


If you tend towards the naturalistic, your favourite King novels will probably be early books, such as Carrie and Cujo, and psychological thrillers such as Misery and Gerald's Game. The way you read King depends on your usual taste in film, TV and literature. Dreamcatcher, however, is something rather different. In my opinion, two of his most recent novels, Bag of Bones and Hearts in Atlantis, are not only the best work he's ever done, but the equal of anything by DeLillo or Updike. The language has become much more important to King in recent years. Yet many of us proles also care about the language, in our own humble way, and care passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper." They ask the DeLillos and the Updikes and the Styrons, but they don't ask popular novelists. King has always been sensitive to this, claiming in On Writing : "Nobody ever asks about the language. The sheer amount of material has led some critics to question the quality of the writing. Alongside the novels, he has also recently completed several screen plays, published an award-winning short story in the New Yorker and ventured into e-publishing with a new novella, Riding the Bullet, and a serialised novel, The Plant, that he first started 20 years ago. This appears to be the case here, as King had previously indicated that his next book would be From a Buick Eight. Completed novels are often shuffled back in the publication schedules when a new book seems more pressing, as when he surprised his publishers with The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon two years ago. He once described the process of artistic inspiration as "having someone crap on your head", and this seems to happen to him with incredible regularity. It's always been hard to keep tabs on King's incredible output.
