Book Report

I've started writing the occasional book review for the small rural paper here in Veneta. This be my inagural one...

Library News for Thursday, Feb 28th
by Colin Rea, Director

February Book Review – Duma Key by Stephen King; published by Scribner Book Company.

Yes, it’s true. I still read the occasional Stephen King novel. Without jumping into a discussion of his ‘literary merit,’ I will say that no matter your position on his writing, Mr. King is one heck of a storyteller. This particular story follows Edgar Freemantle to the Florida Keys, where he begins a new life after a horrific construction accident that takes both his arm and his marriage. The move, undertaken as a ‘geographic cure,’ awakens a newfound artistic talent, and perhaps something else on the Duma Key, an island with a handful of rental properties and one grand estate. This estate crumbles around an elderly matron of the arts, Elizabeth Eastlake and her caregiver, Wireman, even as an old evil awakens and reaches out to the inhabitants of the island.

Duma Key is King’s best novel since his own accident in 1999. Like much of what he’s written since an encounter with a Dodge Caravan on a rural road in Maine, his own experience in rehab and recovery appears to be woven into the story. The characters drawn around Edgar are vivid and real, given just enough depth to support their involvement in the narrative. The supernatural element in Duma Key is left to be just that, supernatural. As Hermione Granger might tell you, putting a name to evil serves to give it substance and lessen the terror, and King increasingly leaves it to his reader to fill in the nasty details.

King is at his best when his novels build like a snowball rolling downhill, and Duma Key does just that. It may not be the apocalyptic epic that is The Stand, or the brilliant homage to youth that is It, but I like this one just fine.