Duma Key: A Novel by Stephen King Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $3.00 You Save: $25.00 (89%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Duma Key: A Novel
Book Review: A Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
Stephen King's newest novel, "Duma Key" is, to put it simply, great. I admit to being a pretty hard-core SK fan, having read everything that he has written - usually within a week or so of its release. I think King is a great writer, regardless of subject matter or genre. Like every writer, the great and the not-so-great, some of his works are better than others. "Duma Key" is right up there with his best. I won't bother describing the plot (which is great) since you have already seen that from the publisher's description and the other reviews. And for me, as good as the plot is, the writing is even better.
King has clearly matured over the years. He can still describe horrific scenes graphically with tremendous clarity and emotional impact. And he still does. But he has also mellowed. Somehow now he is able to evoke the same memorable visceral responses as in scenes from Cujo or The Stand, but in a more refined and distilled way. He can still write long novels (Duma is about 600 pages long) but one gets the feeling that compared to 20 years ago he says more with less. His prose is crisp and clean and sometimes really memorable. There is some great dialogue in the book and some of the best is spoken not by the main character, Edgar, but by his close friend Wireman.
King's recent work seems to express more emotion and express it better than ever before, and this is in evidence in Duma Key. There are a lot of relationships in this novel. The relationships between Edgar Freemantle and his daughters and his wife, Edgar and Wireman, and Wireman and Elizabeth Eastlake are slowly unfurled and become richer and more complex as the story moves along. Good things turn bad and things heat up rapidly during the last quarter of the book, and it was tough to put down. I think just about all SK fans will thoroughly enjoy this book. I think it also may turn a bunch of new readers into converts too.
Book Review: A Personal Vision
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the best books ever from one of the best American writers. Stephen King knows what scares us, and he's been proving it for thirty years, but this new novel adds a layer of humanity to the fantasy that makes it all the more surprising. Though the protagonist of DUMA KEY is ostensibly a divorced construction engineer with a latent talent for drawing, he is also clearly a stand-in for the author himself, making this arguably his most personal narrative.
I won't reveal the hypnotically readable plot--it must be experienced to be appreciated--but I will say that Edgar Freemantle's living nightmare plainly echoes events in Mr. King's recent history. A life-threatening accident, like an illness or the loss of a loved one, puts many things in perspective, and DUMA KEY sometimes seems like a personal statement, a portrait of the artist that is as thrilling as it is vivid. For all its entertaining terrors, it is ultimately a celebration of life itself. I urge you to read it. Highly, highly recommended.
Book Review: A Shivery Delight
Summary: 5 Stars
Duma Key is loaded with shivery delights that appear unexpectedly on the page before you.
As in all of his best works, in Duma Key, King builds characters and setting slowly, allowing the reader to fully enter the minds of his characters, to feel the atmosphere of the places they inhabit, and to lose themselves fully in the dream of the story.
And this is one long, satisfying dream of a story. You won't want it to end, even though you'll be anxious to learn the fate of the characters you've come to care about.
Edgar Freemantle (the main character) for example: He "used to be a big deal", but life has knocked him down--hard. And you just want to see him get up again, and STAY up. Will he make it? Seems he will, but there are...forces...that may just keep him from ever finding normalcy again.
I really don't want to include spoilers of any kind in this review, so I'll just say READ THIS ONE!
It's vintage King, yet loaded with shivery surprises.
Book Review: A Solid, Supernatural Thriller
Summary: 4 Stars
I never really considered myself a die-hard King fan, but looking at his bibliography, I realize that I've read almost all of his novels from the last 10 years.
While I always find him readable, King sometimes has a tendency to start with a very interesting premise that ultimately fizzles in the end (CELL, for example). Here, however, we have a slow build that leads to a pretty exciting, action-packed ending. Did I say "slow build"? Yes, indeed... the novel spends its sweet time setting up the story-- in fact, King COULD have turned this into a simple "slice-of-life" story about a man who has a life-changing accident and embraces art as a way to heal the "wounded spirit within." Sure, we get that, but also a good helping of freaky stuff like "phantom limb powers" and ancient evils.
King is at his best when writing for his similarly aged protagonists, and at his WORST when trying to capture the dialog of Edgar Freemantle's teenage daughter (no one talks like that in 2008). Freemantle and Wireman are an engaging duo, though, and the mystery of Duma Key definitely had a satisfying payoff.
Book Review: A Story You'd Swear You'd Read Before
Summary: 4 Stars
***SPOILERS***
Stephen King's 2008 novel Duma Key is heavily evocative of his work from ten years earlier, Bag of Bones.
1. The protagonist is a man who amassed a fortune, then suffered a devastating loss
* Bestselling author loses his wife to death in 1988; successful building contractor loses his wife to divorce in 2008, along with his arm and much of his mental capacity.
2. He flees his home base and takes up in an isolated house near water
* A lake in 1998; the Gulf of Mexico in 2008
3. He becomes increasingly convinced that the place "called" him.
4. Strange phenomena greet him upon arrival at the house
* The sound of a crying child and communication through refrigerator magnets in 1998; seashells that sound like they're talking when the waves hit in 2008
5. He "zones out" and wakes to find strange things have happened in the interim
* Automatic typing in 1998; automatic painting in 2008
6. He experiences a resurgence of creativity, but the creations are the medium for a message
*writing in '98, painting in '08
7. He is encouraged to continue his creative pursuits in order to enhance someone else financially
*his publisher in '98; a gallery owner in '08
8. In both cases, he is being told about a horrific event in the past, and is now being called upon to do something about it
*a vengeful ghost in '98; an ancient sea-demon in '08. Both of these horrific events contain elements of racism.
9. Death by drowning figures prominently in both stories
10. A child or childlike adult leads him to a deep friendship
* Kyra and her mother Mattie in '98; Elizabeth and her caregiver Wireman in `08
11. The protagonist befriends a lawyer
* John Storrow in '98; Wireman in '08
12. The protagonist discovers a psychic link between himself and the child or childlike adult
* He and Kyra share a dream in '98; he and Elizabeth paint the same pictures, eight decades apart, in '08
13. The source of the evil is uncovered in a place not far from where he is staying, but in a place that has largely been abandoned
*The Street in '98, the original family home in '08
14. Someone has hidden a clue in a tin box under part of a house and the protagonist gradually figures out how to find it
* "Owls under studio" in '98; the "ha-ha" under the stairs in the old house
15. Non-human entities are used by the evil spirit to attack the protagonist
*the tree in '98; the heron in '08
16. The protagonist must get "down and dirty" to contain the rampaging spirit, and barely manages to succeed.
* Pouring lye into the grave in '98; the cistern in '08
17. The evil spirit kills the protagonist's loved one by someone else's hand
* His girlfriend in '98; his daughter in `08
18. The protagonist resolves to cease his creative pursuits after the crisis has passed.
~~~
None of this changes the fact that Duma Key is a wordy, fascinating read from start to finish, whether or not you've already experienced Bag of Bones. It's wonderfully atmospheric, stirring your memories of sultry Florida vacations or John Huston film noir classics.
My major complaint with this novel is that it not only crams an enormous amount of events into the story, but also fails quite often to justify their inclusion. Bag of Bones neatly wrapped up virtually every possible loose end. Duma Key leaves many of them dangling. At least one major character dies with no foreshadowing, and others drop off the radar after having a significant amount of attention paid to them throughout the book. Duma Key is at least the length of the earlier novel, but the reader is left wishing King had tacked on an extra 10 or 20 pages.
King also forgoes the "social relevance" angle in Duma Key. While the denouement of Bag of Bones was a matter of racial hatred, the closest we get to that in Duma Key is a man accidentally killing his African-American employee and tossing her body down a well to escape the consequences ... but he does the same with his beloved daughter. There is a murdering pedophile caught on videotape, echoing a real-life news story that Stephen King no doubt got his fill of while wintering in the Sunshine State. But the hero's involvement in that story is, as King's character admits, a device of sorts, contrived by the demon to lure Freemantle into more and more other-worldly artistry, intended to snare more victims.
Both novels entertain us with a cynical "insider" look at the business side of the literature and art worlds.
The biggest objective distinction between these two novels is that in Duma Key, regardless of the eerie atmosphere, the protagonist is never truly alone. He is constantly on the phone to his ex-wife, therapist, daughters, and business associates. There's no love interest, but he has managed to find a platonic companion in an "anger doll" named Reba. He fights the villain with plenty of help from two "buddies." I found myself somehow missing the quiet, introspective solitude that Mike Noonan enjoyed in Bag of Bones. There, Noonan's dialogues, if not with ghosts, are largely with himself. His brother-in-law is his only real ally, and Frank Arlen plays a peripheral role at best. The lawyer is there to help, but for a fee ... and he threatens to become a romantic rival partway through the novel. In Duma Key, Ed Freemantle is surrounded by family and friends, reconciling briefly with his estranged wife (those two truly have a love-hate relationship), and never lacking for a sounding board.
Bag of Bones afflicts Mike Noonan and the reader with heartbreak - in Duma Key, the grief is displaced by rage and revenge.
If there is a point or a moral to Duma Key, it may be similar to that of Bag of Bones - that "things happen for a reason." The "reasons" touch Mike Noonan more personally than they do in Duma Key, where Ed Freemantle is not unlike the man taken in a "press gang" to fight someone else's battle until it becomes his own.