Media Platforms Design Team
After gobbling up his more than forty novels and two hundred short stories, you'd think the world might have had its fill of Stephen King. I admit to being a constant reader. And despite all the years I've spent in his skull, privy to his nightmares, King somehow remains compulsively readable. Can I say the same about the equally prodigious John Updike or Joyce Carol Oates? I'm afraid I can't. As brilliant as they may be, I feel about them as I do a bus. You miss one of their books, no problem. Wait half an hour and another one will come grumbling along with the same sort of passengers having the same sort of conversations.
Like all great horror writers, King is at his best when the speculative takes a backseat to character. Stories such as The Stand, The Shining, The Green Mile, and Different Seasons are profoundly moving not because they scare a gasp out of you (and they do), but because they so convincingly create people out of ink and paper who continue to live with you long after the book closes, years later coming up in soft-focus memory like friends you've lost touch with but vividly remember.
So it is with Duma Key (609 pages, Scribner, $28), King's latest novel. In it we follow Edgar Freemantle, our narrator, who "used to be a big deal in the building and contracting business" until a twelve-story crane slams into his Dodge pickup and crushes it like a can on a Minnesota job site. His skull is fractured in three places. His ribs are broken. His right hip is shattered. And he loses his right arm. In this way the book and his "other life" begins. During the painful rehabilitation process, when a "thousand midnight bells" ring in his head and pain burns and stiffens his right side like a poker, when his wife leaves him and he begins to seriously contemplate killing himself, his therapist asks him if anything makes him happy. "I used to sketch," Edgar says. So the therapist advises him to take up a pencil and pad again because Edgar needs "hedges against the night."
He also needs a change of scenery, since everything in Minnesota reminds him of the life no longer available to him. So he relocates to Florida, where he lives in a rental on Duma Key, a mostly uninhabited nine-mile stretch of dune-rumpled beach and tangled jungle that has (of course) a poisoned history that eventually seeps its way into the narrative. But first, Edgar has to heal. He spends his days walking along the beach and painting to the soundtrack of the shell-riddled waves, their mild and steady sighing like "the gossip of dead things telling secrets in bone voices." Soon he realizes that although he has lost an arm, he gained something else: an eerily serious talent with a paintbrush and easel. As he paints little girls, a strange figure draped in red, a ghost ship with tattered sails, an almost unbearable itch takes over the space once filled by his missing arm, as though it were a divining rod. His injured and rewired brain has given him access to things that have been quiet for a long time. Things are coming back to life on Duma Key.
Yes, the supernatural plays a key role in the plot, but to any reader who may shy away from the book for this reason, know that it doesn't overwhelm the narrative. King has written a story about a deeply troubled man who goes from wanting to die to wanting more than anything to live. The horror in the background serves as a sleek, black vehicle for helping him realize this transformation.
If Lisey's Story and Duma Key are any indication, King is writing at a level equivalent to, if not better than, his last run of excellent work published in the nineties. And I'm course eager to see what will come howling around the corner next. For now, Duma Key will continue to make my eyes go wide, the steadily rising terror of its chapters like the tide to a man buried neck deep in sand.
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