King more readily illustrates this, to the point where he doesn’t need to explain it. “That’s just too gothic.”) These chapters also offer direct advice about how the artist should treat memory, but they need not be high-minded. (“You’re not going to tell me he raised six girls out here,” Edgar says to Wireman, upon hearing the tale of Elizabeth’s father. The winding narrative of “Duma Key” is interspersed with short chapters on the subject of “How to Draw a Picture.” There are 12 of these, and they incorporate creeping, gradual revelations about Elizabeth’s fraught family history. So is his editors’ tendency to let that happen. His own past tendency to wander untethered into the world of dreams is under control.

King constructs this story with patience and rigor.

In such an atmosphere the rules of fantasy might run wild, but Mr.

King calls “weird slip-slides,” moments of maddening confusion. Each of them has suffered some kind of head injury each of them endures what Mr. Like Elizabeth, and like Wireman, the affectionate ex-lawyer who takes care of her, Edgar lives in a befogged and unsteady mental state. Elizabeth Eastlake, the ancient grande dame in the nearby house, has weirdly powerful artistic talents of her own. And the details that crop up in his pictures have a way of prefiguring real events or even causing them, especially when those events are deadly. But it turns out that the sunsets make Edgar want to draw. King takes his teasingly sweet time in revealing exactly what’s going on here. It was a construction crane, and it smashed him to jelly. And also this: Unlike may other people whose lives suddenly go off course, he knows exactly what hit him. Another: He has lost an arm in an accident. One: He has struck it rich in the construction business. King’s main character, Edgar Freemantle, is a regular Joe with only a few unusual qualities. That may make it sound fanciful, but this novel is frank and well grounded. “Duma Key” is about characters whose near-death experiences have given them psychic powers. In the wake of the 1999 roadside accident that permanently altered his consciousness, he has turned the evanescence of health and sanity into his books’ most disturbing source of fear. But lately he also shows off other interests. Sure, he can still use supernatural effects to scare the wits out of you. It may still be the impetus for his stories, but it is no longer the foremost reason they’re interesting. King’s use of horror is not what it used to be. Given this combination of author and setting, it’s inevitable that something terribly undead will show up before the book is over.īut Mr. Stephen King’s “Duma Key” ventures to an all-but-uninhabited Florida island where the shells groan at high tide, tennis balls appear unexpectedly, foliage grows ominously quickly, and at least one heron flies upside-down.

Stephen king duma key review