Sun, sand, sea, scares.
What I was doing didn’t work just because it played on the nerve endings; it worked because people knew – on some level they really did know – that what they were looking at had come from a place beyond talent. The feeling those Duma pictures conveyed was horror, barely held in check. Horror waiting to happen.
Stephen King, Duma Key
One of the clichés of King’s writing is his Maine setting. Write what you know is true of King, who must have a vast collection of blue chambray shirts, so the occasional story set away from Maine can unsettle a Constant Reader, just from being unable to hear a customary ‘ayuh.’ Even the books set away from Maine, like The Shining, Black House or From a Buick 8 have very Maine climates. Yet, though Maine will always be King’s home, early in the 21st century he had started to make a winter home in Florida. After his accident, he would be even more inclined to the warm winter weather, so in 2001 bought a rather snazzy looking home. Regardless of whether he still owns that property (man’s entitled to some privacy), Florida became a regular fixture in King’s life. Knowing that, Duma Key appears less anomalous.
Prior to starting this project, Duma Key was a story of which I had no knowledge. In the public conversations about King, this is not a story that is ever brought up, possibly because the somewhat radical change in location distances this from what people traditionally would consider to be a King novel. Yet Duma Key tends to be very well regarded by fans. Like a couple of other books I could name, this is one of the underrated gems from King’s bibliography worth seeking out.
For starters, King feels on familiar ground. Though this is about an artist, with similar abilities as demonstrated by Patrick Danville from The Dark Tower VII, one of the book’s major themes is the power of the creative act. King has touched upon this repeatedly throughout his career, with Bag of Bones and Misery perhaps being the most relevant here (though there are many, many other examples). In the beginning of the book, Edgar is using his new home and artistic hobby as a way to process his very awful accident, and one gets the feeling that King is doing so too. Every book since 1999 has, in some way, been about king processing the trauma of his accident to a greater or lesser degree. This time, he imagines himself as an artist. King admits in an interview he can’t draw a cat, so this is an act of wish fulfilment on his part! Regardless, though the creative endeavour here is not writing, it is still about how art and creation allows us to work through pain.
Similar to Rose Madder and Insomnia, there is also the return of the mythological references. The villain, known as Perse, is in actuality Persephone in reference to the Goddess of the Underworld and married to Hades. She also has a knack for vegetation, which would go some way to explain the south side of Duma Key’s lush and vicious growth. Gods (or godlike beings) in King’s stories tend to be cruel, and Perse is no different here. She is representative of how the darkness and hate can grow, corrupting those who give into it. This matches with some how she is represented in some myth and literature, where she is called ‘dread Persephone.’ Though there are many sympathetic interpretations of Persephone, it is interesting that King tends towards the darker version – she is, after all, still a God, and God of the Dead to boot. Her power in the book remains so long as you hold onto it.
Edgar isn’t Stephen King, but much of his experiences ring true considering what had happened to King. The early parts of the book were painful to read in a personal sense, as my father-in-law had an accident that left him with similar issues as Edgar experienced. My wife has told me stories of what he was like in the early years after his accident, and it may as well have been the same as King is telling here. The fits of hair-trigger anger, the love for his children, the sheer fucking frustration of being not at what you once were. All the characters in the book, from Elizabeth’s Alzheimers to Wireman’s failed suicide, have been suffering at the hands of time, and in that Edgar is able to find some solace at least. He is not alone.
Take Wireman for example. His winnings at the loteria compelled him to commit suicide, and his failed attempt as the bullet slowly drives its way deeper into his skull haunts him. But to an extent, he has come to terms with it too. In a plot sense, it is clear why Edgar has to remove the bullet, but it works on a thematic level too; Wireman has found a new life on Duma Key, caring for Elizabeth. The pain isn’t gone, but he has learned to live with it as best he can. His grief is there, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be alive and live. The bullet comes for us all, it’s just that Wireman’s is already there, and he has chosen to accept it.
Edgar’s final confrontation with Ilse, his daughter, carries with it similar connotations to Wireman’s story, giving him the chance to being the process of grieving. There is the moment of worry for our lead that he may engage in some Faustian monkey paw shenanigans – that he may indeed submit to the temptations of oblivion offered by Perse. In the beginning of the book, in his darkest moments, that kind of offer may have worked on Edgar. But as Edgar points out, once he had built around himself a community, know that he is loved (much as he saves Tom partway through the book), he finds the will to survive. In some ways, it mirrors the Persephone myth, where once they were caught in an Underworld are released, for a time, into the land of the living. It’s not permanent, but there is hope. There is pain and death too, but that is the price of life.
This is also represented by those who cannot move on. Like Bag of Bones before, and to a lesser extent The Shining, this is a book filled with regretful ghosts. Though the servant Emery’s attempt to save the twins is laudable under the circumstances, we all know that they are dead. Emery is drowned in the grief and guilt, and threatens to drag others with him too, a sharp contrast to Edgar and Elizabeth who stay afloat in their grief. Elizabeth lived with her grief all her life, and in her final years constantly trying to show others how to cope with her requests to throw the chinas into the pond. The ghosts are rotting remnants (and revenants) of the past, unable to leave for fear they may move on. Yet that is ultimately their only hope of peace with themselves, their guilt and their grief keeping them around. It’s hard to let go, sure, but it’s not living otherwise.
King has joked in the past that people need a therapist to work out over the course of hours of therapy what he gets to work out on the page and make money doing so. Confronting his own mortality, before he could see his kid’s own successes, must have put him in a mind of his mother. What he laughingly refers to as his Bonus Round is all the truer in reality, because he did indeed nearly die. Edgar confronts that fact every day, has the literal reminder in being an arm shorter than most people around. He’s getting old, relationships are ending, his kids are growing up and finding their own partners in life, and the life he had built for himself dies. But that doesn’t mean it’s the end for Edgar, and Edgar gets a second chance. Stephen King did too. He’s working on it, but with his writing he’s at least finding out what that means for him. In doing so, he has crafted a tense, absorbing, scary and thoughtful book in Duma Key.
Observations and Connections
The main character is called Edgar Freemantle, sharing a last name with Mother Abigail from The Stand. I’ve speculated elsewhere about the nature of Apocalypse Worlds amongst the King universes, so maybe this is a level of the Tower where there was no Captain Trips. It’s not unlikely they would be related – she outlived three husbands, had six children, thirty-two grandchildren, ninety-one great-grandchildren and a couple of great-great-grandchildren too. We never explicitly learn if Edgar shares a skin colour, but with numbers like that it’s not much of a stretch to put them in the same family tree. Considering Abigail’s shining ability, it may somewhat explain Edgar’s abilities too.
Speaking of Edgar, he has frequent visions of roses, one of his pieces is called Roses Grow From Shells, and his ex-wife gets a tattoo of a rose on her chest. Roses were a frequent recurring image of the Dark Tower series. Another aspect is the frequency of the number 19 if you aren’t afraid to do some maths, including the flight 559, the number of letters in Ilse Marie Freemantle, a big storm in 1927, room number 847, and Edgar’s email of EFree19. Finally, at one point Edgar refers to himself as a gunslinger, and thinks of life as a circle, a bit like ka. All those connections to the Tower, amongst other allusions, makes one wonder about Big Pink, the house, and Maerlyn’s grapefruit for similarities.
The villain, Perse, wears a red robe similar to the Crimson King. Edgar’s ability to draw pictures in reality recalls Patrick Danville’s ability from the final Dark Tower book, though both the King and Patrick first appeared in Insomnia. She also shares some similarities with Rose of Rose Madder, another red monster. Perse being able to take over the heron as a sort of scout or emissary recalls the abilities of Tak from Desperation. All of that considered, I wonder if there is a Royal Red family in King’s universe with these three forming a family.
An odd reference that I only caught from looking at the copyright page at the beginning of the book, but the song Dig by Shark Puppy is credited to songwriters R. Tozier and W. Denborough. Those are the names of two of the Losers from It. The record label is also called Bad Nineteen Music. A similar song reference credit can be found on the copyright page to The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Both of these suggest a fascinating continuing world after It, especially considering the sporadic Pennywise references in other books alongside similar creatures.
Wireman’s powers are minor, but mirror those of Johnny Smith’s from The Dead Zone. Both are induced by serious brain trauma, though Wireman at least gets better.
In Blaze before this, there was included a short story that King expanded into Duma Key. It’s called Memory, and is more of a character monologue that is essentially the first few chapters of the novel. Not essential, but interesting in how little it hints at what Duma Key would eventually be about.
UP NEXT: We’ll meet Just After Sunset.
Deeper Thoughts for the Horror Inclined 