Krishna
This is about four friends and a very special link that connects them from their childhood days via another special friend.
To sample some of our reviews of other books by the same author, refer to Mr Mercedes or Dolores Claiborne.
Jones, Henry and Joe Beaver Clarendon were friends. Joe was married Laurie Sue Kenopensky but the marriage did not last long. Pete is another of the clan; he is a car salesman who is interested in rockets from a young age. He is fascinated with Nasa and anything that flies – planes and even UFOs included.
A girl comes in claiming she has to go show a house but has lost her car keys. (Her name is Trish). Pete walks through the rain with her and using what seems to be clairvoyance, finds the keys in the mud. He claims it is just using his brains but the girl seems to be equal parts gratified and terrified and she cannot wait to drive her car away from Pete. These things occur in 1998.
Henry is a psychiatrist.
The four love hunting and have licenses to hunt. They go every year together to hunt. They all seem to have ‘a line’ – some kind of ESP. (Shades of The Shining that Stephen King wrote about 25 years earlier?). For instance, Henry calls Jonesy, who is a Professor, asking him to be careful just hours before he got into a serious accident that nearly killed him. Jonesy, in his turn, intuits that a student, Defuniak, cheated on his latest exams and confronts him. (This happens in the later timeline, in 2001, in this dual timeline story.)
After his near death experience Jonesy finds that he has no interest in hunting or dealing death to animals. But he enjoys the trip and sits and reads in the tent when others go out. Still happy with the annual trip with his close friends.
Jones stays back while the others go to hunt and Jones sees a man stumble into the cabin, nearly frozen. Jones gives shelter and the man is fascinated by Dreamcatcher, which is a native American artifact that is supposed to keep out nightmares.
The visitor introduces himself as Richard McCarthy. Jones introduces himself with his full name, Gary Jones.
Richard meets Beav. Apart from the sixth sense of Jonesy which tells him that the stranger is somehow all wrong, there are also physical and mental peculiarities with the man. For one thing, he looked fat and bloated but after a giant and stinky fart and a large belch, his stomach indeed went in and he looked – not thin but – a lot less obese. He had vacuous eyes and sometimes a strange expression as if his brain was a void.
He also said that he came from a far part of the forest and wandered, lost. Jonesy found it hard to believe.
Meanwhile we learn that Henry is thinking seriously of suicide and also worried that Jones would ‘see into’ his mind and guess the intention. He and Pete are driving back in the snow with the supplies they had garnered.
When he suddenly sees a lady on the road when they crested a rise, Henry swerves and avoids the woman but the car topples over.
That woman exhibits the same symptoms as Richard – very smelly belch, very stinky huge farts, and missing teeth. When suddenly lights appear in the sky, she shrieks in fear saying ‘They’re back! They’re back!’
Henry manages to take them both to an abandoned building nearly (‘mentally tracked by Pete’).
Anyway, meanwhile Pete realizes that there is something seriously wrong. The lights in the sky briefly appear. All animals seem to be moving out of their own volition. Predators and prey walking together. When a helicopter comes and he tries to get help (Because Richard seems to be bleeding like hell but is oblivious) the guy in the helicopter warns him to stay put because ‘the whole area is under quarantine’.
Meanwhile, Henry and Pete and others remember the exact event in 1978 where they stopped three bullies, one of them a sports star in the school and the Homecoming King (Rick Grenadeau) , trying to torture a mentally challenged child and rescue the boy by bravely stand up to the boys who are bigger than them. They thus become friends with the boy Duddits.
Henry senses conversations between Jones and Beaver. He is walking and suddenly he gets a crazy impulse to get off the street before the evil cloud approaches on a snowmobile engine which he can hear coming towards him from his destination – the cabin.
In the cabin, a lot of blood is everywhere and Jones and Beav are scared. Still they need to go into the bathroom, find McCarthy on the toilet and he suddenly topples over and falls into the bathtub, not before they see a huge crater where his bum used to be. And when they sense that there is something live in the toilet, Jones makes Beav sit on it until he can bring a tape and seal the damned thing before they leave in safety.
Beaver makes a fatal mistake and tries to get off the toilet just for a second to get at one of his toothpicks – he always has one in his month when something from the toilet explodes out. It looks like a worm with just two eyes and a sharp set of teeth and damages him severely – bursts one of his balls to start with. He sees Jones back standing there dazed and shouts at him to run after closing the door but it is too late. Beav is killed by the monster thing. (Shades of the baby Alien movie monster there, I thought – I mean, I am not saying that Stephen copied the idea, only that to a reader, it is similar. With Stephen King’s fertile brain, there are no dearth of original ideas, I know)
Really tense and horrifying scenes to read.
And it gets worse. Jones recovers at the last minute and tries to close the door and hold it in. He does not dare run because he knows he will never outrun that thing if the door is open. Already it is trying to chew through the door to get at him. When he finally finds he cannot hold it in anymore, he turns and sees The Grey Man behind him. The man just says ‘Mercy’ when his head seems to explode and tiny things come all over in the air and Jonesy breaths it in and is lost. (At the very same time Duddits, far away, is crying hard, saying to his mother Roberta that ‘Beav is dead’. )
He takes the vehicle and drives over but Henry knows that it is a ‘thing’ even before it gets anywhere near him and hides.
Meanwhile Pete is lying down with the broken beer bottles and a bum knee and finally craws back to where the girl, Becky was lying. She is dead and he has a near fatal encounter with another of those creatures that came out of Becky. He senses that the creatures will die unless they get warmth and feed on living bodies. He manages to outfight it with fire, losing almost all his fingers on one hand in the process. Exhausted he lies down and waits for whatever (the thing that was Jonesy) to come take him.
At this time if, like me, you get the ‘Game of Thrones’ vibe where the main protagonists are either helpless or killed off and wonder what the remaining story is about, you will find out. The scene shifts to the army, which is collecting and segregating people in the area. Kurtz, a humourless, emotionless leader seems to be in charge. (To me at least he has shades of the villain in Stephen King’s Under The Dome, Big Rennie. I couldn’t tell you why or offer concrete evidence but felt it throughout.
They are bringing food for the ‘guests’ who are really captives. The airforce goes and meets gray men, who are like naked babies, helplessly wandering around a grounded aircraft and the leader, the ruthless Kurtz, orders them to open fire.
We go back to Henry, who finally reaches the cabin and sees what is now occupying it. He manages to set fire to the strange creatures and then get out.
He walks back until he meets the rescue military team and manages to convince them that he is in fact uninfected and therefore, as human as they are. The story gets then surreal, trying to get into the mind of the now contaminated Jonesy. There is a real confusing jumble of thoughts in the mind of the thing that Jonesy has become. But you soon realize that it is not all surreal and the point that Stephen King is trying to make is that he is not completely consumed and can even keep secrets from the infectors. He sees them through nightmarish scenarios jumbled up with his own past hospital stay but he seems to be able to control his thoughts.
Henry meanwhile reaches the soldiers but is included in the cordoned off pen with the others captured. They are all targeted to be ‘culled’ and Henry understands it clearly.
Meanwhile Kurtz goes on a temporary rampage. He shoots the toes of a man who disobeys him and also tells his deputy Underwood that he intends that not only the inmates but most soldiers who are guarding them would also be sacrificed before ‘this is over’. What the deputy does not know is that he himself will be one of them – Kurtz cannot stand slip ups and he was careless once.
Meanwhile Henry and Underwood have a conversation where Underwood is told that the alien race is dying in the hostile planet and the only one who matters is trying to escape the dragnet in Jonesy’s body. He also reveals that both he and Underwood have caught the infection (byrus as he has christened it). There is only one of those ‘graymen’ who has escaped so far and that can be stopped. He also advises Underwood that killing Kutrz may be an option but Underwood says that ‘another Kurtz will just replace him’.
Jones is ‘living’ inside the Gray Man now and is able to even control a very small portion of the mind (as Stephen King surrealistically imagines, a small room with some files that is not accessible to the Gray Man because it is locked). Other than that both his body and the rest of his mind are open to the Gray Man to use at will.
Gray Man is going to get out of the cordon because he is the last “thing’ that has survived in the alien species and unless he finds another warm body soon, their whole species will become extinct (that is, the parts that came down to earth).
As Jones gets contaminated and turns into Gray Man or his dominion, he feels that the Gray Man is also slowly changing, absorbing the mind set of Jonesy.
Meanwhile Henry manages to incite a rebellion while escaping with Underwood to stop the only threat to humanity and Kurtz is furious, noticing that they are escaping and failing to stop them with bullets. He resolves to follow and kill Underwood and Henry (whom he knows only as a prisoner).
As the story moves on, we find how extraordinary are the four friends. Henry manages to show Owen how they found a missing girl through sheer telepathy and a kind of a mental chain they call Dreamcatcher. Meanwhile Jones manages to connect with Henry from within the mind of the Gray Man where he has isolated himself. Kurtz, even though he knows that his career is over due to the riot that went out of control in his camp, is determined to find and stop the biggest traitor, Owen. Fascinating stuff.
Owen and Henry reach Duddits but Henry is shocked at how emaciated Duddits is now. He has leukemia and is dying, according to Duddit’s mom.
They take Duddits away and Duddits forces his mom Roberta, to stay back against her will. They all know that a huge danger is coming and are afraid but still forge ahead. Meanwhile the Gray Man has hit another snow vehicle and is immobilized temporarily, giving them all time to go away from Duddit’s house where the Gray Man is headed.
Jonesy and Henry together intuit Mr Gray’s purpose. The dog he carried with him is full of byrus and the only way to save the aliens is to reach the town’s drinking water and pour the byrus into it. Then Mr Gray can die, having ensured the future of his species on Earth.
Jonesy finds a way to connect with Duddits – actually it is the other way around. Through dreamcatcher, which they had once used (metaphorically, locking hands) to find a missing girl called Josie. The idea is to stop Mr Gray before he reaches the water source and before it is too late for much of humanity at least in that region.
Duddits manages, with Jonesy’s help, to distract Mr Gray to stop for bacon but Kurtz is hot on their tails too, unknown to them.
Finally they are too far behind and Mr Gray man walks up the water reservoir steps, carrying the dog which is full of their byrus and is their salvation. The tension reaches fever pitch.
When Mr Gray is so close to destroying the world with byrus, when Owen is so close to taking matters in his own hands and shooting Mr Gray (and Jonesy) dead, and when Kurtz is just behind the car parked and very close to destroying Duddits and Henry, the author turns annoyingly surreal. (What? You swallowed all the other impossibles and are complaining about this now? Yes, because the others went with the flow of the story and this popped in from nowhere).
Except for that one or two brief annoyances – what Mr Gray really was is another such disappointment – the story moves on to its glorious climax before it ends. As in some of King’s other books, even the epilogue is interesting!
9/10
— Krishna