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I've got good news and bad news. The good news is, Dreamcatcher is not just a rehash of It. The bad news is it's a rehash of The Tommyknockers, too, which is perhaps my least favorite of all of King's works.

All right, maybe that's not quite fair. Dreamcatcher does involve aliens, a secret in the woods, and telepathy, but it's not exactly a carbon copy of The Tommyknockers. It re-uses pieces of many of King's works. There's the "adults who bonded as children and did a great thing" theme from It. There's also the "child with a great secret power" trope from The Shining and/or Firestarter. Granted, Duddits is technically an adult, but he is retarded and therefore retains, quite literally, the mind of a child, as evidenced by everyone calling him by his childhood name. Duddits is also reminiscent of Tom Cullen from The Stand, as another example of the sweet and noble retarded person who, after enduring great hardship, saves the day, or at least a piece of it. Speaking of The Stand, let's talk about a nasty, virulent disease that wipes out around 99% of the population. Granted, in this case the "disease" is actually a creature, and the affected area is relatively small, but within that area, the terminal rates are about the same.

So what's the big deal, you ask? King has always re-used certain themes in his work: kids in danger, life in Maine, narrators who are writers; why am I harping on this one book in particular? I'm harping on it because he doesn't bring anything new to plate this time. In the past, these themes were simply a framework of familiarity to hang a new story on. It was fun for long-time readers to get the references to previous characters and stories, and to feel like they knew the territory. We've been to Derry and Castle Rock so many times it feels like we belong there. But in Dreamcatcher, it doesn't feel like King's using similar elements. It feels like he's telling the same stories, albeit in bits and pieces and mixed around some. You know how you feel when you watch a movie adaptation of a Stephen King book? With a few notable exceptions, they just don't get it right. The casting is a little bit off or the script keeps the wrong parts of the story (or loses the wrong parts). The bones of the book you loved are there, but the mad doctor put them together all wrong, attaching a femur to a vertebra, or the skull to a kneecap. That's how Dreamcatcher felt to me: right pieces, wrong place.

King is an amazing storyteller; he always has been. Even the books I didn't particularly like, I finished. I find that I get caught up in his stories despite myself, and I have to follow through to the end. Maybe that's the crux of my displeasure with Dreamcatcher; I know King is capable of so much more. Authors aren't perfect. Some books are going to be better than others. You just hope that over the course of a career, the good books outweigh the weak ones.