Well Begun and All Done: "Duma Key"

The book: Duma Key by Stephen King

Opening line: "Start with a blank surface."

Closing line: "All the rest is only life."

At some literary conference of the future, tweed-jumpsuited academics will present papers on the recuperation fiction of Stephen King. Since 1999, when King suffered a near-fatal accident, injured protagonists have turned up frequently in his work. From the dreary (Dreamcatcher, 2001) to the quite good (Lisey's Story, 2006--not an injured-protagonist story, but King's imagining of his wife, Tabitha's, experiences if he had not survived), to a significant portion of the multi-part epic, The Dark Tower, into which King wrote himself as a character. Duma Key is another entry in the growing canon.

Duma Key tells the story of Edgar Freemantle, a successful contractor who is nearly crushed to death in a construction accident. He suffers brain damage, loses an arm, and, of course, experiences massive leg pain. On the advice of his doctor, he leaves the wintry climes of Minnesota for a yearlong retreat to Duma Key, off the west coast of Florida. While there, he rediscovers a passion for art and soon finds out he is far more talented than he had ever imagined himself to be.

This being a fairly typical Stephen King story, it turns out that his supernatural-seeming talent is, well, supernatural. His paintings foretell the future! And his talent is a result of a sort of possession by a powerful evil force. . . . Blah blah blah.

As a great fan of Stephen King, we have long since resigned ourselves to taking the mediocre or the bad with the good. Duma Key is an example of the mediocre. Nothing unexpected happens, the good guys win in the end, with the requisite amount of heartbreak and horror along the way.

More interesting is to ponder the symbolism: A successful man suffers a crippling injury, only to discover his creativity blossoming. His creativity, though, is a mixed blessing: recuperative at first, energizing, only to become destructive to the artist and to those around him. What is Stephen trying to say? After his accident, he did consider packing it all in. Maybe conjuring horror and gore lost its appeal after suffering his own near miss.

Maybe, like Edgar, King cannot resist the beckoning of the blank surface (page); at the same time, though, he realizes that art is not all--the rest, after all, is (only) life.