HELLNOTES

Spring Into Terror - Duma Key Review

Duma Key
Stephen King
Scribner
Hardcover, $28.00
Review by Sheila Merritt

The Rite of Spring: When a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of ritual sacrifice. This is about horror, after all. Horror aficionados understand that this season of renewal and rebirth comes with a few strings attached. In Stephen King’s Duma Key, regeneration and recovery from a devastating accident have a price; a very high price indeed.

A striking feature of much of King’s work, is the delicate balance of feeling between dizzying, exhilarating hope and the omnipresent sense of doom. In Duma Key, the protagonist, Edgar Freemantle, gets more than the proverbial second chance at life. Physically and emotionally disabled, the former builder becomes an amazingly successful artist in a brief span of time. This whirlwind of rehabilitation proves psychically scarring. It is intoxicating, yet an inevitable spiral into hell. Like another King creation, Carrie, Edgar has his own “prom.” His art exhibition is met with critical and public praise; he is the man of the hour. The art is his means of communication. It is his triumph against adversity. Yet waiting behind the triumph is tragedy.

Edgar’s artistic ability, which is fueled by his environment, is a channeling of sinister remnants and revenants. It is the place, as well as the person, which is the key to Duma Key: “On Duma Key broken people seem to be special people. When they cease being broken, they cease being special.”

Special/broken people: Something King can certainly understand since the catastrophic accident which nearly killed him, and required extensive physical rehabilitation. It has been the speculation of some critics that King is addressing the issue in his fiction with simply an autobiographical sensitivity. It is worth remembering, however, that the author wrote The Dead Zone long before his personal experiences with disaster and the ensuing introspection. The frustration, anger, and alienation so well delineated and conveyed by the main character in that novel, proves evocative writing doesn’t necessarily come from direct experience. Duma Key, of course, will lend itself to much discussion about this.

Communication through art is a core theme in Duma Key. Visual creativity is a means of conveying what words cannot express. The heady emotion of having a positive response to one’s art, as Edgar does, liberates him. What words denied him, he can now communicate in a different medium. The only problem is, what he is expressing is not exclusively his own. “Art is magic, and not all magic is white.” As with Dorian Gray and that infamous portrait, a painting can harbor dark secrets. Edgar Freemantle is very prolific in his short time as an artist, hence there are many secrets and much mystery to be unraveled. There is the scary and tenuous connection between the real and the fantastic, the mundane and the imagination. The Florida waters morph into images that are tranquil and frightening depending on perception or mood; it is, itself, a “key” player in the story. An interaction with a vile phantom from the sea is described in the unsavory and sensory passage: “Its smell — rot and seaweed and dead fish turning to soup in the sun — bloomed and became overwhelming. I felt its hands, freezing cold, close over my forearm, and cried out in shock and horror.”

Like the phantom limb phenomena that Edgar experiences in his lost arm, Duma Key throbs, itches and gets under the skin. It’s what is remembered, in the body or the mind, that haunts. Stephen King forbids complacency; there will always be a shift, a shuffle of the deck, a stroke of the paint brush that will alter perceived reality. So, embrace the warmth and delights of Spring — and remember: This is about horror, after all.

Note: This is the Hellnotes contribution to The Spring Into Terror Book Review Project which was proposed by Dylan at MonsterLibrarian.com. You can read the other reviews from participating websites by clicking on the links below. But before you do, please let me give a big thanks to Sheila Merritt for contributing the above review. She’s a fantastic reviewer and we’re honored to be able to carry her reviews in Hellnotes. Thank you, Sheila!

The Monster Librarian
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