The first thought that came into my head was: “some books are dangerous.” Trust me, Duma Key is one such book. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled and a chill fell upon the room and I swear I thought the lights dimmed for a second. Duma Key isn’t a safe place for daughters.” If you mean to stay, Edgar, you mustn’t invite your daughter back. A pretty thing with blond hair? I may be confusing her with my own sister Hannah - I tend to do that, I know I do - but in this case, I think I’m right. Didn’t she? I seem to remember her waving to me. I think you have a daughter, and I believe she visited you. “Edgar, one is sure you’ll make a very nice neighbour, I have no doubts on that score, but you must take precautions.
It serves as a taste of what Edgar Freemantle might experience upon relocating himself to Florida, to an idyllic beach-front residence called Duma Key: I was about a quarter of the way into Stephen King’s Duma Key and feeling a sense of growing dread and dark foreboding when I came upon this passage spoken by the elderly property owner Elizabeth Eastlake. horror is a broken leg." Or a missing arm.Published by Hodder & Stoughton UK (as reviewed) Disability is still a taboo in fiction and film and King deals with it brilliantly, perhaps deliberately rebuffing Paul Theroux's fictional dismissal of the author in his 2001 novel Hotel Honolulu: "horror is not a dog that gets bitten by a bat and besieges a mother and son. The scenes following Freemantle's physical recovery, of his anger and suicidal depression, are the author writing at his absolute best, immediately gripping the reader and putting him on the protagonist's side. Edgar Freemantle, who has made his millions in building and contracting, loses an arm in a freak accident and comes round to discover that his wife wants a divorce. He returns to this theme in his latest novel, Duma Key, which opens with his most vivid depiction of a traumatised patient to date. Since his accident, King has relived his personal horror story in a number of novels and television programmes, including Dreamcatcher (2001), Kingdom Hospital (2004) and The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah (2004). King has got much creative mileage out of incapacitated characters, from Paul Sheldon hobbled and trapped in bed by obsessive fan Annie Wilkes in 1987's Misery, Jessie Burlingame left handcuffed to the head board in a solitary cabin in Maine, after her husband suffers a fatal heart attack during an S&M session in 1992's Gerald's Game, to the horrors witnessed by Louis Creed while working for the University of Maine's campus health service in 1983's Pet Sematary. Even before he was hit by a truck in 1999, being bedridden had frequently been one of the primal fears powering Stephen King's fiction.
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