Duma Key

It's been a long while since I've experienced the pleasures, as well as the frustrations, of reading a Stephen King novel. I picked up his Bram Stoker Award-winning novel from 2008, Duma Key, and blew through it's 769 pages almost as quickly as a Florida thunderstorm.

The book contains many of King's familiar themes, but it is in a unique setting. Instead of Maine, or Colorado, he's set up horror camp on Florida's west coast, the fictional key of the title, located just off shore from Sarasota (I read that King winters there, so he got in his research while making trips to the local Starbucks and multiplex I'm sure). Though the location is a lot sunnier, it is not exempt from the primeval malevolence that King specializes in. It seems that off the shore of this idyllic, undeveloped island is an evil as old as time itself.

The story is narrated by Edgar Freemantle, a building contractor from Minnesota. He's hurt horribly in an accident, losing his right arm and sustaining severe head damage. On the long difficult road to recovery his marriage ends, and he's advised to get away and rents a house on Duma Key to take up a long suborned interest in art. When he gets there he moves into a house he dubs "Big Pink" and starts sketching, then painting, and he realizes that what he paints is coming from some unknown source, and the resulting pictures are telepathic and psychic. In a certain way, he's painting with his phantom limb.

At the other end of the road live an old lady whom he discovers owns the island, along with her caretaker, Wireman, who becomes his best friend. Together they unearth a mystery that involved the old lady when she was a girl, and the pieces of the mystery include some spooky dolls, birds that fly upside down, and a ship that lies off the coast and seems to be manned by ghosts. It's white-knuckle stuff, especially the last few chapters, which involve Freemantle in a cistern with a couple of skeletons (and I almost forgot the alligator that emerges out of the tar-filled swimming pool).

King is a controversial figure among people of letters. Some insist he should get credit for writing literature, not just pulp. I'm of the opinion that Frank Zappa was about music--there's two kinds, good and bad, and that goes for writing. King is not William Faulkner, he's not even Ernest Hemingway, but so what? I think his incredible prolificness inspires envy (it certainly does in me), and some many cite a prolixity that calls out for an editor, but his writing is so fluid that it's hard to object. He has some turns of phrases that are just perfect, such as something having a "green smell," and knows how to build and alleviate suspense. At a certain point in the book Edgard lets us know at a departure from a beloved character that this would be the last time he would see her and the news hits us in the solar plexus.

What creeps into Duma Key, along with ghosts from the watery depths, are some of King's old standbys. Edgar is not physically described, and at first I pictured a Minnesota contractor as someone I'd see at a Rotarian meeting. But it became apparent rather quickly that Edgar is just a stand-in for King, especially since I've gotten to know him from his columns in Entertainment Weekly. I can't imagine any other building contractor having a near encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, particularly of rock and roll. Consider this sentence,which could come straight from his column: "I turned on the radio and the The Bone: J. Geils doing "Hold Your Lovin." J. Geils was nothing special, only great--a gift from the gods of rock and roll."

But later in that same chapter, King forgets about trivia and gets into serious fright mode, returning to one of his favorites: twin girl ghosts (who can forget The Shining?) "I came to the head of the stairs and looked down, and there at the bottom were two small dripping figures. Then the lightning flashed and I saw two girls of about six, surely twins and Elizabeth Eastlake's drowned sisters. They wore dresses that were plastered to their bodies. Their hair was plastered to their cheeks. Their faces were pale horrors."