Duddits Stephen King

Let's get down to this. First off, I admit at first glance this book looked like it was going to be a cross between Tommyknockers and It, which are pretty much my two least favorite Stephen King books. It doesn't end up that way, thank goodness--it's actually more like... well, aliens are involved, but it has more of a feel like The Thing (the eighties remake) or Alien than anything else. Kind of like a Derry version of The Thing I guess, with some of the Yeerks thrown in. He lucked out actually, because that's probably my favorite sort of horror movie--they're there, but where and anyone could be them--a little less of that, but still it had that nice flavor to it.

Quick summary: Four friends, best buds through middle and high school. One day they meet and befriend a boy with Down's syndrome, Duddits (Douglas), and have a really great rest of school experience. Fast forward twenty or so years. All of the boys have gone their separate ways, all of them face separate problems. However, once a weekend in November they go on a hunting trip together. So this time is no different except a stranger with severe gas and strange mannerisms comes into the cabin they stay in. All is kind of fine till an alien creature claws its way out of his body via his butt and kills Beaver (one of the four friends). A different alien takes over another friend's body--Jonesy's--much like a Yeerk would, that is, drives him like you would a car, only a car that is still alive and functioning but trapped. (However, Jonesy has more freedom than a human-controller would.) And Duddits is the key to making everything right again too--that is, stop the alien in Jonesy's body from spreading his parasitic aliens across the tri-state area! I mean, the world. He is the dreamcatcher of the title, because he drew all four even closer and kind of made those years with him their greatest. I... guess. I'd be lying if I said I ever completely understand whatever Stephen King is trying to make me understand.

'To say that Beaver's marriage didn't work would be like saying that the launch of the Challenger space shuttle went a little bit wrong' (15).

A semi-interesting note: Stephen King apparently wrote this book while being laid up as a result of a car crash. Jonesy, very early on, before the start of the story really, is hit by a car and breaks his hip. Yeeeep.

The animals in the forest instinctively try to get away from the aliens and they go walking through the woods a la Fantasia during the Rite of Spring segment to do so. Beaver tries to scare off one of the deer by telling it to get 'Make like an amoeba and split!' (111), which is a phrase I'm totally going to use more often. By the way, I totally pictured Beaver as Jeff Goldblum. They described him as a nerdy looking guy who you think would be a math whiz, has shoulder-length hair, kind of dorky, even the way he talks... I refuse to believe that Stephen King was doing anything other than taking a poke at Jeff Goldblum when he was writing about Beaver.

'Henry put his head down and jogged a little faster' (136). Oh shit, Henry--the mummy's after us.

A lot of the things in the book that would remind me of something else are discussed later on--Peter and Henry run into a lady while Beaver and Jonesy are dealing with their gassy guest who looks at the sky and yells 'They're back, they're back!' Of course I thought of Poltergeist. This connection is made later on. The aliens that are parasites aren't dissimilar to the aliens from the Alien series either--at least when they've just broken from their human hosts--and the fungus that the aliens spread (think of Creepshow!) is referred to as the 'Ripley' after Sigourney Weaver's character from that series.

Duddits is a huge fan of Scooby-Doo. He has the little lunchbox, and when Henry first sees it his only comment is: 'I hate that f---in show... They never change their clothes, did you ever notice that? Wear the same f---in thing, show in and show out' (140). I don't know... I just thought it was sort of funny....

So the little parasites--well, Beaver traps the thing in a toilet, but it breaks loose. It kills him, and before it can attack Jonesy he slams the bathroom door on it. Immediately he gets worried about if it can figure out the mechanics of the doorknob and it says 'as if it had read his mind' (179) it starts trying to turn the doorknob. Of course, it's revealed later that the creatures are telepathic, but still... They can open doors. That is bad news.

Stephen King makes a Pokemon joke, too. I really think there's no better way but an 'lol' to express my amusement at this fact.

'Did they think that maybe he wouldn't be interested, that maybe he'd just go Ho-hum, been there, done that, got the tee-shirt?' (275). This is probably a very common saying, but I'd like to think that Stephen King is making a reference to Space Jam.

Stephen King name dropsWar of the Worlds--no huge surprise, it's another book about an alien invasion. But, I should just say that these aliens spread via a fungus that if ingested are what cause the parasites to form and be incubated. In War of the Worlds, HG Wells kind of has this foreshadowing about a 'red weed' that withers and dies, meant to be a hint that the martians eventually fall. (Actually, to be honest, it works so well that I always get a little confused when I read that part and think the martians have been killed already.) The fungus the aliens in Dreamcatcherspread is red--ohhhh! You see what Stephen King might have possibly done there?

Jonesy compares the alien controlling his body to what Gollum said of Bilbo--oh, forget it. This is worth a quote. '...Reminding himself to be wary... because, as Gollum had said of Bilbo Baggins, it was tricksy, precious, aye, very tricksy' (382). Hahaha what. Talk about unexpected.

Because this book is set in the same fictional town as It, it would be a surprise if there are no references to It... Of course there are. Jonesy--the alien in Jonesy--goes to the standpipe in the hopes of releasing a parasite into the water, however, the book is set after the events in It--so the standpipe is destroyed. There is a memorial dedicated by the 'Losers' Club' in its place (they were the kids who eventually defeated It) and across it 'PENNYWISE LIVES' (386) is spray-painted on it. Interesting, mostly because it implies at the end of It that even though It has been destroyed, It laid eggs shortly before its destruction, that the 'Losers' club' don't know about. (Fight to the death between Pennywise and the Ripley!?)

Oh, and while I'm thinking of it--remember the HP Lovecraft story, 'The Colour Out of Space'? Well, there was a well in the farm it was set on, and the area was to be opened for a reservoir. If that was done, the disease or whatever the alien matter was would be integrated into the water--it already was--and whomever drank it would be infected as well. Like if the parasite in this book.... Hey, it's not impossible. We know King is a huge Lovecraft fan...

Stephen King name drops another book of his, The Dead Zone. I don't remember much about it, other than that I didn't really understand it and that it appeared to be a post apocalyptic sort of deal.

One last note on the book itself--I have the hardcover version, and the author's photo looks suspiciously similar to the set from Creepshow. (The one involving the meteorite; see the HP Lovecraft post for more information regarding this.) In that story, the alien matter made a horrendous fungus grow over and eat away at everything, kind of like the Ripley. (The fungus didn't cause any alien impregnation, however.)

As for my feelings regarding the book: I really enjoyed this. It feels very different from a lot of his other books, less... less shaped, I guess, kind of like he just spit it out, but not in a bad way. Parts of it are confusing--like I said, I understand about 1/10th of why Duddits was so important, exactly and how he fit into it at the end especially--but Stephen King has his own logic that I've learned to just accept instead of try to figure it out rationally. It's better wrought than Pet Sematary, and I'm okay with the fact that I read this instead of that even though I was really in the mood to reread that*. But okay.

While we're talking about Stephen King books, apparently he's thinking of making a sequel to The Shining. That's pretty cool, I guess. And, let's see.... They might remake the Pet Sematarymovie, and the It movie. Cool. And a movie adaptation of this book exists as well, though I've yet to see it.

MLA citation information: King, Stephen. Dreamcatcher. New York: Scribner, 2001. Print.

Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics for Emma: Live to Tell the Tale by Passion Pit

This post's cryptic song lyrics for Emma: Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids... In fact, it's cold as hell

*The local library doesn't have much, but they do have quite a bountiful collection of Stephen King books--yup, just about everything but Pet Sematary. That's cool, I guess. So I took out A Man Without A Country instead and went back home to this.