If you want information, and you want it quickly, don’t visit a Stephen King novel.

King is the unparalleled master of carrot-and-stick fiction – the kind of writing that gives you just a little bit of what you crave (the answer, the secret, the McGuffin) and then strings you along until you get another torturously sparse sliver. And the cycle begins again.

In the wrong hands, such blatant tantalizing of the reader could grow tiresome. Fortunately, King always delivers – and rarely more effectively than in “Dreamcatcher” (Scribner, $28), his new novel and one of his most ambitious in years, which is scheduled to be released today.

Incongruous as it may sound, this is a coming-of-age story about an alien invasion of Earth. And at 620 pages, it’s hardly a quick read. But unlike some of King’s other recent novels, it doesn’t meander and it never feels too long.

He serves up an often terrifying, sometimes repulsive and always melancholy tale of four boys in the fictional King locale of Derry, Maine, who went through something special together and, as we all do, grew up. They drifted apart and their lives unfolded. They are in their mid-30s when the story begins.

Two, Pete and Beaver, are eking out unremarkable existences with somewhat major problems. Two others, Henry and Jonesy, are successful in their work – psychiatry and teaching – but feel pockets of deep emptiness.

After a prologue that shoots back and forth through time and space in a remarkably fluid way, the story picks up as they all come together for their latest annual hunting trip to Beaver’s cabin in the woodsy, desolate Jefferson Tract of northern Maine.

They come upon Rick McCarthy, a man who has been touched – physically and figuratively – by something horrifying, disgusting and with implications for the entire planet. It is up to the quartet of childhood friends – and another remarkable human being they befriended years ago, a mentally retarded boy called Duddits – to set things right. And, as in all King novels, it will not come without a dear price for everyone involved.

Never one to scorn popular culture, King is unabashedly and reverently referential – and, as is his habit, self-referential as well. “Dreamcatcher” incorporates elements of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “Alien,” but also echoes parts of his own “The Tommyknockers,” “It” and “The Body,” the novella that produced “Stand By Me.” Even “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill,” a throwaway story of his that became part of the 1982 movie “Creepshow,” contributes an idea or two to “Dreamcatchers.” One gets the sense that King is taking the best elements of his previous work and combining them into something even better.

But don’t get the idea that “Dreamcatcher” is a derivative jumble, or even a mere horror-sci-fi novel. It’s neither.

Like the recent interconnected collection of King novellas called “Hearts in Atlantis,” it spends a great deal of time trying to figure out the nature of adulthood: when it overtakes us, what it means, and just what role the experience of childhood plays in adult lives.

King also never falters in the characters he creates. “Dreamcatcher” is teeming with them. The obsessive military commander, audaciously named Kurtz, who is as obsessive as his namesake. Owen Underhill, a military man desperate to atone for a small misdeed in his past. Duddits Cavell, the mentally retarded boy-turned-man, so unequipped for this world but so strangely wise nonetheless. These are characters whose traits, and whose very names, stick with you long after “Dreamcatcher” has been read and put aside.

People who dismiss King as a schlockmeister or, as he has lamented, a “Big Mac and fries” writer, miss the point. Structurally, he can spin a tale of many tentacles better than any popular author writing today. His details – even the “Big Mac and fries” elements of the writing – resonate and feel like a genuine depiction of the chaos of a consumption-minded America.

Finally this, corny but true. King is doing something quite important: He’s taking the elements of pulp fiction that have long appealed to diverse readerships and using them as a tool to figure out the meaning of human experiences.

And, fortunately for those of us who consume his tales, he just keeps getting better at it.