From a Buick 8

This book has a lot more personal philosophy to impart rather than horror. This is about growing old. This is about mysteries in life. This is about sticking to duty. This is about the chains that we can feel but rarely know. The Buick 8 pulls up to the gas pumps at a full-serve gas station in Western Pennsylvania in 1979. While the statio attendant is filling the tank, the driver walks around to the back of the station and...disappears. The local police, two Pennsylvania State Troopers named Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox from Troop D, show up and almost immediately notice that this car isn't...right. For one thing, it can't be driven. And...it hums. You can't really hear it, but it's there. Troop D takes custody of it and they watch show more it. This is one Buick 8 that bears watching. And guarding. Whatever it is, it's not a car. Worse than that, it breathes. It exhales things out into our world and inhales things in to...who knows where. You don't want to know, and you don't want to go there. You won't come back. The car becomes Troop D's family secret, kept in Shed B and quietly but vigilantly guarded. When Wilcox is killed in a senseless accident in the fall of 2001, Ned, his 18 year old son, begins doing odd jobs around the barracks, trying to hold onto his father's memory. Ned discovers the car and the story behind it and he wants to know more. And the car is ready to give him far, far more than he will ever want.

"From A Buick 8" is a wonderfully gripping read, full of the creepy crawlies, but mostly it's a moving, melancholy meditation on time and loss. Give this book a try, it's a great read. show less

King returns to the theme of haunted cars, as well as that of found family spinning yarns and revealing hidden histories, this time in the sewtting of a state trooper station with something that looks like a car in a shed out back, but it isn't a car, it's something else, just what nobody knows, or probably can know, all they can do is stand guard. It's Lovecraftian, but it doesn't feel Lovecraftian because it feels so quintessentially Kingian.

Well, this was interesting. In my re-read of King, this was one that I was definitely not looking forward to. I remember being quite frustrated with this novel on two fronts.

The first was, why is this all happening? What's up with that car?

The second, quite closely tied to the first was, I know this is related to the Dark Tower, it has to be, because it reminds me sort of the car the Low Men drove in HEARTS IN ATLANTIS, so it has to be right?

Nope.

This time, I went in with a different frame of mind, and just kind of let the story happen, and I loved the hell out of it. It's King just spinning a fascinating yarn that builds and builds and, at least to me, has a satisfying conclusion, which was the third complaint I had the first time show more around.

King builds a mystery, and doesn't offer a lot of answers, and I'm okay with that now.

Maybe getting older has taught me that life rarely offers up the answers we're constantly seeking. Sometimes, we just have to enjoy the ride...even if it's a ride in an otherworldly Buick 8. show less

While From a Buick 8 is neither as strong nor as compelling as King’s best books, it’s eerie that the central theme so closely paralleled my own thoughts in recent months. On the surface, this book is about a strange car that looks like a Buick, but only if you don’t examine it too closely, because then you’ll see that it is like no other car ever imagined. Abandoned at a western Pennsylvania gas station by its equally weird driver, the Buick is impounded by the State Police and kept out back of the barracks in Shed B, where it occasionally shows signs of life. Sometimes things come out of its trunk, and sometimes people go in.

That’s the plot in a nutshell – your basic horror yarn. But this book is not about a Buick from show more another dimension, not really. It’s about the senselessness of death. It’s about how we, as human beings, try to impose some sort of pattern and meaning on our lives, when everything really is just chains of random events linked together. There are no easy answers to all these questions what we all ask, but which really come down to one thing: Why? We can’t even hope to understand death, no matter how much science we apply to it, no matter how many frustrated emotions we throw at it, not matter what we do.

So, while FaB8 is not the intricate, suspenseful epic story that characterizes my favorite King books, there is a lot going on here – a lot more than in many of King’s more ordinary horror tales. Perhaps that’s why it feels so unsatisfying at the end – because that’s the point. The reader – like the character of young Ned, who lost his father in a traffic stop gone horrifically wrong – will never get any satisfying answers, and in the end, the reader – like Sandy Dearborn, the cop who has lived with the weird Buick for two decades – will just have to accept that. show less

i'm never a fan of the other-worldly scary stuff, and there's obviously some in here, but this is overall well done and interesting. his point, about how we can't always find meaning in what life throws at us, is well done. the writing is good and the characters are fleshed out enough. i like his depiction, as usual, of friendship, this time with adults.

in particular, i like that the resolution is sort of a non-resolution. we don't really know where the buick 8 came from, we don't really know what the other side is like. we won't ever know. like life, right? sometimes we don't get to know, we just have to accept it and continue on. he was nice enough to give us a "happy" ending, in that it would appear that the people outlasted the show more thing, and it will be gone soon, while they're still there, but it would have been ok not to do that, because that would follow the theme, too. not ever really knowing as much as we wanted about it, like ned himself, feels right. show less

Stephen King tends to get hammered in the press and by literati. He’s pulp, they say. He’s popular, they say. Nobody can be as productive (he publishes an average of two books per year) and still write quality, they say. I remember starting college in Boston in 1988, shortly after U2 released their huge Joshua Tree album. The established U2 fans rejected it outright as a ’sell out’. They couldn’t believe that their heroes sold out to ‘the man’ and became… popular. I think King gets painted with a similar brush.

But the truth is, much of his writing resonates quite deeply. His work can be touching. It’s relatable, and has as much symbolism and depth as one chooses to see. Is everything he touches great? No. But as a show more rule, is it schlock? Absolutely not.

I only discovered Stephen King as an adult. And over the last few years, I’ve been working through his catalog, kicking myself for not having given him a chance sooner. Fortunately, I have a whole lot to look forward to.

From a Buick 8 was published in 2002. The actual writing took place in 1999 and was finished shortly before it was published, bracketing King’s well-publicized auto accident, which almost took his life. The story’s emotional focal point centers on the accidental death of a police officer, Curt Wilcox, who was killed by a drunk driver while investigating a truck’s mechanical problem on the side of the road. The exposition surrounding the officer’s death is detailed and pain-laden, and I couldn’t help but view my analysis of the story through the lens of King’s accident until I got to the author’s notes where King is swift to point out that the scenes of the accident were written before his own and were only moderately edited after. It was just coincidence, which brings us to the crux of King’s story. How much in life has a natural beginning and end? How many of the threads of our existence have a natural continuance or succession? How much happens that is explainable or simple coincidence?

From a Buick 8 is equal parts science fiction, horror and Lovecraftian ode. Many readers anticipate that the eponymous Buick is a sort of “son of” Christine — the evil car gone amok in his 1983 novel (and movie), but this is not the case. Stephen King’s 1953 Buick Roadmaster has nothing to do with Stephen Kings’s 1958 Plymouth Fury.

When the story begins, it’s 1979 and a stranger in a black jacket pulls into a gas station in rural PA. He asks for a fill up, indicates he needs no oil and heads to the john. 30 minutes pass, the strange man never returns, and leaves his Buick 8 behind. Local Police Troop D is brought in and the mystery is off and running. The car is like nothing anyone’s seen. It has no functional parts, sucks the heat out of the shed in which it sits, and belches horrible creatures from its trunk.

From a Buick 8’s narrative thread focuses on Officer Wilcox’s son, Ned, several months after his father’s death in 2001. The story is a journey taken together by two characters: Ned, and the current Chief Commanding of Troop D, Sandy Dearborn. The journey is one that covers time rather than space as vignettes connect the past and present of Troop D’s interactions and investigations of the Buick over the years. It’s Ned’s journey of understanding and acceptance. It’s Sandy’s story of reconciliation with what the Buick means and the role it’s played in the collective past of Troop D.

Sandy’s journey started years ago but doesn’t end until the present. Ned’s is happening in the narrative real time.

There’s much sitting around and talking… telling stories, drinking and eating. One might make a symbolic connection to the Last Supper: Jesus (who is probably Sandy, but could also be Ned at times), surrounded by disciples (the other officers and caretakers), mostly younger but some the same age, who sit at his feet while he tells tales and waxes poetic. King even references that the storytelling group appears to look like a “little council of elders… surrounding the young fellow, singing him our warrior-songs of the past.”

The real theme of From a Buick 8 is about learning how to let go. Let go of the past… Let go of blame… Let go of finding fault and reason and answers. Chief Sandy uses the imagery of a chain when discussing cause and effect. And his idea of a chain surrounds, ties, and binds the story and characters. For example, the gas station attendant who witnesses the man in the black coat leave the Buick is the same person who, years later, hits and kills Curtis Wilcox.

Sandy considers:

I didn’t know about reasons, only about chains — how they form themselves, link by link, out of nothing; how they knit themselves into the world. Sometimes you can grab a chain and use it to pull yourself out of a dark place. Mostly, though, I think you get wrapped up in them. Just caught, if you’re lucky. Fucking strangled, if you’re not.

Is there simply cause and effect? Ned’s father’s death is suggestive of nothing beyond coincidence. The book sets the tone with the following quote from Sandy regarding Curtis’ death:

If there was a God, there’d be a reason. If there was a God, there’d be some kind of thread running through it. But there isn’t. Not that I can see.

This story didn’t have the emotional depth that makes King’s memorable work… well, memorable. Despite the incorporation of a dog who senses evil and a teenager whose father just died in a violent accident, it just didn’t touch me.

The elements of horror are definitely creepy. There are some gross-out moments, but nothing flat-out scary. Lovecraftian ‘cosmic horror’ is a place King loves to go. But Lovecraft, for all of his bombast and grandeur, had a certain subtlety about his pacing and finales. Lovecraft is all about the glimpse… the merest horrified glimmer of ‘eldritch horrors’ that one sees in the periphery. King, for all of his own vivid visualizations, is not beyond that Lovecraftian subtlety.

Sandy thinks back on the first time he entered the shed where Troop D kept the Buick:

In the twenty-odd years that followed that day, he would go inside Shed B dozens of times, but never without the rest of that dark mental wave, never without the intuition of almost-glimpsed horrors, of abominations in the corner of the eye.

And King always works one or two Lovecraft code words into his work. In this case, I didn’t catch a reference to ‘cyclopean’ structures, but I did see something that was “lit up a pallid, somehow eldritch yellow.”

From a Buick 8 ends in very Lovecraftian fashion, which will disappoint people who desire a very conclusive and explosive finish. If you’ve read later-era Stephen King, you’ll relate the ending in From a Buick 8 to the big finale in Revival. It’s pretty dramatic, but King doesn’t give it to you: he leads you to the water and you have to drink it in. But he does this with a very clear purpose. Some things end and have a clear conclusion. And sometimes things just don’t. Ned searches for an answer to his father’s accidental death. Of course, there is no answer. Things happen. Sometimes bad things. Sandy, our own personal Pennsylvania Jesus, tells Ned at one point:

Sometimes there’s nothing to learn, or no way to learn it, or no reason to even try. I saw a movie once where this fellow explained why he lit a candle in church even though he wasn’t a very good Catholic anymore. “You don’t fuck around with the infinite,” he said. Maybe that was the lesson…

This is a good book. Not one of my favorites from King, but enjoyable and uncharacteristically short. If you’re a King fan you’ll enjoy it, though it may not be tremendously memorable. If you’re a Lovecraft fan, you’ll enjoy it as well. show less

Stephen King’s newest novel, From a Buick 8 is like a campfire tale minus the roasted marshmallows. King has never been an author I’d call “bright and cheery,�€? but this time out, his ghost story is even more glum than usual. Chances are, you’ll crawl into your bed after reading it and feel like you’re covered with blankets of gloom and despair, the bitter aftertaste of campfire smoke and char still on your tongue.

Oh, there’s plenty of horror here that’s sticky and gooey, and at least one character gets roasted (from the inside out), but From a Buick 8 is about as sweet as a plate of rotting cabbage—a particular stench that happens to be King’s perfume du jour show more (in Dreamcatcher, you’ll recall, it was pungent farts).

The eau de cabbage rises from the trunk of a car which shows up at a rural Pennsylvania gas station one afternoon, startling the dimwitted attendant:

It was a beautiful midnight-blue Buick, old (it had the big chrome grille and the portholes running up the sides) but in mint condition. The paint sparkled, the windshield sparkled, the chrome side-strike sweeping along the body sparkled, and even before the driver opened the door and got out, Bradley Roach knew there was something wrong with it. He just couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

The state troopers are called and that’s where our story picks up. From a Buick 8 is narrated, campfire-style, by members of the Troop D barracks who haul the car back to the station and lock it away in a shed out back. Right away, the troopers notice that no dirt seems to stick to the car’s body—even pebbles forcibly resist being lodged in the tire treads—and the interior seems to be rather…odd. Then people start disappearing and foul Lovecraftian creatures are seen erupting from the trunk. As one character says, “It breathes, that’s what I think. Whatever that car really is, it breathes….It blew that pink-headed thing out on the exhale, the way you can blow a booger out of your nose when you sneeze. Now it’s getting ready to suck back in. I tell you I can feel it.â€?

For the most part, King’s writing is restrained and more somber than usual, but when he starts flinging gore across the page, he proves that no one can match his mastery of the ick factor, some of which borders on the poetic. He handles the blood, gristle and guts carefully, judiciously. He knows just when a gob of goo will make our scalps feel like ants are running around drunk in the hair follicles. While From a Buick 8 isn’t as packed with as many hair-rustling moments as some of his classic works, there’s enough here to make you think twice before popping open the trunk of your own car and reaching around in the dark interior.

The tale is mainly told by trooper Sandy Dearborn to Ned Wilcox, a teenage boy who’s been hanging around the barracks ever since his father, another trooper, was killed in a bizarre accident the year before. Ned’s father was one of the first people to discover the allure of the Buick—an obsession which may or may not have led to his gruesome death. For his part, Sandy doesn’t believe in coincidences, “only chains of event which grow longer and ever more fragile until either bad luck or plain old human mean-heartedness breaks them.â€?

Like Sandy, King takes a dim view of the road humanity is zooming down—the Highway to Hell, if you will—and the headlights have never been dimmer than they are in this story of a Car From Beyond, a 1954 Buick Roadmaster that turns out to be a portal to a hellish hell full of cabbage-stench creatures who can only best be described with words like “pusâ€? and “oozeâ€? and “quivering pink.â€?

The Bad Stuff has always lurked (and outright leaped) in the majority of King’s novels, but the pessimism seems to be on the rise in From a Buick 8. Nothing can be done to stop the evil from swallowing our world. In his past novels, there’s usually been a brave band of people struggling to ward off the nasties, often with a precognitive child in the lead. Here, all the King’s men and women can’t put the world back together again once it’s shattered by the mysterious appearance of the midnight-blue car at a rural Pennsylvania gas station one afternoon. It (evil, the car, a trunk that won’t latch) is hungry in an indiscriminate—and nonsensical—sort of way. King never fully explains the threat, leaving us (and the characters) with a vague sense of unease when the world beyond the Buick portal is glimpsed.

This is where the new novel differs from Christine, the other King book which springs immediately to mind when you hear the words “evil car.â€? In that 1983 novel, there was no doubt that the 1958 Plymouth Fury was the relentless force of Satan, crushing people, smearing them across the highway and literally driving Arnie Cunningham to single-minded obsession. In Christine, you could almost hear King giggling with ghoulish glee as he typed (he even ended the novel with a winking pun: His unending fury.).

Nearly twenty years have passed since Christine was reduced to a cube of scrap metal and now King comes across as tired and resigned to the fact that horror is no joking matter, not in a world where airplanes can be used as weapons of mass murderers or a swerving van can plow into you on your afternoon walk, reducing your hip to hamburger. For proof of King’s weariness, look no further than the author photo on the back flap of From a Buick 8, surely one of the oddest author photos I’ve come across. In it, King is backed into a corner and his head is titled back as he looks for help from above. It smacks of “I’ve had it, I’m through, here’s the towel, evil wins,â€? or, if recent announcements are to be believed, “I will write no more forever.â€?

What he’s written in From a Buick 8 is sporadically good, but ultimately unsatisfying. It’s like being offered a plate of cabbage when what you really want is marshmallows skewered on a stick. show less