By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY
There are bad accidents, and there are horrible accidents, and horror novelist Stephen King knows about the worst kind.
In 1999, he was hit by a minivan, and he mines his experience with physical suffering to write Duma Key, in stores today.
It's the story of Edgar Freemantle, a man whose life goes tragically off track after his Dodge Ram has an unfortunate encounter with a crane on a construction site.
Like King, Edgar has fractured bones on the right side of his body. Unlike King, Edgar loses his right arm and suffers severe head injuries. Survival and rehabilitation will turn out to be the least of his problems.
Life as he knows it is over. His anger destroys his marriage. He wishes he were dead. Instead of suicide, he escapes the bracing weather of Minnesota for Duma Key, a tiny island off the coast of Florida.
He chooses Duma for its isolation but soon wonders if the island has chosen him. His "hedge against the night," the thing he hopes will heal his mind, is learning to paint. And oh what a painter he is. Good — really good — works of art are pouring out of this one-armed man. Soon he begins to wonder what's up.
He paints a dead-on portrait of his daughter's boyfriend without having seen him. He paints his ex-wife's new tattoo without having been told about it. Things get weirder. He paints a portrait of a child murderer, and the man dies. His island friend Wireman has a bullet in his brain. Edgar paints his brain without the bullet and, voilà, no more pain.
Wireman has telepathic powers, and so it appears does Elizabeth Eastlake, the aged woman who owns most of Duma Key. The source of this power eventually will turn on these misfits. It will wreak unholy havoc, and more than one character will not survive.
In essence, King has written a classic Gothic tale of terror. It's about what happens when men must fight a battle against creatures of a netherworld where the rules we're used to living by don't apply.
Elizabeth says "a life without books is a thirsty life." A life without King's novels would be a parched one indeed.
Read the first 25 pages here!
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