Buying a Stephen King novel is a crapshoot. And I'm not the gambling type. After trying to read the last couple of installments of "The Dark Tower," I swore I'd never shell out good money for another of his books. But I found myself having lunch, alone, next door to a bookstore, and the next thing I know, I'm standing at the checkout counter with "Duma Key."
"Have you read this?"
"No, sorry. I don't read fiction."
"Have you heard anything about it?"
He pulled out his New York Times bestseller list, which I pointed out was pretty worthless when it comes to giving the kind of information I was looking for. King could (and often does) write complete drivel and it would still make the bestseller list.
It's easy to tell when he's written a book just to meet a contract deadline. Some of his stuff is just so awful, it's embarrassing. At least, it ought to be. Ah, but sometimes what he writes is so downright beautiful, so artful, so.....sublime, that it floors me. And that's the rub. How to know whether the book I'm about to purchase is going to take me for a ride or send me on a journey.
For every stupid, ridiculous story about evil cellphones, murderous toasters, and wicked cartoon characters, is another that's a gem -- beautiful stories like "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" or "The Green Mile"; elegant psychological studies like "Apt Pupil" "Rage," and "Misery"; and groundbreaking horror stories like "Carrie" and "The Shining."
So I looked at the book in my hand - a rather hefty tome, and decided to toss the dice.
Duma Key is the story of Edgar Freemantle, a wealthy building contractor who is nearly killed in a construction-site accident. The fallout from the accident includes some brain damage, his right arm and his marriage. Hurt (literally) and angry, he decides a change of scene is the only answer to come to grips with the world he's now living in. So he moves into a beach house on a remote Florida key where he rediscovers a talent for painting and meets the two other residents of the key, whose own near brushes with death include the same sort of brain insult -- a contracoup injury. In addition to what they've lost because of their injuries, they all discover they've also gained something -- abilities with a dangerous edge.
What I got from this story was a bit of a mixed bag -- the majority of the book is the good stuff: a character-driven story that, at least initially, goes easy on silly. The prose is beautiful, at times poetic with descriptions like a Gulf breeze with, "a rueful salt tang" or "little scars of light dancing on the table."
"The thunderheads stacked up, huge flatboats, black on the bottom and bruise-purple through the middle. Every now and then, lightning would flash inside them, and then they looked like brains filled with bad ideas. The Gulf lost its color and went dead. Sunset was a yellow band that flicked feeble orange and went out. Little Pink filled with gloom"
The characters in this book, especially Edgar Freemantle, are thoroughly fleshed out. I cared about them. There's a lot of internal dialogue that made me like Freemantle and want to root for him. And while King tends to have moved inward with his stories since his own near-death experience, he loses focus occasionally, and missteps.
He has an annoying habit of letting the reader know ahead of time which characters won't make it through to the end of the book. After going through all the trouble of making me like a character, their demise would have a much bigger emotional punch if I didn't already know they were doomed. By the time he gets around to killing off his character, I'm prepared for it and have lost interest.
King also needs to pay attention to his characters' emotions. One scene, in particular, where Freemantle has just learned that a loved one has been killed, rings particularly false. He goes to bed sobbing over the death, and wakes up the next morning determined to stop the killing. So far, no problem. But as he and his two companions are riding over to do battle with whatever it is that's destroying everyone he loves, Freemantle suddenly decides he wants to hear what's on the radio.
"Jack backed onto the road and turned south. More out of curiosity than anything else, I punched on the radio and was rewarded with Billy Ray Cyrus, bellowing about his achy breaky heart."
Huh? A loved one has just died, he's on a dangerous mission where they might all be killed and he's curious about what's on the radio? It's a small detail, but I think an important one. If the plot needed that radio turned on so badly, there were two other people in the car who hadn't just lost a loved one.
And then it gets silly. I suppose there really are people who are frightened by frogs with teeth and flying lawn jockeys with big grins on their faces, but I'm just not one of them. That's the kind of gimmick that made me wonder if the reason King named that one book, Desperation, was because it's what he was feeling when he didn't have a really good story to turn in to his publisher.
Which is not to say I didn't like it. For the most part, I did, but the last quarter or so left me cold. It put my boyfriend to sleep during what was supposed to be the climax of the story.
I'm left wondering if his next book is going to be one of his gems. I do hope so.
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