His wife, Pam, frightened by his anger and exhausted by his arduous physical rehabilitation, has left him, and his two grown daughters, one estranged, the other close, are worried about his welfare. It’s first-rate entertainment and, the lurid cover notwithstanding, a novel the most effete reader can take up without embarrassment.Īfter nearly dying in a work-site mishap that takes his right arm and leaves him brain-damaged and enraged, Freemantle seeks, on the advice of his therapist, a “geographic cure” by moving to a barrier island off the southwest coast of Florida. Perhaps Duma Key‘s setting - it is King’s first Florida novel - accounts for its fresh vigor and supreme craftsmanship, or perhaps it is the courage with which he confronts the aftereffects of a horrible accident on his hero, Edgar Freemantle, a Minnesota building contractor. But when King became a columnist for Entertainment Weekly in 2003, writing off-the-cuff reactions to popular culture, it was impossible not to take it as the effort to remain in the public eye by a novelist, his creative spark ebbing, whose best stuff lay behind him. These are, of course, the musings of a reviewer who knows King through only a selective reading of his vast body of work, and may well be off the mark.
Bag of Bones (1998), a big sloppy mess of a ghost story, in particular appeared a willful repudiation of the impulse toward more refined work. This could most readily be ascribed to the 1999 accident, in which he nearly died after being run down by a van near his home in Maine, but might as easily be seen as the result of a continual conflict between his very great literary gifts and a steadfast allegiance to the pulp fiction that formed his sensibility as a boy.įor after garnering serious critical attention in the 1990s for psychological suspense novels like Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game, which seemed to be moving toward a mature and happy marriage of entertainment and literature, he returned, perhaps spooked by the attention, to the familiar comforts of the kind of horror novel that first made his name in the 1970s. His recent output, though scarcely less protean than before he announced retirement in 2002, has been spotty at best.
Duma Key, Stephen King’s terrific new novel, constitutes a return to form for a beloved pop novelist who has seemed, for many years now, to be running out of steam.
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