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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781416552512
ISBN: 1416552510
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 592
Publication Date: January 22, 2008
Publisher: Scribner
Sales Rank: 717
Studio: Scribner
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Book Description:
No more than a dark pencil line on a blank page. A horizon line, maybe. But also a slot for blackness to pour through...
A terrible construction site accident takes Edgar Freemantle's right arm and scrambles his memory and his mind, leaving him with little but rage as he begins the ordeal of rehabilitation. A marriage that produced two lovely daughters suddenly ends, and Edgar begins to wish he hadn't survived the injuries that could have killed him. He wants out. His psychologist, Dr. Kamen, suggests a 'geographic cure,' a new life distant from the Twin Cities and the building business Edgar grew from scratch. And Kamen suggests something else.
'Edgar, does anything make you happy?'
'I used to sketch.'
'Take it up again. You need hedges...
hedges against the night.'
Edgar leaves Minnesota for a rented house on Duma Key, a stunningly beautiful, eerily undeveloped splinter of the Florida coast. The sun setting into the Gulf of Mexico and the tidal rattling of shells on the beach call out to him, and Edgar draws. A visit from Ilse, the daughter he dotes on, starts his movement out of solitude. He meets a kindred spirit in Wireman, a man reluctant to reveal his own wounds, and then Elizabeth Eastlake, a sick old woman whose roots are tangled deep in Duma Key. Now Edgar paints, sometimes feverishly, his exploding talent both a wonder and a weapon. Many of his paintings have a power that cannot be controlled. When Elizabeth's past unfolds and the ghosts of her childhood begin to appear, the damage of which they are capable is truly devastating.
The tenacity of love, the perils of creativity, the mysteries of memory and the nature of the supernatural -- Stephen King gives us a novel as fascinating as it is gripping and terrifying.
Amazon.com:
Amazon Significant Seven, January 2008: It would be impossible to convey the wonder and the horror of Stephen King's latest novel in just a few words. Suffice it to say that Duma Key, the story of Edgar Freemantle and his recovery from the terrible nightmare-inducing accident that stole his arm and ended his marriage, is Stephen King's most brilliant novel to date (outside of the Dark Tower novels, in which case each is arguably his best work). Duma Key is as rich and rewarding as Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (yes, that Shawshank Redemption), and as truly scary as anything King has written (and that's saying a lot). Readers who have 'always wanted to try Stephen King' but never known where to start should try a few pages of Duma Key--the frankness with which Edgar reveals his desperate, sputtering rages and thoughts of suicide is King at the top of his game. And that's just the first thirty pages... --Daphne Durham
Duma Key: Where It All Began
A Note from Chuck Verrill, the Longtime Editor of Stephen King
In the spring of 2006 Stephen King told me he was working on a Florida story that was beginning to grow on him. 'I'm thinking of calling it Duma Key,' he offered.I liked the sound of that--the title was like a drumbeat of dread. 'You know how Lisey's Story is a story about marriage?' he said.'Sure,' I answered.The novel hadn't yet been published, but I knew its story well: Lisey and Scott Landon--what a marriage that was. Then he dropped the other shoe: 'I think Duma Key might be my story of divorce.'
Pretty soon I received a slim package from a familiar address in Maine.Inside was a short story titled 'Memory'--a story of divorce, all right, but set in Minnesota.By the end of the summer, when Tin House published 'Memory,' Stephen had completed a draft of Duma Key, and it became clear to me how 'Memory' and its narrator, Edgar Freemantle, had moved from Minnesota to Florida, and how a story of divorce had turned into something more complex, more strange, and much more terrifying.
If you read the following two texts side by side--'Memory' as it was published by Tin House and the opening chapter of Duma Key in final form--you'll see a writer at work, and how stories can both contract and expand.Whether Duma Key is an expansion of 'Memory' or 'Memory' a contraction of Duma Key, I can't really say.Can you?
--Chuck Verrill
'Memory'
 Memories are contrary things; if you quit chasing them and turn your back, they often return on their own. That's what Kamen says. I tell him I never chased the memory of my accident. Some things, I say, are better forgotten.
Maybe, but that doesn’t matter, either. That's what Kamen says.
My name is Edgar Freemantle. I used to be a big deal in building and construction. This was in Minnesota, in my other life. I was a genuine American-boy success in that life, worked my way up like a motherf---er, and for me, everything worked out. When Minneapolis–St. Paul boomed, The Freemantle Company boomed. When things tightened up, I never tried to force things. But I played my hunches, and most of them played out well. By the time I was fifty, Pam and I were worth about forty million dollars. And what we had together still worked. I looked at other women from time to time but never strayed. At the end of our particular Golden Age, one of our girls was at Brown and the other was teaching in a foreign exchange program. Just before things went wrong, my wife and I were planning to go and visit her.
I had an accident at a job site. That's what happened. I was in my pickup truck. The right side of my skull was crushed. My ribs were broken. My right hip was shattered. And although I retained sixty percent of the sight in my right eye (more, on a good day), I lost almost all of my right arm.
I was supposed to lose my life, but I didn’t. Then I was supposed to become one of the Vegetable Simpsons, a Coma Homer, but that didn't happen, either. I was one confused American when I came around, but the worst of that passed. By the time it did, my wife had passed, too. She's remarried to a fellow who owns bowling alleys. My older daughter likes him. My younger daughter thinks he’s a yank-off. My wife says she’ll come around.
Maybe sí, maybe no. That's what Kamen says.
When I say I was confused, I mean that at first I didn’t know who people were, or what had happened, or why I was in such awful pain. I can't remember the quality and pitch of that pain now. I know it was excruciating, but it's all pretty academic. Like a picture of a mountain in National Geographic magazine. It wasn’t academic at the time. At the time it was more like climbing a mountain.
Continue Reading 'Memory' | | | Duma Key
 How to Draw a Picture
Start with a blank surface. It doesn't have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember.
How do we remember to remember? That's a question I've asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic. Or so I’ve come to believe.
Imagine a little girl, hardly more than a baby. She fell from a carriage almost ninety years ago, struck her head on a stone, and forgot everything. Not just her name; everything! And then one day she recalled just enough to pick up a pencil and make that first hesitant mark across the white. A horizon-line, sure. But also a slot for blackness to pour through.
Still, imagine that small hand lifting the pencil... hesitating... and then marking the white. Imagine the courage of that first effort to re-establish the world by picturing it. I will always love that little girl, in spite of all she has cost me. I must. I have no choice. Pictures are magic, as you know.
My Other Life
My name is Edgar Freemantle. I used to be a big deal in the building and contracting business. This was in Minnesota, in my other life. I learned that my-other-life thing from Wireman. I want to tell you about Wireman, but first let's get through the Minnesota part.
Gotta say it: I was a genuine American-boy success there. Worked my way up in the company where I started, and when I couldn’t work my way any higher there, I went out and started my own. The boss of the company I left laughed at me, said I'd be broke in a year. I think that's what most bosses say when some hot young pocket-rocket goes off on his own.
For me, everything worked out. When Minneapolis–St. Paul boomed, The Freemantle Company boomed. When things tightened up, I never tried to play big. But I did play my hunches, and most played out well. By the time I was fifty, Pam and I were worth forty million dollars. And we were still tight. We had two girls, and at the end of our particular Golden Age, Ilse was at Brown and Melinda was teaching in France, as part of a foreign exchange program. At the time things went wrong, my wife and I were planning to go and visit her.
Continue Reading Duma Key | | |
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Customer Reviews Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Couldn't stop reading
Stephen King once again proves himself a master with "Duma Key." Fantastic characterization and suspense; masterful exploration of the horrors lurking in seemingly benign places.I particularly enjoyed it because of its exporation of the creative process. Edgar's irresistable urge to paint is, no doubt, an echo of the way Stephen King feels about writing. The ending felt a little rushed. Other than that, great.
Rating: - Compares Favorably with King's Early Work
I must confess that I was blown away by Duma Key. I used to be a huge fan of Stephen King's -- in the days of his classic works Carrie, The Shining, It, The Stand and Salem's Lot. I stopped reading King regularly after he published Pet Sematary which I found repulsive. However, King has restored my faith in his unique storytelling abilities with Duma Key. It is an epic introspective novel about Edgar Freemantle, a man crippled by a terrible accident, whose life (including his marriage) is destroyed ... Read More
Rating: - A Story You'd Swear You'd Read Before
Stephen King's 2008 novel Duma Key is heavily evocative of his work from ten years earlier, Bag of Bones.
1. The protagonist is a man who amassed a fortune, then suffered a devastating loss
* Bestselling author loses his wife in 1988; successful building contractor loses his arm and much of his mental capacity in 2008 (and his marriage)
2. He flees his home base and takes up in an isolated house near water
* A lake in 1998; the Gulf of Mexico in 2008
3. He becomes ... Read More
Rating:  - Dumb Key
Far from King's finest ("The Shining," "Carrie"), "Duma Key" is about a wounded contractor, Edgar Freemantle, who settles on one of the Florida Keys to recuperate. [Plot spoilers follow.] Mysteriously he is seized with the need - and talent! - to draw and paint. He also begins a tedious relationship, conveyed through painfully artificial dialogues, with an elderly woman who owns most of Duma Key, and her caretaker. Freemantle's paintings apparently can cause changes in the real world (healing, killing, ... Read More
Rating:  - Disappointed
First things first.I didn't even finish "Duma Key".It was a struggle to enter the final quarter of the book, and I gave up.The story twisted into a confusing wreck.
I've been a fan of SK's writing for decades, but I think the affair is almost over.King seems to have turned into the George Lucas of writing.The more he tries to push the envelope, the worse the results are.Case in point with "Duma Key".
The first two-thirds of the novel were excellent.You can really ... Read More
Duma Key: A Novel | | | |
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