Stephen King

It is tempting to simply write: Stephen King goes to the beach. In some ways that tells you almost everything you need to know about this book. With King being, well, the king of horror, you know that sun and fun will evolve into dark and terrifying. You know someone will get burned and not by forgetting the sunscreen. King doesn’t disappoint. He makes the beach scary and doesn’t need a hurricane to do it. In “Duma Key,” readers meet Edgar Freemantle, a successful contractor who has lost his arm and suffered brain damage during an accident on a construction site. During his recovery, he also loses his wife because he loses his temper. Yet, something more than phantom-limb syndrome is happening to him. With so many changes in his life, he moves to Florida, leases a house on the small island of Duma Key, and begins to draw as an outlet and an outline to a new life. Yet, strange things continue as his art improves by impressive leaps, and his missing limb pulses with an urgency for him to paint. He makes friends with the people down the beach, the woman who owns the island and her caretaker. And the mystery of Edgar’s art, these new friends, and Duma Key intensifies. But it is a slow boil. At 600-plus pages, King takes his time getting to the meat of the plot. He is, however, Stephen King so he keeps the suspense percolating just below the surface as readers fall into pace with the rhythms of Edgar’s new life and relationships on Duma Key. And like many of King’s books, this one is comparable to a roller-coaster ride. There are plenty of thrills, which is the usual intention of a comparison to a roller coaster, but like that proverbial roller coaster, it isn’t so much how the ride ends. We know how a roller coaster is supposed to end. With dozens of books to his credit, you can kind of guess at how a Stephen King book will end, too. But roller coasters and Stephen King aren’t so much about destination or conclusions. They are about the ride, and so is “Duma Key.”