Duma Key
by Stephen King
Summary
Edgar Freemantle, a Minneapolis construction millionaire, is crushed by a crane on one of his own sites: he loses his right arm, part of his memory and language, and, in the divorce his rages precipitate, his marriage. On his therapist's advice to try a geographic cure, he rents a house on Duma Key, a nearly empty island off Florida's gulf coast, and takes up the sketching he abandoned in youth. The drawings come fast, strange and very good, and then they start coming true.
King builds the first half as his most patient study of convalescence: Edgar's rehabilitation, the phantom itch of the missing arm that only drawing scratches, and his friendship with Jerome Wireman, another broken man keeping watch over Elizabeth Eastlake, the island's ancient owner, a former child prodigy sliding into Alzheimer's. The second half opens Elizabeth's past like a tomb: in 1927, after a head injury of her own, the small girl drew wonders on this island until something used her gift as a door, and the drowned twins, the ship offshore and the porcelain woman named Perse who commands them have been waiting eighty years for another talented amputee.
The art scenes are the book's distinction, the ecstasy and menace of a gift arriving from outside, and the horror is patient, beach light and red picnic baskets and things standing in the surf at dusk.
Around six hundred pages.
Best for readers who want late King at full breadth, recovery memoir and ghost story braided, the Florida gothic he built from his own worst year.
Historical Context & Significance
Duma Key won the Bram Stoker Award for 2008, King's fifth in the category, and reviewers read its foundations at once: the shattered right side, the rage of rehabilitation and the itch of a ruined limb translate the 1999 van accident that nearly killed him, transposed to the Florida where the Kings had begun wintering, his first novel set in Florida.
The book sits in the late King preoccupation with art as dangerous transmission, alongside Lisey's Story and preceding the metafictions of the 2010s: the gift arrives from somewhere, the somewhere has terms, and the artist's discipline is a form of self defense.
Reception was among the warmest of his 2000s run, with the Elizabeth Eastlake backstory, told in a bravura sequence of a child's paintings escalating from wonder to atrocity, singled out; the Perse mythology borrowed its name and office from Persephone, queen of the Greek underworld. A film adaptation has been perennially announced and never landed.