Duma Key

I came to this one late because the later King books pile up fast. Duma Key was first published January 22, 2008 by Scribner, 611 pages in the first hardcover, ISBN 9781416552512, author Stephen King. It is his Florida ghost story about a man who loses an arm and finds a talent that scares him. I read it over a rainy week and had to put it down a few times, not because it is gory, though parts are, but because the sad parts land.

Edgar Freemantle starts as a rich Minnesota contractor who owns a building company and a big house and a marriage he thinks is solid. Then a crane crushes his work truck with him inside. He loses his right arm above the elbow. His head injury scrambles his temper and his memory. He attacks his wife Pam during a confused rage spell, nearly chokes her, and cannot fully recall doing it. Pam sticks around through rehab for a while, then asks for a divorce. His daughters Ilse and Melinda try to help in different ways. Ilse is warm and close to him. Melinda is cooler and keeps distance. His psychiatrist Dr. Kamen gives him the advice that shapes the book. Change your life. Go somewhere new. Give your brain a fresh job.

Edgar rents a house on Duma Key, a thin island off the Florida Gulf coast near Sarasota. The house is called Big Pink, or El Palacio de los Suenos, a big pink place right on the beach owned by an old woman named Elizabeth Eastlake. The island is half wild, with a key phrase locals use about how things grow fast there. His only neighbors for a stretch are Elizabeth and her caretaker Jerome Wireman, plus a young man named Jack Cantori who helps with driving and chores. Wireman tells Edgar he is from Nebraska, used to be a lawyer, lost his wife and daughter, tried to kill himself and lived with a bullet still in his brain. He talks in a mix of plain talk and Spanish bits, calls Edgar muchocho or muchacho when teasing, and becomes the friend Edgar leans on.

Learning to draw with the wrong hand

Edgar starts drawing because Kamen tells him to rest his brain by using it differently. He sketches with his left hand on the porch. Shells. Chairs. The beach. He is bad at first, then less bad, then strangely good in a rush that unnerves him. He moves from pencils to paints. He paints the sunset over and over. He paints a ship out in the Gulf. He paints a girl with a parasol walking on the beach. He paints his own rage as red shapes.

King spends a lot of pages on this process. Edgar sets up tables. He ruins shirts. He learns about light at different hours. Jack frames things. Ilse visits and cries because the work is good. A gallery man named Dario Nannuzzi sees photos and wants to show the paintings in Sarasota, which feels too fast to Edgar and thrilling at the same time. I liked these chapters more than I expected, since I do not paint. The physical detail carried me. Sore neck. Paint under nails. The way a left handed line looks shaky and then sure.

But the paintings do things. A sketch of a man Edgar dislikes ends up tied to harm coming to that man. A painting of a ship lines up with a real shipwreck history near Duma. A picture of Ilse's future seems to warn of danger. Edgar tries to laugh it off as coincidence. Wireman does not laugh. Wireman has seen enough loss to take warnings seriously, and he starts to ask careful questions about what Edgar remembers while painting. Did he hear voices. Did he feel watched. Did the light change.

There is a classic King move here where the supernatural seeps in through a hobby. The Shining had writing. Bag of Bones had writing. This one has painting, and it fits Edgar's injury. He lost his dominant arm and his old work. Now his remaining hand makes things that unmake people. That link between creation and guilt drives the whole middle of the book. Edgar keeps painting because it steadies his temper and keeps the rages away. He fears stopping more than he fears the pictures.

Wireman, Jack, and the Eastlake history

Wireman is the reason to keep going when the book sags. He is funny in a dry way, tells stories in pieces, cooks, watches over Elizabeth with real tenderness. Elizabeth Eastlake is in her eighties, with dementia that comes and goes. Some days she knows Edgar and offers sharp comments about his work. Other days she calls him John, thinking he is her father, and talks about her sisters and a picnic long ago. Wireman keeps a chart of her good and bad hours. He warns Edgar not to tire her with questions, then breaks his own rule because the history matters.

The history comes out slow. Elizabeth grew up on Duma Key when her father John Eastlake owned much of it. She had twin sisters Tessie and Laura, often called the twins. As a child Elizabeth drew with unusual skill. Something happened involving the water and a figure the family called Persephone, a female presence tied to the sea and to a red robe and a child's chair. The twins died. Other deaths followed. Elizabeth's father tried to bury the past by keeping her from drawing and by moving the family story sideways. Elizabeth grew up, married, left, came back old with her memory leaking.

I want to be vague here on purpose because King doles this out across hundreds of pages and the pieces shift as Elizabeth remembers more. The shape is clear enough though. Persephone is old and hungry and uses pictures as doors. Elizabeth as a girl opened the door by drawing what Persephone showed her. The paintings from that time were hidden or destroyed, but not all of them. Some are stored in a house on the key. When Edgar starts painting on Duma, he picks up the same signal. His art teacher in a past life was loneliness and pain, Wireman jokes, but the real teacher is the island.

Jack Cantori gives the book some air. He is young, strong, a little lost, hired to help Edgar and to watch Elizabeth's property. He falls into an easy friendship with Ilse when she visits, which made me nervous in the way King wants. Anyone Edgar loves becomes a target once Persephone notices him. Jack drives, carries canvases, learns to look at paintings for wrong details. A rope where no rope should be. A face in water. He believes faster than Edgar does, maybe because he is younger and less invested in rational excuses.

Ilse's visits are the warmest and most painful parts. She swims. She poses. She tells Edgar he is coming back to life. She picks favorites among the paintings and pushes him toward the gallery show. Edgar loves her so openly it aches, especially after the divorce cooled things with Pam and Melinda. Pam calls with worry that sounds like control. Melinda warns from a distance. Ilse just shows up and sits on the porch and talks. King uses that closeness to raise the stakes without a lecture. If Edgar's pictures can hurt people, the person he painted most lovingly is in the most danger.

When the pictures start to kill

Around the middle the book turns from moody to frightening. Edgar paints a man who wronged his family and the man dies in a way that matches the picture. He paints Candy Brown, a thug tied to earlier trouble, and harm finds him too. Edgar tells himself these men earned it. Wireman pushes back, gently at first, then hard. Even if they earned it, what is painting through you. And what does it want next.

The answer is Ilse. Edgar paints her, or paints around her, and sees water and red where they should not be. He tries to stop showing work. He cancels calls. He tells Ilse not to come back to Florida. She comes anyway because she is twenty and stubborn and loves her dad. There is a terrible sequence involving a phone call and a rushing trip and a near loss that I will not spoil beat by beat. It left me shaky. King is good at making you feel a parent's helplessness across distance. Edgar in Florida, Ilse somewhere else, a picture drying on an easel that feels like a countdown.

Nannuzzi's gallery show still happens, which felt strange to me at first. Why show paintings that kill. But Edgar needs money talk to cover fear, and Nannuzzi needs new work, and Ilse needs proof her father is more than his injury. The show scenes are vivid. Rich people drink wine and say smart things about color. Edgar stands with his pinned sleeve and smiles until his face hurts. One painting in particular draws a crowd and draws trouble. I kept thinking about how King likes to put horror in bright rooms. Sunlight, white walls, red paint.

My main gripe with this stretch is length. King lets Edgar describe painting after painting, with titles and sizes and color choices, and after a while I skimmed. I get that the pileup shows compulsion. He cannot stop. Still, thirty pages of studio talk could have been fifteen. A few side figures blur. Nannuzzi's assistants, gallery buyers, Minnesota friends on the phone. They serve the plot but I forgot names. Wireman holds focus whenever he appears, which almost becomes a problem. He is so much more vivid than Edgar that I started waiting for his chapters.

Elizabeth remembers, and the price becomes clear

Late in the book Elizabeth has clearer hours and tells more. As a girl she drew Persephone as a woman in red with dark water around her. She drew her sisters. She drew a ship called Persephone that sank offshore. The entity used her talent the way it now uses Edgar's. Her father and others tried to stop it by hiding pictures in fresh water, since salt water feeds it and fresh water weakens it. There is a pond or cistern or sunken place on the key tied to that plan. Details vary as Elizabeth drifts, but the rule sticks. Drown the pictures and the figure in fresh water, and its reach shortens.

Edgar, Wireman, and Jack plan to fight back by painting on purpose and then trapping what comes. Edgar paints Persephone to call her. He paints the ship. He paints Elizabeth as a girl. He uses his missing arm's itch as a signal, that phantom limb burn that flares when the island pushes in. Wireman insists on helping despite his health and his past. Jack insists because of Ilse. Elizabeth insists because she started this as a child and wants to finish it. The old woman who could not remember breakfast leads them to boxes of old canvases and points with a steady hand.

The last hundred pages move fast after the slow middle. They haul paintings. They dig. They pour fresh water. Persephone pushes back through storms and visions and a rising sea. People Edgar loves see things that are not there. Ilse, far away, feels the pull. Wireman faces his dead family in a way that made me put the book down and walk around. Jack bleeds. Edgar paints through pain with his left hand cramping, trying to finish one true picture that will hold her still long enough to drown her. Elizabeth walks into danger knowing she will not walk out, and King lets her choose it without dressing it up as noble. She is tired and guilty and done.

I will not detail who lives. The fight costs a lot. Someone Edgar loves is hurt in a lasting way. Wireman is changed. Edgar loses the painting gift, or most of it, and is left with the ordinary talent he had before Duma. That loss feels like mercy. He returns north diminished and saner, trying to be a father without magic to fix things. The final scenes with Pam and Melinda are quiet and awkward in a good way. No big forgiveness. Just calls and visits and an effort to show up.

What holds and what wears thin

What holds is the grief writing. Edgar's accident chapters are among King's best injury writing, up there with Misery and The Stand's broken places. The rage spells, the phantom itch where his arm was, the way rehab feels endless, the shame after he hurts Pam. Those pages feel lived in. Wireman's backstory about his wife and daughter and his suicide attempt is told in fragments across the book, and each piece lands because he deflects with jokes until he cannot. Elizabeth's dementia is handled with care. She is not a clue machine. She is a person losing words who sometimes finds the exact right one.

The island itself works. Heat, sudden rain, shells, egrets, the way sound carries over water at night. King lived in Florida part time around then, and it shows in small touches. Sunscreen smell. Gallery air conditioning. A road that floods. I believed Duma Key as a place where something old could sit offshore unnoticed while condos rise nearby.

What wears thin, besides length, is repetition. Edgar cycles through anger, painting, fear, denial several times. The pattern makes sense for brain injury, but as a reader I wanted him to learn faster after the second death tied to a picture. Some dialogue explains the rules twice. Fresh water hurts her. Salt helps her. Pictures are doors. I nodded the first time. By the third explanation I skimmed. A few Minnesota sections with Pam's new partner and lawyers felt like another novel intruding. They add realism about divorce, yet they slow the island dread.

The women in danger bothered me a little too. Ilse is vivid and smart, but her main job in the plot is to be threatened so Edgar and the men act. Melinda and Pam get thinner roles. Elizabeth is the exception, and she is great, but she dies to close the story. I wished Ilse got one scene of pushing back with knowledge instead of just being protected. She gets moments of courage, to be fair, especially on the phone and in the hospital stretch. I just wanted more.

Still, this is one of the stronger late period King books for me. It is too long and proud of it, the way his long books are. If you liked Bag of Bones or Lisey's Story, about grief giving horror a door, this will fit. If you want tight and fast, start elsewhere. I finished tired and a little wrung out, which seems right for a book about a man who paints his way out of rage and almost paints over everyone he loves.

Facts kept straight: first published January 22, 2008 by Scribner in the United States, 611 pages in the first hardcover, ISBN 9781416552512, author Stephen King. Summary follows that text.