A Dreamcatcher in Spook Country

Two book reviews.

In Dreamcatcher, four men, friends since childhood, are out hunting in the woods of Maine. A lone hunter stumbles upon their cabin sputtering nonsense about mysterious "lights in the sky" while being plagued with the worst case of gas ever imaginable. It's Stephen King so you know what's coming.

The first third of the book is great. King hooks us right in and then beats a frantic pace: a snowmobile barreling through the woods with the reader being dragged gleefully through the snow. We can't help but stay up late turning those pages to find out what happens next. He seems merciful when he idles down the pace for the middle third so that we can catch our breath and brush off some of that snow.

But it dawns on me that some of this landscape seems familiar. We're given backstory on the protagonists, a group of men who've been friends since childhood, albeit a bit more distant (It). We get the long-winded side trip flashback, a King staple, where the boys confronted an evil back then (though it was a different evil) and now, as adults, face an evil alien threat in the woods (Tommyknockers). And then there's the psychotic government agent who becomes obsessed with one of the protagonists (Firestarter) and starts to hunt him down. Stephen King is one of the most prolific writers of our age. So, it shouldn't come as a surprise that he began re-using some elements of past stories. But I was willing to let all this slide if the book ended well.

The final chase consumes the last third of the book, but it drags. And when the crisis is resolved, it felt anti-climactic. Although King doesn't use the old "it was all a dream" cliche, the ending, for me at least, was just as insulting. I had to re-read it a couple times just to make sure I was reading it right. Maybe this was some kind of catharsis for King. He wrote this story while recovering from an accident where he was struck by a minivan (which is paralleled by one of the characters here). I haven't read any other of his post-accident works and after reading this I'm not sure when I will. Dreamcatcher rates 2 out of 5 stars.

After reading Pattern Recognition (I'd give it 5 out of 5 stars), I couldn't wait to read Spook Country.

Hollis Henry, a former member of a 90's alternative rock band, is trying out a second career as a journalist. She's been sent out by Node, a magazine that she isn't sure exists, to do a piece on "locative art" (think geocaching meets VR). One of these artists introduces her to Bobby Chombo, the man who runs the servers where said art is hosted. The problem is he's extremely paranoid and her boss insists she find out why.

There's also Tito, a runner for a really small organized crime family. And he's being tracked by a guy named Brown, who's a covert operative of some kind with a strong sense of nationalism. But rather than get in Brown's head, we get his prisoner, Milgrim, an Ativan addict who speaks Russian. We meet other characters along the way, but the story focuses on Hollis, Tito, and Milgrim.

The story starts out slow. It took about 100 pages before it picked up. There wasn't any sense of danger looming over the characters nor was I able to determine what they were after that was so important. The three main characters are mild. Hollis seems capable of some decent snark but Gibson never really lets her loose. Tito's utilization of his Santeria faith is compelling when there's action, but it's sorely underutilized. He's a mushroom most of the time. Milgrim's Atvian experiences are intriguing but his objective seems to be avoiding a beating from Brown.

There are some minor characters which try to save us from these mild mannered and mellow trio. Chombo isn't one of them. He's annoying. But most of the characters in the novel get along so well that there's hardly any conflict.

We do find out what everyone is after. It's partly based on reality. I remember reading about the item in question in the news, but it never really seemed to garner the attention it deserved. I don't want to spoil it, but it concerns the Iraq War. The premise is believable, and what the characters set out to do seems cool but there's never any real danger. The plan is so well executed that when the story's climax comes along, I was left saying, "Oh, that was it."

William Gibson founded the cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction, but there's really nothing in this novel that comes across as sci-fi. It's been said that the world has caught up with Gibson's vision and I have to agree. There's nothing here to chase away sci-fi phobic readers. But will they want to read it? Gibson's prose continues to be efficiently rendered, sparse yet beautiful. But as it's presented here it amounts to an ornately decorated cardboard box. I give it 3 out of 5 stars. A middle of the road Gibson novel is still better than most of the schlock out there.

One thing that really bugs me is that if I, or any other unpublished writer, submitted this manuscript to an agent we'd be rejected because there's no hook to draw in the reader. I had a character die from gunfire in the first chapter of my novel and a publisher (who read just the first 3 chapters) said it was too slow! Gibson, a successful author, gets away with it.

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DED