Duma Key [Paperback]

First up: I'm a huge Stephen King fan and have read pretty much everything he's ever written (yes, including the sprawling, genre-defying Dark Tower series) and have weathered the great and not-so-great works he's produced over the years.

So how does Duma Key compare?

If you're looking for the gory, Hammer-style horror of Salem's Lot or the epic scale of The Stand, then I'm going to hazard a guess that this book won't be for you. The Stephen King of today (as opposed to 20/30 years ago) is a much more subtle author - gone are the breakneck, rollercoaster, breathless confrontations and instead comes a more low-key sense of fear and menace. Duma Key isn't a short book, as several other reviewers have taken pains to point out, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's much to be appreciated and savoured here from a writer who has the experience and the craft to write a great story... it just might not be the one you were expecting.

Duma Key refers to a small island in the Florida Keys where the main character, Edgar Freemantle, hides himself away for physical and spiritual rehabilitation after a horrific accident on a building job which leaves him scarred and missing his right arm. His wife wants to divorce him, he's angry all the time, and his broken body feels like it belongs to someone else. His recovery is slow but helped by the sea and tranquility at Big Pink, the salmon-coloured artist's hideaway he's renting from the mysterious Elizabeth Eastlake, a very elderly and reclusive woman who owns half the island. Doesn't sound like much, does it? But be patient, because this book has atmosphere in spades. The genuinely sweet growing friendship between Edgar and Elizabeth's companion Wireman is offset by Edgar's sudden, frantic and all-consuming desire to paint and draw, a latent talent that the brooding island unleashes, but which hints at powers beyond his control... powers which have a price. Wireman has his own special "gift" that Duma Key intensifies, but he's haunted by the death of his wife and child, and is struggling with the gradual decline of his much-loved but fragile employer. Elizabeth is slowly succumbing to Alzheimer's but in her increasingly rare lucid episodes she hints at her own past and her ties to the dark forces on the island. How did her twin sisters die? What happened to her family? Why is Duma Key not a safe place for daughters? Any why do Edgar's paintings keep coming back to a dark and sinister ship on the blood-coloured Florida horizon?

This book is as much about the ties that bind people as it is about supernatural beings and things that go bump in the night, but King has an excellent ear for dialogue and a real knack for laying bare the truest of human emotions. The "climax" of the book is definitely a slow burner (like the rest of it, I hear you shout) and that won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoyed the slower pace and the build-up. This to me felt like a Stephen King story where the people were real; their limitations, fears and frustrations were genuine and believable (well, for the most part - I do agree with the reviewer who compared Edgar's daughter Ilse to a 5 year old, she got a little wearing).

In summary it's not a book for everyone but if you've got the time to sit down and enjoy something slower, and more subtle, than previous efforts it's worth a go. Perhaps if you've been put off Stephen King before thanks to the "schlock horror" reputation of his work this is the place to start - great characterisation and much less in the way of slobbering, shrieking monsters every 20 pages or so. It's a change of scene and a change of pace for King - but the scares are still there, just a little less in-your-face. So why not give it a go?

As Wireman might say, do the book, and let the book do you.

and I write as one who also thought King had lost his way (as did |Heinlein, as the years wore on). I hated Dreamcatcher, quite liked Cell.. but the end of the Dark Tower series really left me flat. Oh, and Lisey's Story wasn't terribly good. But Dura Key was wonderful... his style of writing which, if we are all honest, keeps us reading the stories which aren't so good... paid off again. I can't remember a book which last pulled me in so much and, for me, he has combined his storytelling ability (hard to surpass) with a bit of the old 'supernatural' King. In my view, his ability to tell a story has never diminished; but his later stories have been less than gripping in spite of that. Duma Key is just wonderful; his prose and lyrical storytelling is A1. I truly hope they never attempt to make a film of this book.

**** spoilers ****

A new Stephen King novel is usually an event to savour. I guess that is why, with expectation so high, my disappointment with Duma Key was so great.

Firstly, it's highly unoriginal. The well-worn motif of an artist affecting reality with his paintings is as old as the hills (Tom Baker as the voodoo-cursed painter in Vault of Horror springs immediately to mind). Next, the cheesy old creepy dolls/spooky ventriloquist scenario has also been done to death in everything from the classic Brit horror Dead of Night to Magic and Dead Silence. The concept of a possessed or cursed statuette has been lifted from one of the Amityvilles. The sand-demon apparition owes a huge amount to Clive Barker and the whole climactic denouement in the subterranean cistern is surely a huge hat-tip to the Japanese horror Ring 2.

At almost 700 pages, Duma Key is also a very hefty tome and I really struggled through much of the tedious scene-setting and characterisation.

On the plus side, one of the characters - Wireman, does stand out as charismatic and intriguing. His back story was genuinely powerful and moving. The reasonably gruesome grand guignole climax also just about saves Duma Key from being a lone-star novel. Then though, in the final pages, it all peters out into anticlimactic nothingness, with the added irritation of the unnecessary demise of the strongest character.

Maybe I'm being a little harsh. Had some young unknown writer penned this novel, I would probably have praised it more. For King though, this falls far short of some of his classics and I was left with the impression that he rattled this potboiler off after having watched his collection of classic British horror DVDs for inspiration.