Dreamcatcher (novel)/Trivia

Trivia about Dreamcatcher (novel) includes:

Canon Welding: Takes place in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, the site of previous King novels IT and Insomnia. At one point a character comes across a memorial written by the Loser's Club from IT. Scrawled on it in graffiti is "PENNYWISE LIVES.
Old Shame: Stephen King compared Dreamcatcher to The Tommyknockers when interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine in 2014.

Rolling Stone: Is The Tommyknockers the one book in your catalog you think you botched?
Stephen King: Well, I don’t like Dreamcatcher very much. Dreamcatcher was written after the accident. [In 1999, King was hit by a van while taking a walk and left severely injured.] I was using a lot of Oxycontin for pain. And I couldn’t work on a computer back then because it hurt too much to sit in that position. So I wrote the whole thing longhand. And I was pretty stoned when I wrote it, because of the Oxy, and that’s another book that shows the drugs at work.

—Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview, October 31, 2014

Shout-Out:
- Kurtz is named after the character Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness. Lampshaded with a comment that it's probably not his real name and probably something that he decided to call himself.

Perlmutter had read Heart of Darkness, had seen Apocalypse Now, and had on many occasions thought that the name Kurtz was simply a little too convenient. He would have bet a hundred dollars (a great sum for a non-wagering artistic fellow such as himself) that it wasn’t the boss’s real name-that the boss’s real name was Arthur Holsapple or Dagwood Elgart, maybe even Paddy Maloney. Kurtz? Unlikely. It was almost surely an affectation, as much a prop as George Patton’s pearl-handled .45.

- The government nickname for the alien fungus is "The Ripley" after Sigourney Weaver's character from the Alien movies.
  - Jonesy is also the name of Ripley's cat from Alien.

Back to Dreamcatcher (novel)