So Far

The book that I am reading is Duma Key by Steven King. I am about ½ of the way through Duma Key and can say that it is a pretty cool book. The book is in the 2^nd person and it is told in a way so that the reader feels more like they are interviewing he main character, Edgar Freemantle. Edgar is a middle-aged man from Minnesota who is a wealthy owner of a construction company. While on the construction site his right arm is severed by a crane, his ribs are broken, his pelvis on his right side is also broken, and to top that of, he sustains a skull fracture that sends him into a coma for 3 weeks. Edgar’s life had fallen apart, not only was he horribly injured but his wife left him and he couldn’t remember much of his life for about 6 months after the accident. After that he moves to Florida, where he bought a home on Duma Key, he calls this home big pink. It is here that Edgar discovers his passion for painting and drawing. He feels phantom pain and an itch in his arm, and this itch can only be scratched and pain dissipated by him pouring his soul onto a canvas. Edgar paints sunsets and other things but soon Edgar learns that while he is painting he can see what will happen in the future, what has happened, and can even change the present. When he meets his neighbors Wireman, and Elizabeth, the only other permanent inhabitants of the island he has found his niche. Wireman is a formerly suicidal lawyer who is now making a new life for himself on Duma key as the caretaker of Elizabeth, an ageing Alzheimer’s victim. Things start getting creepy as more is discovered about Elizabeth’s drowned sisters, a killer called Candy Brown, a harpoon gun and an x-ray, and of course more paintings.

The book is great because you feel sucked into it, it is real feeling it is hard to tell at the beginning when the supernatural begins and the natural ends. When you are immersed in this book it feels like you are standing shoulder by stump with Edgar Freemantle. This book displays much of Steven King’s own life in the story, in fact it is considered. Just as Edgar pours his pain, hope, and aggression into his paintings and makes it worth looking at, Steven King pours his own pain, hope, and aggression into Duma and makes it worth reading. I think that this book feels so real because it is real. With the exception of the superstition, it is the story of Steven King. That is part of why it is an amazing book. I look forward to reading the rest of the book as it builds up intensity.