A Case of Literary Déjà Vu

Posted 11 February, 2008 in Book Reviews |

Duma Key, by Stephen King. Scribner, $32.00 cloth, 614 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4165-8555-8.

What happened to Stephen King? There was a time — this would have been the late ’70s and early to mid ’80s — when America’s self-styled “literary bogeyman” could reliably be counted upon to turn out solid works of popular fiction, albeit with a pronounced dark streak. ‘Salem’s Lot; The Shining; Cujo; Pet Sematary — each of these novels operates as a kind of machine designed to deliver what Poe referred to as “a certain single effect” — the effect, in King’s case, being to scare the bejesus out of his readers. His early fiction is marked by an effortless storytelling verve combined with a talent for creating believable characters and a willingness to pull out all the stops in his attempts to manipulate his readers’ emotions. It is also possessed of an almost preternaturally observant eye, able to sketch settings and locales in such minute detail that readers feel transported, as though they have become part of the scene they are reading. (Even The Stand, an otherwise bloated and overly schematic exercise in good vs. evil Manichean mythology, has the trip through the Lincoln Tunnel, which is one of the most vividly creepy sequences I’ve ever read.)

By contrast, King’s recent fiction seems like a pallid imitation of the earlier books: warmed-over themes are trotted out again and again, plot elements from previous books are recombined and incorporated in more recent novels but with a steady diminution of their effects; the later novels have the consistency of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.

True, King has always borrowed liberally from his literary predecessors. ‘Salem’s Lot is an admitted reworking of Dracula. Pet Sematary incorporates elements of W.W. Jacobs’ classic short story “The Monkey’s Paw.” King’s 2006 novel, Cell, is dedicated to Richard Matheson and George Romero, which is entirely appropriate, since the novel is little more than a recapitulation of Masterson’s I Am Legend by way of Romero’s zombie films. But more to the point, the postapocalyptic vision that serves as the book’s faintly beating heart hearkens back to the more potent vision of a plague-ridden wasteland in The Stand. In short, King has started cannibalizing himself.

This is apparent in Duma Key, which features a number of King staples: its protagonist is a tortured artist (The Dark Half, Bag of Bones, “Secret Window, Secret Garden”) who has suffered a traumatic accident (Misery, The Dead Zone); he is gifted with a kind of second sight (The Shining); and he is plagued by revenants from beyond the grave (see S. King, passim).

At the heart of the story is Edgar Freemantle, the survivor of a construction-site accident that left him with serious brain trauma and minus his right arm. Following a nasty divorce, Edgar’s therapist tells him that he needs a change of scenery and Edgar relocates to Duma Key, an island off the Florida coast. There he meets Elizabeth Eastlake, the aged scion of the family that owns most of the land on Duma Key, and Wireman, an ex-lawyer who acts as her guardian and keeper. Edgar also begins painting. He starts with rough sketches in coloured pencils, but quickly graduates to more ambitious paintings of a girl who resembles his beloved daughter Ilse and a vaguely menacing ship. It gradually becomes apparent that his paintings have the ability to foretell the future and, in some cases, to change it.

All of this is developed throughout the languid first half of this 600+ page book. King takes his time setting the scene and laying out the various relationships among Edgar, his family, and his new neighbours on Duma Key, but it doesn’t take long for a kind of torpor to set in. Much of the novel’s first half deals with Edgar’s attempts to heal himself following his accident, a subject that King is intimately familiar with as a result of being run down and almost killed by a careless driver in a blue van during the summer of 1999. But despite drawing from this clearly harrowing life experience, the early stages of the novel come across as strangely lifeless, and are certainly nowhere near as potent as King’s description of his own near-death experience, which appeared first in The New Yorker, and later, in a reworked version, in his memoir, On Writing.

There are indications that King is aware of the book’s flagging pace, since around the halfway point things kick into overdrive with the arrival of those pesky revenants. It is at this stage in the proceedings that the book takes on the mantle of a fairly straight-ahead horror novel, as Edgar and Wireman band together to defeat the evil that plagues Duma Key. There is no denying the relentless forward momentum of the novel’s final third — once King finally manages to get his pot boiling, he ensures that we keep turning the pages — but, again, it all feels like territory we’ve covered before. Indeed, the climactic sequence involving the disposal of a malevolent china figurine (don’t ask) is strikingly reminiscent of the rainswept climax in Bag of Bones, arguably King’s last really solid work of fiction.

That Duma Key is grossly overlong is readily apparent, although its author would probably accuse me of being churlish by saying so. In his introduction to the story collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes, King asserts that “[i]n reviews of every long novel I have written, from The Stand to Needful Things, I have been accused of overwriting. In some cases the criticisms have merit; in others they are just the ill-tempered yappings of men and women who have accepted the literary anorexia of the last thirty years with a puzzling (to me, at least) lack of discussion and dissent.” But the fact remains that a goodly number of Duma Key’s 611 pages are expendable, and even diehard fans of the man’s writing will likely find themselves becoming impatient at points during the course of the book.

But it is not the book’s excessive length, or its case of split personality, that ultimately dooms it. What is most distressing is the reader’s sense of déjà vu, the feeling that we’ve been here before. This sense of the novel as a pale imitation of its literary predecessors is exacerbated by King’s refusal to push his story to its nightmarish limits. King has mellowed in his later work, which could be seen by some as a sign of maturity, but it also blunts his edge. A case could be made that the worst thing that ever happened to King’s literary sensibility was his discovery of the happy ending.

What we are left with is a novel that feels like a paint-by-numbers copy of a master’s work. King’s words keep coming, but Duma Key provides readers with the terrible question: does he have anything more to say?

2 comments to “A Case of Literary Déjà Vu”

Panic, February 12th, 2008 at 10:54 am:

• At least it’s not set in Maine!

  The problem now with King, is that we’re no longer willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. His novels start off okay, he’s good with characterization, and then whenever the “bad” thing happens, I just don’t buy it anymore. I don’t know why The Shinning seemed so plausible, and thus scary, while anything written past 1990 doesn’t. I just seem to roll my eyes when the “scary stuff” happens.

Alex, February 12th, 2008 at 4:49 pm:

• Steve we have to stop reading (and reviewing) the same books . . .

  In King’s sort of defence, he is writing genre fiction. And this is his — what? — fiftieth novel? You’re surprised it’s starting to get a bit old? I have a lot of respect for the guy, but I agree he peaked in the 80s and that those are the books that are going to last. Not this one, that’s for sure.

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