Book Review: Duma Key by Stephen King

BlogCritics.com has posted a review by Amanda Banker of Stephen King’s Duma Key…

“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings; words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.” – Stephen King, via Gordon LeChance, The Body

I recently finished Stephen Kings epic Duma Key, electing to wait until it came out in paperback so as to better consume the story. Or, should I say, let the story consume me. Stephen King is an author I believe readers either obsessively love or passionately abhor. His imagination is something to be feared, but it’s his prose, his way of making the unbelievable real, pulling meaning out of chaos with a simple order of words that really captures a reader.

King’s characters are oftentimes every man or woman. There isn’t one that is overly dramatic or romanticized. They simply are. The tragedy and terror is less obvious in the traditional monsters that live inside of his stories — vampires, ghosts, demons, devils, even aliens — and more palpable in the simple situation of a child walking down the side of a road, a group of boys on a hike, or the secret smile shared by comfortable lovers. By the time he has introduced the Bad Guy of the story, you as a reader are already invested in the happenings of his characters, and that what once felt impossible to swallow is now a real and terrible threat.

I thoroughly enjoyed Duma Key. There were moments when my skin literally crawled, moments when I teared up, moments when I gasped, and moments when I had to close the book and take a breath before continuing on.

King writes best, I think, when he does so in first person narrative. The reader almost instantly identifies with the storyteller, as if they are being let in on a secret and must sneak away to climb inside the story and listen with eager fascination while the story unfolds.

In Duma Key, King creates a whole person in his character, Edgar Freemantle, a good deal of the author himself was revealed through Edgar’s voice. Perhaps on some level this story was King’s way of healing (both mentally and physically) from the car accident that broke his hip.

A victim of a tragic construction site accident, Edgar is forced to rebuild a life out of the debris left behind when both his body and mind are broken. Through a series of seemingly meaningless coincidences, he ends up renting a house on Duma Key that he affectionately dubs “Big Pink” (revealing King’s penchant for imbuing his love of rock music into his characters and storylines) and begins his healing process. As we walk through Edgar’s tortured nights and painful days, we see that life on Duma Key is not what one might expect it to be. Not inside Big Pink, at any rate.

Head on over to BlogCritics.com to read the rest of the review