Duma Key

Stephen King has been monkeying around with a new style for a while, since he was almost killed by a van that struck him while he was walking, most likely. It's popped up in From a Buick 8, Cell, and most obviously in Lisey's Story, published in 2006. It was hard to put a finger on what that style was, and it made for a read that was often frustrating, with plots that it took ten minutes to sum up (in other words, these weren't "evil big dog" novels, or "evil car" or "evil hotel"). The narration would meander, the frequent pop culture references replaced by more and more oft-repeated odd turns of phrase that seemed to go beyond the regional dialect King often employs in his Bangor books. But it wasn't until Duma Key that this new style finally seems to have found cohesion.

Duma Key is not a novel I could sum up for you in two sentences, but to attempt: Edgar Freemantle, construction mogul, gets into an accident on a site and suffers a brain injury that impairs his speech and thought. He also loses an arm. After his wife leaves him, his therapist suggests he spend some time in another locale to help recover, so Edgar moves to Duma Key, a small and unknown Florida Key. Once there, Edgar begins painting, and churns out paintings of surprising power and beauty. But, naturally, there are unseen forces behind the work, and they're not all that nice.

Now, that plot snippet really only gets you a third of the way through the book, and doesn't cover any of the people he meets on the Key, who are very important to the plot, but that's exactly the difficulty. Short of describing the entire book in outline form, you can't put your thumb on summing it up. But what's different about this book is...it's finished. That's the feeling I had reading it that I didn't necessarily get from the other books. In those, the prose seemed a little unpolished, as though King had published a first or second draft, while in this everything worked for me. The weird recurring dialogue snippets made sense because of the head injury and the introduction of a character (Wireman) whose speech patterns match King's new way of writing.

The novel is also barely a horror novel. There were a few scenes that made me want to turn on the light, but there's a point about two-thirds of the way through where he could have ended it, and it would have been a beautiful 400-page novel about recovery from injuries physical and psychological. The supernatural stuff doesn't seem tacked on, it just seems...I don't know, secondary. In a way, that is a return to his earlier work, since the point of Carrie is the pain and frustration of being a high school reject, and the point of the Shining is the destructive nature of alcoholism, and what it can do to a man and a family. King's new narration style is a return to his older sensibilities but with (and he'd hate me for saying this) more of a literary sensibility and a greater attention to the subtleties of character. He had to take his story from Bangor to the Florida Keys to find it, but I'm glad he's reached a new plateau, and I'm looking forward to seeing if he can stay there for a little while, before either falling off, or trying another rocky climb to somewhere new.