow, to my rented apartment where I slept on a futon on the floor that got dustier and dustier as the legislative session dragged on. I had terrible insomnia–I’d lie awake worrying about things like whether I’d accurately reported the latest proposed figures in the bitterly fought negotiations to fix the unbelievably complicated formula known as the New York Prospective Hospital Reimbursement Methodology–and tried to drown myself in big, compelling, all-consuming books that would take me out of the minutiae of health-care policy and the sadness of my personal life and put me in another world.
King did that for me then. I never loved his books, in the way that you love the books that change your life, and I never felt better for reading his books, in the way that reading something by Anne Tyler or Barbara Kingsolver or E.B. White can cheer you up and make life seem a bit more worth living. But he took me out of my head and presented for me these fully imagined worlds where the supernatural lurked around the corner and normal Americans got involved in wildly abnormal situations that he somehow made utterly believable. I can’t remember now which books I read during this strange lugubrious interlude in my life, but one was The Stand, which was as good a conjuring of an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil as anything I’ve ever encountered. King is smart, smart, smart and a sponge for popular culture and ideas, which he often uses to awesome affect. (Sometimes he overdoes it, mixing his stew with too many ingredients.) Some of the King fiction I encountered in Albany satisfied my ever-present craving for elegant supernatural thrillers; some I found gross; some I found a perplexing mix of the two, by turns gross and elegant.
I would put Dreamcatcher in the third category. It has a great premise and two plots that go side by side, as you point out: the classic X-Files-ish alien invasion scenario, complete with little gray men who are really blobs of fungus dressed in suits, and a twin plot about memory, telepathy, and love and kinship among friends. (As it happens, I read this book during another period of sleeplessness, this one caused by bronchitis that gave me ample time to read in bed in the middle of the night while strung out on various contradictory forms of uppers and downers masquerading as cough and cold remedies–maybe I can’t read King in ordinary times.) I agree that the parts of the book having to do with Jonesy’s memories were brilliant; I found the parts that had to do with telepathy pretty brilliant, too; and I found myself being incredibly moved by Duddits, the Down syndrome sufferer who was befriended by the protagonists when they were kids and whose own special telepathic gifts are crucial to the book’s resolution.
The byrus did have particular resonance for me, living as I do in the heart of disease-ridden Britain. Like a lot of King’s otherworldly creations, it evoked all sorts of things out of popular culture, including AIDS, the Ebola virus, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, various forms of nasty flesh-eating disease, and, well, cancer (which was King’s original title for the book, apparently, until his wife made him change it). I was slightly confused about how deadly the byrus was in the end: Some people who got it recovered; others were infected with a kind of internal worm that burst out (very disgustingly) and killed them. But maybe you could explain: Since so many of the infected people seemed to be recovering by the end, why would it matter if the byrus infected the municipal water supply that the alien was heading for? Wouldn’t most of the people who came down with it recover so that it would be like Ebola–deadly but containable? And those huge disgusting worms: Didn’t they die in the snow?
I was truly grossed out by the gross-out details in this book, many of them larded on at the beginning, so much so that I wouldn’t have kept reading if I hadn’t been so looking forward to my dialogue with you. (Not to mention, we had to do it.) But it was worth it to keep going–I thought the book got better, and that parts if it were wonderful, and that King’s trademark inventiveness and ambitiousness shone through. But the scatology and the diarrhea and all the rest really got to me. I’d love to know what you made of all that, to use the word in its multiple senses, shit?
All best to you,
Sarah
