Stephen King, Duma Key (Scribner, 2008)

Once a decade or so, Stephen King goes through a terrible writing slump, and I inevitably find myself wondering if King is finally past it. It happened in the early eighties (Christine, Cujo, Firestarter, et al.), the early nineties (culminating in the grandly awful Insomnia), and the late nineties (in which he went from the brilliant The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon to the... not at all brilliant... Bag of Bones). In the midst of this last batch came the accident, a couple of announcements of retirement, and a bunch of mediocre writing-- but then came “Blind Willie”, perhaps the best story King has written, and the final two Dark Tower novels, which heralded a possible return to form. Now, there is Duma Key, and it looks like King is back on his feet. Not that Duma Key is one of King's deathless novels like The Stand or Misery, stuff that should be pressed on visiting alien races as examples of what we do down here, but something that is solid and worth reading. In other words, it's King's best standalone novel since The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

The story centers on Edgar Freemantle, a building contractor from Minnesota who loses his arm in an accident with a crane, and soon after loses his marriage. His therapist suggests a change of venue as a possible cure, and he resettles on Duma Key, an isolated island off the Florida coast, where he discovers a previously unknown talent for art and some rather odd characters. Soon he realizes, with the help of the island's doyenne, that his art may be something more than he had at first taken it for...

One thing that King always does well, even in his bad periods, is characterization. King is one of the modern masters of drawing a character in a few broad strokes and having the reader know as much about the character as is necessary (and, frequently, a great deal more). When he's on his game, his characters are some of the best to be found in modern fiction. And while Edgar Freemantle himself is, surprisingly, a pretty stock character from the King arsenal-- you could pick him up and drop him whole into any number of King novels and he's be right at home-- it's the supporting cast who really make this book tick. Freemantle's younger daughter Ilse is fantastic, as is Elizabeth Eastlake, the senile landlady who, in her moments of clarity, gives Freemantle and his (equally wonderful) friend Wireman all the necessary clues to figure out what's going on with Freemantle's blossoming talent. They alone would make the book worthwhile. And there are times when they have to carry it-- King's depiction of Freemantle and his ex-wife's fumbling in the dark toward some sort of post-marriage understanding comes off as, at worst, horribly manipulative (and at best nothing more than a demon loosed to advance the plot)-- but when the book is on, it's on. King is also fantastic (when he's not dropping the ball, as in the relationship above) at setting things up without the reader realizing those things are being set up, and much of the book works in this vein; King, who has repeatedly stated in interviews that he starts his books without much idea of where they're going, has either changed the way he writes or has allowed his subconscious total control when writing, because the setup starts in the first few pages and never lets up; half the fun of reading any King novel is in getting through a big revelation and saying “hey, that scene back on page twenty-six...”. You know the drill.

I liked this one a bunch. It's good to see that Mr. King is back again and firing on all cylinders, even if one or two miss now and again. ****