And then there's that problem of Duddits, the retarded boy with psychic powers. The simple savior is a recurring and weary trope in King's fiction. Usually, however -- and somewhat disturbingly -- the saintly simpletons are black characters, pretty much the only black characters in King, such as the cook in "The Shining," Speedy in "The Talisman" and Mother Abigail Freemantle, the Christ-like old woman in "The Stand."

Or, sometimes, the black character and the mentally retarded character are merged into a sort of supersaint, such as the angelic John Coffey in "The Green Mile." King is on shaky ground here. Could it be coincidence that Maine, his longtime home, has virtually no African-Americans? If King weren't a well-known liberal, would we call these characterizations racist?

An incoherent plot, translucent characters, self-plagiarism -- these are not the only flaws in "Dreamcatcher." More worrisome for King in the long run is the pop culture problem. King is a baby boomer, and he's always had a dead-on sense of middle-class boomer taste -- which, I think, is one reason so many readers feel connected to King and his books. In his pages, they see themselves.

But in "Dreamcatcher," I noticed something I'd never seen in King before: King's middlebrow references felt dated and off-key. When an army of helicopter-flying hit men cue their soundtrack -- hasn't King seen any movies since "Apocalypse Now"? -- the song they play is "Sympathy for the Devil." Except that these days, it wouldn't be. Our boys in Afghanistan aren't playing Vietnam-era Stones. They're listening to Outkast and Kid Rock.

If you like King, seeing him age like this is painful; it's like watching a great athlete lose a step, or senior citizens try to boogie at a rockin' wedding reception. King could fix the problem, but he'd have to work at it, and he's no Tom Wolfe. In fact, he's never really reported at all. His world comes from his experiences and his imagination. And when you spend every day of the year writing, as King has said he does, in a fenced-off house in an isolated state where it's winter for about nine months of the year, and you're cranking out books like a roomful of monkeys, you're going to run low on original material. It's just a matter of time. King only lasted longer than most.

"Dreamcatcher" was followed by "Black House," a sequel to "The Talisman," and if "Dreamcatcher" could have been chalked up to post-accident jitters, there's no excuse for "Black House." It's an atrocious piece of work. (As "The Talisman" was, "Black House" was co-written with Peter Straub, but the book feels dominated by King.) Some of the problems are the same: flimsy characters, lazy plotting. There is only a token attempt to connect "Black House" to "The Talisman," as if King has simply taken it for granted that if you're reading the second, you read the first. Frankly, anyone who hadn't read the first wouldn't have a clue what was happening in the second.

It's possible that King's remarkable imagination -- surely one of the most fertile in American literature -- has finally grown barren. In both "Dreamcatcher" and "Black House," he resorts to cheap vulgarity and violence far more repulsive and over-the-top than anything in his best books. "Dreamcatcher" features "shit-weasels" who grow in victims' stomachs, then -- after the victim suffers prolonged and odiferous farting -- eat their way out of the victims' anuses. (Okay, King also saw "Alien.") How charming. The plot of "Black House" hinges on the cannibalization of young children; apparently the flesh of the buttock is the most tender. Even for a King fan, this is beyond the pale. It reeks of creative desperation and verges on pornography.

Ideally, the writer-reader relationship is a symbiotic one. But King seems to be taking his readers for granted. His impatience with the role of celebrity author and his new, post-Bryan Smith appreciation for life have made him resent all those demanding little people who made him rich and famous. In "On Writing," King declares that "Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around." I'm not quite sure what that means, but it sounds to me like King needs to get a life.

Not knowing what else to do but write, and happy to keep the money pipeline open -- "Black House" reads like a Hollywood sequel, manufactured solely to cash in on a far superior predecessor -- King still keeps the books coming. Even if he stops now, he's got enough manuscripts in the drawer for years of new material.

But he's not writing. He's shoveling, and asking us to grin and swallow it. Better for Stephen King to stop publishing altogether than to keep churning out crap, like a shit-weasel, eating its inexorable way through our insides, making us not King's fans but his victims.

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