What he does know about is crippling accidents, and that plays a very large role in Duma Key. Edgar Freemantle was a successful builder before a crane accident crushed his body, took his right arm, and resulted in his divorce. Edgar moves to the Florida Keys for some geographical therapy, and discovers a formerly hidden artistic ability.
Duma is about the power of art to uncover truth. Because this is a Stephen King story, that truth concerns dead twins, giant frogs, and a Florida Island's dark history.
While I enjoyed Lisey's Story a lot more than Duma Key the new book does speak to King's further development as a writer. He no longer writes pure "horror" in my opinion, but instead uses horror as the backdrop against which his characters live their lives.
No King's not writing literary fiction, but with the exception of the horrible Cell, King is writing deeper, fully realized works.
For me it was a compelling read, though I usually devour King at a rapid pace anyway. The story unfolds perfectly, ramping up the creepy factor with each new chapter. The ending fell a little flat, almost too easy, but other than that it's a new spin on classic King that's worth reading.
Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.
New York Times, February 20, 2008, Book Lust.
This piece ostensibly calls Steve Jobs out for his wrongheaded remarks about the state of reading in America, but what I really liked are the ideas about books, like the one above, found in the piece.
This story from Rolling Stone is a few issues old, but can be found online. In the War on Terror, it seems there is
"The hope is that they will nab an actual terrorist or prevent a putative jihadi from becoming one," says David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University and co-author of Less Safe, Less Free, a new book detailing the ways 9/11 has transformed domestic law enforcement. "It makes sense in general —but when you're pressing people to undertake conduct they would have never undertaken without an informant pushing them along, there is a real question if you're creating crime, not preventing crime." -- Rolling Stone, The Fear Factory, Feb. 7 2008.
When I'm actively working on my own writing, as I am currently, I read books in a slightly different manner than normal. I read not only for the story, but to study the craft. I did this while reading Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and came away thinking I should give up writing entirely. My skills will probably never match those of Chabon.
His use of simile alone in this novel blew me away. His command of the English language is among the best I've read. His prose style is somehow simple and complex. Meaty sentences full of crystal-clear detail abound here.
The story is pretty damn good too. Chabon has taken a classic pulp-character, a down on his luck police detective, and an essentially pulp story and turned it into a literary feat of character driven fiction.
Amazing!
I heard this story on All Things Considered during my drive home yesterday and pulled it up my browser while I banged out a page of my latest manuscript this morning.
"As part of NPR's occasional "First Books" series, first-time author
Charles Bock explains that it took a decade to "unpack his head" and
write the novel."
Bock has a line in the piece explaining how the book was bigger than his meager skills were when beginning the book. In order to write it he had to first understand the structure of a "big book" and the depths of character it takes to achieve such a book. There's not a lot of insight in the story about how he did that, but the ideas certainly gave me food for thought.
I'm writing my newest book in a different manner than I did my first. I did a little bit of advance outlining, and what I called story boarding the stake points of the story before I began the act of writing the story. It helped me realize the structure of the book as a whole. There will still be quite a bit of creative improv as I move the characters between the stakes (and whose to say those stakes will be there when they reach the places I put them), but I'm hoping this will help in the revision process. There were so many words on the cutting floor after I revised my first book.
