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Loading... Duma Key: A Novelby Stephen King
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This might very well be King's best work to date. The writing and characterizations are both horrifying and flawless, and what seems an entirely unsupernatural story moves from simple beauty into chilling horror and literature before he's done. Readers who are interested in the place of the artist in literature, or in addiction and trauma in literature, will especially fall in love with this work, but when it comes down to it, this book will be both entertaining and touching for any reader. If I meet someone who's never read King, or who's avoided him until now, this will be the book I pass them as introduction. It's careful, graceful, funny, engaging, and chilling, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. (  )1   whitewavedarling | Jan 2, 2010 |  This might very well be King's best work to date. The writing and characterizations are both horrifying and flawless, and what seems an entirely unsupernatural story moves from simple beauty into chilling horror and literature before he's done. Readers who are interested in the place of the artist in literature, or in addiction and trauma in literature, will especially fall in love with this work, but when it comes down to it, this book will be both entertaining and touching for any reader. If I meet someone who's never read King, or who's avoided him until now, this will be the book I pass them as introduction. It's careful, graceful, funny, engaging, and chilling, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. ( ) whitewavedarling | Jan 2, 2010 | I've read Stephen King's stuff since he started writing. I love some of it, and hate some of it (not surprising for a writer as prolific as he is). Duma Key is one of my new favorites (along with The Stand, 'Salems Lot and The Shining). The setting and the slow buildup of tension were what attracted me to the story, and like all of King's books, won't attract everyone. The healing process has been slow for Stephen King and the optimism seen in this story indicates that perhaps the man has beaten some of his personal devils. ( )1 kcs_hiker | Dec 12, 2009 | When I wasn’t listening to Duma Key, I wanted to be listening Duma Key. When it was over, despite piles of books that I should be listening to, I wanted to start all over again. I can’t wait to pass this one along to my follow audio addicts. I’m not sure it gets any better then this. That said, it does take a few CDs for the book to hook you as our main character, Edgar Freemantle’s life implodes due to an accident, he’s not a likable guy. And there are 18 CDs total, so it was a definite time commitment. There is also a lot of adult language, so I had to painfully forego listening with my children in the car. However, with Duma Key, King surpasses anything he’s ever done. I was never sure what to expect, and I carried an unshakable unease during every moment I was able to listen to it. Easily the best audiobook I’ve listened to this year. John Slattery did an excellent job in creating dozens of characters. Do not hesitate; if you haven’t listened to Duma Key, you’ll want to. ( )3 Sararush | Nov 15, 2009 | King is back With the exception of the Colorado Kid, I have to confess to having not read Stephen King in awhile. I'd become disappointed in some of his efforts. By chance, through the winning of a raffle, which awarded a bundle of books, I came into possession of a copy of Duma Key. Even then I did not read the book right away, choosing a few of the other books in the stack instead. When I did get around to it, I first examined the cover, realizing that I liked that much of it. I cracked the book open and began to read. A few hours later, I knew that I had once again become entranced by the work of Mr. King. If you're a fan of Stephen King, especially one who has been away for a while, you should pick up a copy of Duma Key. Stephen is definitely back on track with this one. -- Bob Avey, author of the Detective Elliot mystery series ( )1 BobAvey | Oct 26, 2009 | 
 Sometimes, you hardly know where to begin. And so it is with "Duma Key," latest in a gloriously long line of tales from the uber-popular Stephen King. There are bad accidents, and there are horrible accidents, and horror novelist Stephen King knows about the worst kind. 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. Given this combination of author and setting, it’s inevitable that something terribly undead will show up before the book is over.  When Stephen King wrote Misery in 1987, making the hero a writer was an unusual departure for him. Recently, however, centring his novels on creative types has become a habit. In Cell, the protagonist is a comic-book artist. Lisey’s Story involves a dead author whose widow struggles to protect his legacy. And Duma Key’s narrator, Edgar Freemantle, is a painter whose work gives him paranormal powers – to know everything about people hundreds of miles away, to predict events, even to heal or kill someone. If you've read most of Stephen King's past works, you'll get a kick out of the opening line of "Duma Key," his new effort hitting bookstores this week. King signals to his Constant Readers, as he calls us, that whatever flaws his protagonist might have — and they are plentiful in this tale — he would wind up trying to do the right thing. Our hero's name is Edgar Freemantle, and it's no small accident he shares his surname with the savior-like figure in King's epic novel, "The Stand."
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| Book description |
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Duma Key: Where It All Began
A Note from Chuck Verrill, the Longtime Editor of Stephen King
In the spring of 2006 Stephen King told me he was working on a Florida story that was beginning to grow on him. "I'm thinking of calling it Duma Key," he offered. I liked the sound of that--the title was like a drumbeat of dread. "You know how Lisey's Story is a story about marriage?" he said. "Sure," I answered. The novel hadn't yet been published, but I knew its story well: Lisey and Scott Landon--what a marriage that was. Then he dropped the other shoe: "I think Duma Key might be my story of divorce."
Pretty soon I received a slim package from a familiar address in Maine. Inside was a short story titled "Memory"--a story of divorce, all right, but set in Minnesota. By the end of the summer, when Tin House published "Memory," Stephen had completed a draft of Duma Key, and it became clear to me how "Memory" and its narrator, Edgar Freemantle, had moved from Minnesota to Florida, and how a story of divorce had turned into something more complex, more strange, and much more terrifying.
If you read the following two texts side by side--"Memory" as it was published by Tin House and the opening chapter of Duma Key in final form--you'll see a writer at work, and how stories can both contract and expand. Whether Duma Key is an expansion of "Memory" or "Memory" a contraction of Duma Key, I can't really say. Can you?
--Chuck Verrill
"Memory"
Memories are contrary things; if you quit chasing them and turn your back, they often return on their own. That's what Kamen says. I tell him I never chased the memory of my accident. Some things, I say, are better forgotten.
Maybe, but that doesn’t matter, either. That's what Kamen says.
My name is Edgar Freemantle. I used to be a big deal in building and construction. This was in Minnesota, in my other life. I was a genuine American-boy success in that life, worked my way up like a motherf---er, and for me, everything worked out. When Minneapolis–St. Paul boomed, The Freemantle Company boomed. When things tightened up, I never tried to force things. But I played my hunches, and most of them played out well. By the time I was fifty, Pam and I were worth about forty million dollars. And what we had together still worked. I looked at other women from time to time but never strayed. At the end of our particular Golden Age, one of our girls was at Brown and the other was teaching in a foreign exchange program. Just before things went wrong, my wife and I were planning to go and visit her.
I had an accident at a job site. That's what happened. I was in my pickup truck. The right side of my skull was crushed. My ribs were broken. My right hip was shattered. And although I retained sixty percent of the sight in my right eye (more, on a good day), I lost almost all of my right arm.
I was supposed to lose my life, but I didn’t. Then I was supposed to become one of the Vegetable Simpsons, a Coma Homer, but that didn't happen, either. I was one confused American when I came around, but the worst of that passed. By the time it did, my wife had passed, too. She's remarried to a fellow who owns bowling alleys. My older daughter likes him. My younger daughter thinks he’s a yank-off. My wife says she’ll come around.
Maybe sí, maybe no. That's what Kamen says.
When I say I was confused, I mean that at first I didn’t know who people were, or what had happened, or why I was in such awful pain. I can't remember the quality and pitch of that pain now. I know it was excruciating, but it's all pretty academic. Like a picture of a mountain in National Geographic magazine. It wasn’t academic at the time. At the time it was more like climbing a mountain.
Continue Reading "Memory" Duma Key
How to Draw a Picture
Start with a blank surface. It doesn't have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember.
How do we remember to remember? That's a question I've asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic. Or so I’ve come to believe.
Imagine a little girl, hardly more than a baby. She fell from a carriage almost ninety years ago, struck her head on a stone, and forgot everything. Not just her name; everything! And then one day she recalled just enough to pick up a pencil and make that first hesitant mark across the white. A horizon-line, sure. But also a slot for blackness to pour through.
Still, imagine that small hand lifting the pencil... hesitating... and then marking the white. Imagine the courage of that first effort to re-establish the world by picturing it. I will always love that little girl, in spite of all she has cost me. I must. I have no choice. Pictures are magic, as you know.
My Other Life
My name is Edgar Freemantle. I used to be a big deal in the building and contracting business. This was in Minnesota, in my other life. I learned that my-other-life thing from Wireman. I want to tell you about Wireman, but first let's get through the Minnesota part.
Gotta say it: I was a genuine American-boy success there. Worked my way up in the company where I started, and when I couldn’t work my way any higher there, I went out and started my own. The boss of the company I left laughed at me, said I'd be broke in a year. I think that's what most bosses say when some hot young pocket-rocket goes off on his own.
For me, everything worked out. When Minneapolis–St. Paul boomed, The Freemantle Company boomed. When things tightened up, I never tried to play big. But I did play my hunches, and most played out well. By the time I was fifty, Pam and I were worth forty million dollars. And we were still tight. We had two girls, and at the end of our particular Golden Age, Ilse was at Brown and Melinda was teaching in France, as part of a foreign exchange program. At the time things went wrong, my wife and I were planning to go and visit her.
Continue Reading Duma Key
More from Stephen King 
Blaze 
Lisey's Story 
The Mist
Cell
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:10 -0400)
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