Stephen King hates popular book he wrote after tragic accident | Books | Entertainment

Stephen King has written more than 60 novels and 200 short stories, with countless adaptations making him the undisputed king of horror.

But even legends have regrets – and for King, few works haunt him more than Dreamcatcher, the 2001 sci-fi-horror epic he penned in the context of trauma and painkillers.

In an honest 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, King admitted: “I don’t like Dreamcatcher very much. Dreamcatcher was written after the accident. I was using a lot of OxyContin for pain.”

In June 1999, King was struck by a minivan while walking on a rural road near his home in Maine. The collision shattered his leg, fractured his hip, broke ribs, and collapsed one of his lungs. The recovery was long, grueling, and completely compromised his writing process.

“I couldn’t work on a computer back then because it hurt too much to sit in that position,” he recalled. “So I wrote the whole thing longhand. And I was pretty stoned when I wrote it, because of the Oxy.”

The result was Dreamcatcher – an ambitious novel about alien parasites, childhood trauma, telepathy, and military conspiracy.

It follows four childhood friends in Maine who discover psychic abilities after befriending a boy with Down syndrome. They develop telepathy, shared dreaming, and the ability to see “the line” – a psychic trace of human movement.

It sold well, debuting at No. 1 on bestseller lists and later receiving a 2003 film adaptation starring Morgan Freeman and Thomas Jane.

But to King, sales figures were irrelevant. The writing, he insists, suffered under a cloud of painkillers: “That’s another book that shows the drugs at work,” he said.

While his early career was famously fuelled by alcohol and cocaine (a period he later addressed and overcame), Dreamcatcher was different. This time, the drugs weren’t recreational, but prescribed.

Despite the commercial success of Dreamcatcher, it’s one of the few books he has publicly disowned. In the years since, he’s distanced himself from it both in interviews and in tone. While he remains characteristically gracious toward its readers – many of whom still enjoyed the novel – he makes his opinion clear.