Duma Key: A Novel by, Stephen King

February 18, 2008 · Posted in Book Reviews 

duma_ket.jpg What makes King such an amazing author? His ability to describe the human emotion and his amazing ability to develop characters that practically leap off of the pages. Once he has you emotionally embedded into the story, once you are completely locked in; well, that’s when the shit starts to hit the fan. This novel is classic King. That’s about all I can say – no spoilers, sorry. It just so happens that Stephen King wrote a short story entitled Memory, published by Tin House, that later evolved into Duma Key. If you need a little teaser to get you interested, then download Memory by Stephen King in a pdf version.

A terrible construction site accident takes Edgar Freemantle’s right arm and scrambles his memory and his mind, leaving him with little but rage as he begins the ordeal of rehabilitation. A marriage that produced two lovely daughters suddenly ends, and Edgar begins to wish he hadn’t survived the injuries that could have killed him. He wants out. His psychologist, Dr. Kamen, suggests a “geographic cure,” a new life distant from the Twin Cities and the building business Edgar grew from scratch. And Kamen suggests something else.

“Edgar, does anything make you happy?”

“I used to sketch.”

“Take it up again. You need hedges… hedges against the night.”

Edgar leaves Minnesota for a rented house on Duma Key, a stunningly beautiful, eerily undeveloped splinter of the Florida coast. The sun setting into the Gulf of Mexico and the tidal rattling of shells on the beach call out to him, and Edgar draws. A visit from Ilse, the daughter he dotes on, starts his movement out of solitude. He meets a kindred spirit in Wireman, a man reluctant to reveal his own wounds, and then Elizabeth Eastlake, a sick old woman whose roots are tangled deep in Duma Key. Now Edgar paints, sometimes feverishly, his exploding talent both a wonder and a weapon. Many of his paintings have a power that cannot be controlled. When Elizabeth’s past unfolds and the ghosts of her childhood begin to appear, the damage of which they are capable is truly devastating.
The tenacity of love, the perils of creativity, the mysteries of memory and the nature of the supernatural — Stephen King gives us a novel as fascinating as it is gripping and terrifying.

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