A Review of Duma Key by Stephen King

[Clayton Clifford Bye]

Duma Key
By Stephen King, Scribner, 611 pp., $32

Stephen King has built his career by putting ordinary people into the most unusual of situations, slipping horror into many of his stories as naturally as you and I go through our days. Duma Key, although set in the Florida Keys with a less than ordinary King protagonist, does not disappoint.

Edgar Freemantle —the millionaire contractor who’s lost an arm, suffered some serious brain trauma, wrecked one leg and lost his wife—has found himself recuperating on a sparsely inhabited Florida Key with a handfull of interesting characters. Turning to an old skill, Edgar begins sketching and painting as a kind of therapy. But instead a peaceful return to some semblance of normality, he finds himself painting a series of disturbing works, some of which he barely remembers painting.

This being a King story, we automatically look for the fright factor. Is it Edgar’s strange paintings, his new friend with the bullet in his head or the strange old woman that lives in a mansion up the road? Bringing us slowly, almost leisurely, into the lives of these people, we begin to sense something is very wrong on Duma Key. Centering on the theme of creativity unleashed by injury to mind and body (something King has worked into several novels since his near death experience in 1999), the maturing author gives us a frightening look at the cost of second chances.

A welcome read after his disappointing novel, Cell, King returns to the unusual character creation he gave us in Lisey’s Story, and once more takes us masterfully to the edge of our imaginations.

Duma Key brings us sea shells that talk, paintings that kill, giant frogs with “teef” and birds that fly upside down. Only King could write a book like this. I’m glad he decided not to retire.


Copyright © 2008 by Clayton Bye