By Brigitte Weeks,
who is a former editor of Book World
Wednesday, January 16, 2008

DUMA KEY

By Stephen King

Scribner. 611 pp. $28

Art and the effects of physical trauma take center stage in Stephen King's fiction these days, shadowed perhaps by his own near-fatal accident almost nine years ago. With a hero crippled on the job and then tormented by a demonic spirit in recovery, King's new novel, "Duma Key," is a tale of conflict between the forces of horror and the redemptive power of creativity.

In his previous novel, "Lisey's Story," the artist was uncomfortably close to King himself. Scott Landon, Lisey's late husband, was a best-selling horror writer who exercised his power from beyond the grave. In "Duma Key," King distances himself a step from his own craft by turning to the easel rather than to the pen: Mysterious paintings set in motion the forces of healing but also conjure the specter of death.

The novel's hero, Edgar Freemantle, is driving his pickup truck when it "argues with a twelve-story crane." In a minute of catastrophe, he is transformed from a millionaire construction developer into a brain-damaged invalid minus a right arm. In constant pain, he flashes unpredictably from suicidal despair to violent rage. He loses his job, his wife and life as he has known it.

Attempting to shake off his depression, Edgar moves from suburban Minneapolis to a sparsely inhabited Florida spit of land called Duma Key. There he rents an isolated stucco mansion he nicknames "Big Pink" and hires Jack Cantori, a bright "make-it-happen" college student, to be his missing right arm and help him start life over.

Jack's cheerful presence gives life at Big Pink an air of normalcy, but Edgar does a great deal more than rest and gaze at the blue waters of the gulf. Out of nowhere, he starts drawing and painting, producing sketches and surreal landscapes. His landlady, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, provides enigmatic insight into what is happening to her tenant. "Art is memory, Edgar," she tells him one day. "There is no simpler way to say it."

In three months he amasses more than 40 paintings and sketches and is invited to become the client of a major Sarasota art gallery. The exhibition is an astounding success, but Edgar's brilliant works of art transform the novel from a story of convalescence to a fable of nightmare.

It requires some suspension of disbelief to accept this Midwestern real estate mogul as an instant heir to Salvador Dali (who passed through Duma in years past). Edgar himself points out, "Last year at this time I was doodling on phone pads while I was on hold." But the King faithful -- and they are legion -- know that a terrible price must be paid for such acclaim and fame. Edgar's success as a painter marks the point at which death and damnation kick into high gear. Edgar's art, it soon turns out, can cure but also kill. Woe unto those art connoisseurs who so enthusiastically buy these strange works of toxic beauty.

King strews signs of doom everywhere, from the sinister murmuring of the seashells beneath the house to a series of increasingly diabolical children's dolls to the constant presence of Edgar's missing right arm, which itches unbearably when he forces his left hand to draw. He cannot put it to rest however hard he tries. "I lowered my right hand, long since burned in the incinerator of a St. Paul hospital, to the arm of my chair and drummed the fingers," he tells us. "No sound, but the sensation was there: skin on wicker." His phantom right arm partners with his left to paint ever more demonic scenes, often with the sun setting behind a stark abandoned ship anchored just offshore from Big Pink.

The story moves slowly but hypnotically toward an unfolding horror that surrounds Edgar and everyone he cares for. Along the way, we encounter a very nasty goddess by the name of Perse, "old when the Children of Israel were still grubbing in the gardens of Egypt." She, who has been conveniently imprisoned in a sunken ship, is reincarnated in all her implacable evil. And she has scores to settle.

King may be meditating on the diverse powers of the creative soul, but he has in no way lost his unmatched gift for ensnaring and chilling his readers with "terrible fishbelly fingers."