Duma Key

I just finished Duma Key, by Stephen King. I’ve been wanting to write about it for a while, now, but forced myself to wait until I had finished the book; sometimes these things take a sharp turn south before the end, and I find my opinion of them changing.

But I like the book, right up to the end.

I have a sort of weird relationship with Stephen King’s books. Many years ago, when I was in high school, I started reading his novels – The Dead Zone, Firestarter, Carrie, Christine – and I loved them. Of course, I was about thirteen years old at the time, but that’s really neither here nor there.

When I graduated high school and moved into the city to go to university, I got a job at a book store. Some how, between the courses I was taking at university and the attitude of people at the store and the general tendency of people of that age to disparage anything popular, I developed this… contempt, I guess, is the only word… for the works of Stephen King.

This idea settled into my head, anchored deep, and somehow kept me from reading his stuff for many, many years. In fact, I didn’t start again until Wolves of the Calla came out. For some reason, this book got me to catch up on the Dark Tower series. And reading through The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three, I felt my old disdain for the man’s work to bubble up to the surface. Of course, these two are the earliest books, and really the least polished of the entire series, in my opinion.

But I kept at it.

By the time I finished Wolves of the Calla, I had a brand new respect for Stephen King as an author. And really, the series is a wonderful tour through his development and growth as a writer, stretching as it does from his very beginning, up to his current writing. I started going back and reading all the novels I had missed. Some of them, like Tommyknockers and Cujo, I’m just not a fan of. Others, like Dreamcatcher and Needful Things, I really enjoyed. And a few, like Bag of Bones and It, were amazingly good.

Stephen King is the kind of author I love. He is a craftsman, building his story through careful use of his tools. You can see him finding new tools and learning to use them well as his career progresses, from rougher earlier novels to more polished recent ones. He talks about writing the way I think about writing. And he is completely unapologetic about doing what he needs to do to make the story work.

And he had some very interesting things to say in the second half of his speech to the National Book Foundation when they gave him a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003. Things that made me want to stand up and cheer, even though I was reading the speech six months after the fact.

Okay, enough generalities. What about Duma Key?

I loved it. Part of this is the fact that I listened to the audio book, and the reader (John Slattery) was very good.  At times, his voice even sounded like Stephen King’s.

Beyond that, though, it’s a good story. The main character was, to me anyway, immensely likable, flawed though he was. I’ve noticed that, since his own accident, King brings the ideas of near-fatal accidents and the pain and effort of recovery into his work a lot more often. If he was less good at it, it would be annoying, but his own experience of such things lets him write about it with a truth and clarity that you rarely see. So, too, in this novel. I found myself very invested in Edgar Freemantle’s long, painful recovery, and his striving to build a new life after his old one is destroyed.

And then, of course, the weirdness seeps in. It comes with laudable subtlety, building slowly, with a little bit of prophetic teasing allowed by the first-person voice and the conceit of the book having been written after the events. It’s slow and patient, and you hardly notice the strangeness increasing until you’re neck-deep in it.

I compare this to other books, where I find that King just couldn’t keep it in his pants. His Lovecraftian short story, Crouch End, struck me as being spoiled by his rampant rush to the bizarre.

Aside from being a chronicle of a man’s struggle with physical recovery and a shattered life, Duma Key is a ghost story. The ghosts are a little strange, and some of them are still living, but really it’s all about ghosts, whether of dead people or former lives, clinging when they should let go.

It’s also a Cthulhu Mythos story, though not overtly. But the dread power reaching out through the sea to touch the troubled mind of a sensitive artist? Tell me that’s not straight out of Lovecraft. King even makes a brief mention to Old Ones or Ancient Ones, and then just sort of lets it drop. He’s captured the feel, and the threat, and the unknowable horror that gave Lovecraft’s stories their power, without resorting to a worn pastiche, like Crouch End.

It’s also a story about the transformative power of art, with the metaphor made hellishly literal in this sense.

And, in the end, Duma Key is a story about loss. It’s a story about how much someone can lose, and still struggle on. And about what happens when they lose more than they can stand, but need to keep going anyway.

The ending is not happy, but it is good. Solid. Right.

I found a lot of similarities in tone, mood, and style with Bag of Bones, another Stephen King first-person novel about a haunted artist. There’s the same sort of immediacy to the tale, and a strange mix of sentimentality and cynicism about both men that make them very real in the imagination. And there are subtle things woven into the beginnings of each story that change meaning radically later on as more is revealed.

So. Duma Key. Good book. I recommend it.