It might be a dream, but it's a bad one....

Let me say at the outset: I am a HUGE Stephen King fan, and I've read all the novels and short stories, as well as his rather wonderful books on writing.

Unfortunately, Dreamcatcher is a bloated, vacuous, dreadful piece of self-indulgence that mostly goes to show that King has apparently gotten so famous that no one dares edit him or tell him that he's written a bad book.

The pointless repetition in this door-stop of a novel is staggering beyond belief (and, ultimately, stultifying as well). King beats you over the head with his 7th-grade brand of peepee/caca humor (I presume it's supposed to be funny, if you think scores of pages with people reacting to fetid flatulence is funny) until you're ready to join forces with Tipper Gore. He gives his main characters an annoying set of catch-phrases (meant to be all down-homey Maine) that they say over and over and over and over and over like verbal tics until they sound like mental defectives. He needlessly involutes the plot, requiring the reader to go back and forth in time—which must have seemed like a nifty device at some point in the writing, but which is ultimately just a nightmare (and not the good kind) of padding and disorganization.

Since I also love (or have loved) the 'potboilers' of Grisham, Crichton, et al., I note an increasing trend among these writers (case in point: Tom Clancy's tumid Sum of All Fears): to write obese and flabby novels (high-cholesterol plot, no unneeded fiber such as character development) that all but completely ignore the reader and keep winking ingratiatingly at the screenwriter over your shoulder. Personally, I'm a little sick of it.

Thankfully, you don’t have to give up good writing in order to enjoy action-oriented, heavily plotted suspense fiction—consider the truly wonderful series of carefully constructed books by Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston or Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code.

Until King and the rest of his “I-have-more-money-than-god-so-every-word-I-write-is-gold” ilk stop acting like hacks and start crafting prose again, I say we boycott them entirely and give our money and attention to writers who still give a crap about whether we read them.