DUMA KEY

STEPHEN KING

Stephen King, you crafty bastard.

You had me reading your latest full-length thinking it was one of the best non-horror stories you’d written – so good, in fact, that it made me want to go back and re-evaluate your earlier non-horror work. But then you started to introduce a supernatural element, closely followed by a decidedly sinister plot twist, and I thought ‘Well this is interesting; I wonder what’s going to happen next?’.

What did happen next, Mr. King? What did happen?

You suddenly reveal that DUMA KEY really is a horror story after all, that’s what. Cheeky monkey!

That this happened is by no means a bad thing, in fact it is quite the opposite. I fell out of love with King a while ago, as I started to find his work disappointing and, dare I say it, boring. I only started getting back into him fairly recently, first with Everything’s Eventual (very enjoyable), then Cell (good fun but a bit light on substance) and most recently, Just After Sunset (above average, but still haunted by the spectre of ‘been there, done that’). The synopsis to DUMA KEY didn’t really grab me, to be honest, but it was mainly for that reason I thought I would try and read it…and I’m glad I did.

After building contractor Edgar Freemantle suffers a worksite accident that costs him his right arm and leaves him with aphasia and memory loss, things are looking a bit grim. And then when his wife leaves him teetering on the edge of a bitter divorce, it seems to be the last straw. However, before he can do anything rash, Edgar’s doctor suggests he head somewhere to recuperate. That somewhere is the small Florida island of Duma Key.

Once there, Edgar rediscovers a talent for art, and is soon experiencing both phantom limb pains and sinister visions of an ancient ship out on the Gulf of Mexico. In short, it transpires that Edgar may not be in complete control of his artwork’s subjects…

King has featured ‘cursed paintings’ in his stories a few times, and the central conceit in DUMA KEY is very Twilight-Zone (art becomes reality) but even so, King crafts a dramatic horror story that, despite being 600 pages long, positively rockets along. Long-term fans of King will probably agree this is a nice change from his usual/old habit of taking ages to get anywhere, although that does creep into the book at the beginning – Edgar is happy to tell you all about his new best friend, Wireman, yet takes unnecessarily long to get there. Oh well, tomato/tomato.

Usually, I like to try and find a paragraph in the book I’m reviewing that perfectly sums it up. I couldn’t find one for The Tooth Fairy but that’s not the case with DUMA KEY – there were simply too many to choose from, and like a film that’s crammed with quotable dialogue, this is a very good thing. From Wireman and Edgar’s verbal sparring to the strange ‘just whose memories are those?’ excerpts that litter the book, there’s a surfeit of memorable lines and set-pieces.

DUMA KEY isn’t entirely perfect (there a few other minor niggles, such as characters using phrases I could never imagine a real person uttering) but it is as close as King’s got in recent years. And it’s not set in bloody Maine.