Full confession – I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Stephen King. He is an odd author to me. While I don’t love every one of his books (and in fact, dislike many of them), he is one of those authors that I read everything he puts out. If it’s got his name on it, I usually read it eventually, even if I’m almost 50 years late to the party. Not sure where this comes from, or why I’m so rigorous in my dedication to his books, but for whatever reason, it is the case.
It was not always, however. From the early 2000’s (coincidentally around the time I read Dreamcatcher …. or, maybe not-so-coincidentally), until around 2012, I never read a new Stephen King book. Dreamcatcher was just that bad, and I finally gave up on him after reading all his novels through the 80’s and 90’s. Sometime around 2012 though, I picked up Duma Key, and blasted through it. It scratched an itch I didn’t even know I had, and ever since then, I’ve been reading all of King’s work as it comes out.
The book is not straight horror, even when compared to King’s more psychological horror. It’s a bit of a drama, and a bit of an introspection on growing old and becoming disabled, and it’s a bit of an “On Writing,” but for art – specifically painting. However, there are still plenty of spooks, and a few scenes that are enough nightmare fuel to keep King’s legacy rolling.
The genre of the book, I describe as “non-Lovecraftian weird horror.” Much of the horror comes from near-imaginings of things happening, with a touch of very gruesome actual supernatural mischief, but it takes a very long time to truly get into the ghostly happenings. The first half of the book is more about the protagonist – Edgar Freemantle – dealing with a crippling accident that left him maimed and somewhat brain-damaged. As he re-learns to use his body and mind, he begins painting (at his therapist’s recommendation), and then the ghosts come into play.
The supernatural horror aspects of this book are tied to the secrets in a secondary character’s past, and when everything begins coming together like puzzle pieces around two-thirds of the way through the book, the real horrors begin. The reason I called it “weird” above is because, while it’s non-Lovecraftian (so it’s not about unknowable, unnameable evils beyond the realms of time and space and mortal comprehension), it is very inhuman. The ghosts/spirits/supernatural boogey(wo)men are not truly based around the dead coming back to life, or vampires, or other human-ish goals and ambitions. If anything, the horrors seem to come from an extremely mythological place, a place of ancient gods (or at least super/meta-human-level beings) and magic.
The book is also extraordinarily sad. Or rather, bittersweet. Since it’s a Stephen King book that’s not Revival, we know that good will eventually overcome evil, but moreso than almost any of his books other than It, he leaves you with a feeling of “Yeah, we won, but at what cost?” Some truly terrible things happen in the book, and for much less reason than is fair, and often feel like physical punches to your gut.
I love this book. It’s the best King book in the second half of his career, and is in my top-5 all-time favorite Kings. Read it, and be prepared to feel it.
