If Stephen King had died fifty years ago and left all these books for us to read whenever and in whatever order, I wouldn’t have placed this one in the twilight of his career. This would have gone in the “good and thoughtful” pile. I guess being hit by a car helped him write Edgar, the man who lost an arm, mangled a leg and lost part of his mind to a construction accident. Edgar is our sympathetic narrator, who stumbles out of a marriage that couldn’t survive the accident even if he did, and moves to a quiet beach in Florida (the eponymous Duma Key). It's a place that draws broken people – not fixing them, but empowering them. Giving strange abilities to the physically or mentally handicapped is a theme in King’s fiction, and it’s one of the most fascinating. It never levels the playing field, rather making the game much more interesting to watch. Mixing the pure supernatural with a real medical condition like phantom limbs makes this one of the more interesting cases of the theme in his fiction.There is nothing urgent about this book, and that’s going to break it for a lot of readers. It has more of a premise than a plot. We come in after the accident, and are served with a hefty recap of the things that happened before our boy moved to Big Pink (his house on Duma Key). Things happen, our one-armed painter develops, and the nights pass as they may. King might spend the next five pages talking about walking on the beach, or he may use them to experiment on whether Edgar can see the future in what he paints, or create the future by painting it. This is great to me, and will be to anyone else who enjoys King's sense of voice. It’s been years since I demanded authors, even those I go to primarily for entertainment, throw buckets of plot across my deck or rush me from action scene to action scene.Few books have helped me unwind this much, and it’s in part because of that lack of urgency amongst so many interesting things. Edgar is proper parts sympathetic, amusing, humble, confused and struggling, and with King giving him a voice, he's a pleasure to sit down with even for the most trying anecdotes.That's not to say crazy things don't happen. Edgar is a one-armed painter whose art predicts the future, after all. But does it predict, or can it force things to happen? Is Duma Key a strange attractor for such phenomena? It’s an odd coincidence that the half-blind man down the beach claims to have visions, and that the woman he cares for, stricken with Alzheimer’s, sometimes babbles things she shouldn’t know. Beyond the paranormal, Edgar’s relationship with his daughter (he has two, but only one plays a substantial role) is touching. She’s a great character for this type of story, made up of many stripes, including all of these we see in her mother, but also many more. That half-blind potential psychic, Wireman, is also a great balancing character – funny, philosophical, so suited to letting life and a book wash away on a beautiful beach, and giving perspective to the things Edgar experiences. That the majority of our handicapped cast have some positive nature about them (not always sunny, but at least given to moments that are utterly loveable) helped my spirits as I spent the last week struggling through some physical therapy. But better than sympathetic characters are the relationships. You see Wireman with his profound, pseudo-parental, pseudo-husbandly love for his charge. Edgar and his daughter have a clearly complex relationship. Like in Salem’s Lot, the setting itself has a character with a provocative relationship to anyone who stays. There’s plenty to ruminate over in this book if you have the patience.One level this book works on very well is that of the mythological. Edgar was an architect, someone who took drawn plans and built physical reality out of them. Here, almost detached from time, reality seems to be forcing his pencils and brush, reversing his talents. It’s things like this, especially as they carry out experientially through the book, that make it spiritually engrossing – even if the deepest Mr. King forces his characters to speak is in guessing that maybe there is an afterlife or humorously paraphrasing Nietzsche. It’s the substance, not the style.King uses the wandering prose to play more literary tricks than usual. The most common are Edgar’s mis-speeches. His accident took an arm and damaged a leg, but it also damaged his brain, taking some memories (though from some of the things he remembers and some of the things he can’t, one wonders how much was lost by chance and how much was lost by unconscious desire to be free) and leaving his speech habits broken. He’ll say the wrong word or the wrong phrase in a blend of oral typos and Freudian slips, in the middle of perfectly fluent sentences. Sometimes they’re pathetic, but other times they reflect on his character development, such as when he intended to tell someone, “I’ll never be even,” but instead says, “I’ll never be Heaven.” Word flips like that touch on things he’s thinking or truth about this story as well providing a quirk to dialogue. Sometimes this leaks into his first person narration, like saying he bore someone “no anus” instead of “no animus.” As neat as they would have been if such word flips arose in retelling his most emotionally sensitive scenarios, these last seem to have been random.That kind of spirit bleeds into other things, as we slowly realize the saying, “God punishes us for what we can't imagine” doesn’t mean the Almighty attacks us for reasons we can’t understand, but that ignorance and lack of foresight gets us into trouble.And those kinds of tricks lead to a certain way of thinking about his characters, which King had to have intended. We find that Edgar’s house was once inhabited by Salvadore Dali – for three weeks. The area might be magical, so has his newfound talent come from there? Later we learn he used to draw beautiful picture books for his daughters when they were sick – but he can’t remember it. Did the talent come form there? Despite being much longer, much less funny and of a wholly different tone and intent, the book throws several Nakokov Pale Fire scenarios at you, where you’ll have to figure it out for yourself, and your conclusion really is just as good as your professor’s.This kind of wordplay is indicative of a greater attention to diction than normal in King’s infinitely readable casual prose. It fits the world of quirky characters, where the normal people only visit and curious conversations are legion. King plays with clichés and platitudes as always, but there’s more literal dueling going on here – and thankfully none of it gets in the way of a damned good tone. I don’t even know why I picked up the book that first day, but after three pages I knew I was going to be sitting for a while.
I wasn’t far into reading Duma Key before it dawned on me that there was, quite possibly, something very important about this novel. It’s no secret that King was almost killed in a car accident in 1999 and, for quite some time afterwards, there was doubt whether he would ever recover enough to be able to write again. The author himself even gave voice to the idea that he was considering the very distinct possibility of retirement, because of the constant pain he’d suffered from since the event. King did continue to write, but he stated numerous times that he was finding it a much harder and slower process than before.So, what does this have to do with Duma Key? In my opinion, everything.Enter Edgar Freemantle: middle-aged and happily married, with two loving daughters; owner of a highly lucrative building and contracting business; a self-made success story. Edgar is involved in a terrible accident on a building site. His right side is crushed; bones broken, skull fractured, arm amputated. His wife, unable to cope with the unremitting rage and frustration that he unleashes towards her in his state of confusion during his recovery, leaves him. The world he knew is utterly destroyed and, at first, Edgar feels compelled to end it all - until his therapist convinces him to try a year in a new location, before he does anything too drastic.Edgar relocates to a rented beach house in the Florida Keys, leaving his ‘other life’ far behind, where his view of the Gulf of Mexico inspires him to discover a new hobby in painting - a hobby that he quickly finds he has an almost unnatural talent for, and which eventually leads him to discover that, through his new found creative outlet, holds far more power than merely healing the psychological damage inflicted by his accident. A dark power is at work here, and it threatens to destroy everything he loves.Sounds like a Stephen King story, doesn’t it? Well, even judging the book from this level alone, you’ll find a lot to enjoy here. The well-fleshed, likeable characters and the gradual build-up towards the inevitable final confrontation are typical King, and on more than one occasion I was genuinely creeped out by some of the scenes in this book. One huge problem I have with several of King’s novels is that the endings often tend to feel kind of rushed after such a wonderfully detailed (almost leisurely) pace is set by the first three quarters or so - I didn’t feel that way about this one, though, thankfully.Right, that’s as much as you’re going to get as far as something resembling a ‘proper’ review goes, now back to my original point...What I found especially significant about the telling of this tale is that it’s written in the first-person, from Edgar’s perspective, and that the first half of the novel focuses very much on the process of attempting to regain at least some of what’s lost after the accident - describing in great detail the pain, frustration, despair and anger that Edgar feels about having both his physical frame and previous life shattered beyond any hope of a full recovery. At numerous times throughout the novel I found myself wondering whether this was the character’s or the author’s voice I was hearing. There’s a definite sense that this book was a creative outlet for King to pour all of the emotions he went through after his own accident into something creative - much like Edgar with his paintings.My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say I can do this even when you know you can’t.I can do this. A phrase that’s repeated throughout this book. It’s the essence of the book. A mantra. This is the voice of a man who has been through hell and, somehow, come out alive on the other side; irreversibly changed, but still in control. It is the line in the sand. The desire to put the past behind and finally look again to the future.A work of fiction this may be, but there’s an incredible amount of honesty in this novel.
What do You think about Duma Key (2008)?
Good prose and King sets a really good mood, but it ended up going absolutely nowhere. Very anti-climactic. Second read: It's with a heavy heart that I'm putting this one aside. I thought maybe I didn't give it a fair shake the first time around and I always wanted to give it another go. But again I'm just not feeling it. There's a point where the story loses me and I just can't seem to pull myself through it. Instead I end up losing all interest. It's starting to feel like a bit of a slog, and that's just not the Stephen King I know and love, so I'm declaring this one 'just not for me'.
—Lisa
Another great book by Stephen King. My only complaint about it is, sometimes, once the real story got going, about Nan Melda, the girls, the 'supernatural' stuff going on, it got a little confusing, or I felt like it needed to be clearer. Maybe that's just me, but I found myself having to re-read a few passages over because I would get a little confused about what was going on. The ending left me sad, and quite honestly, once I realized what was going on, it had nothing to do with my original thought. Which, to me, is great. I hate knowing what's going on, and know what's going to happen before the ending, so kudos to King for another great read and unexpected story. :)
—Kathryn
I don't know what to make of the current King. In Lisey's Story, which I sort of liked, I saw a genre writer trying to stretch himself, while keeping a foot in things (Horror, Suspense) he loves (or loved), and placing the other foot onto turf he longs for ("Serious Fiction" ). There is of course an enormous gray area between the two, and I would hope for a writer to just write what he or she knows best and let the chips fall where they may. But the way King is going about it, wanting it both ways (see his dust up with National Book Award winner Shirley Hazzard), isn't going to satisfy a lot of folks. It's certainly not going to fool the readers of literary fiction, who will for the most part just ignore his offerings anyway, and it's going to leave the old fans scratching their heads, wondering what happened.As I said, I somewhat liked Lisey's Story, though there were the usual King weaknesses -- neverending padding being the main one. Then again, this is the same author that gave us the wonderful lean and mean throwback to the early King: Cell. After that one, I felt this guy still had the chops. But after Duma Key, I have to wonder if King's Cell was the author's last look back blip on the Horror screen. In many ways Duma Key is like Lisey's Story. It's ambitious, Arty, perhaps distantly autobiographical (man in his fifties who suffers life changing accident), and ulitmately Endless. (I cannot understand how King, a student of the genre, continues to overlook the importance of economy in the Horror genre.) The characters (always his strength) are great, up until the halfway point (which seems to be a dividing line for many), and then the repetitions just seem to swamp you in a Tropical Depression. And the Supernatural element does feel tacked on (Hey, this is a Stephen King novel). Ultimately, Duma Key is a beach book with a lot of sand. Some will call all that "sand" the New and Mature King. From where I'm sitting, I think it's just crappy writing from a writer who has grown too big to be reigned in by a good editor.
—Steve
