I must admit I was sceptical about reading Duma Key because I was a little disappointed by Under the Dome but I wasn't disappointed by this at all. Gripping from start to finish. Well worth a read. Absolutely brilliant book.

OK, so here’s why I think Stephen King is the greatest damn horror writer in the history of ever. It’s because we believe in his characters, their lives, their environments. Doesn’t matter how trouser-soilingly gruesome those monsters in the closet might be if you can’t believe in the closet. This is one reason why the final chapter of ‘It’ and pretty much the whole ‘Dark Tower’ sequence blow like a Harrier jump jet. Since King’s horror depends so much on a sense of place, of detail-crammed authenticity, it seems almost perverse for him to pack his bags and zoom off to a part of the world he barely knows. Why Florida? Search me. The plot of ‘Duma Key’ could just as easily be set in his usual stamping ground of Maine. Yes, it needs to be on a small island for the thing to work properly, but it shouldn’t be beyond an author of his imaginative prowess to plonk one off the New England coast, or perhaps in one of those lakes they are so fond of. But it’s all deliberate. It doesn’t have to be Florida. It could be California, Timbuctoo, or Leeds. The one place it can’t be, in this particular book, is Maine. What he’s trying to do here, y’see, is reduce his art to the barest essentials. Two men, on a virtually desolate island, fighting for their lives against a terrifying entity of undiluted wickedness. Under the circs, his usual MO of describing everything in sight would be so much chaff. It has to be said that when he’s tried this before, in ‘Gerald’s Game’, he’s made a complete fool of himself. Can our boy make 500 pages of being tied to a bed seem interesting and scary? The hell he can. Yet here, he achieves an almost Beckett-like simplicity, reminiscent in some ways of Lear in its elemental starkness. It all starts with a near-fatal accident. Edgar Freemantle loses an arm, a chunk of his hip, and very nearly his mind when a crane falls on top of him. No more work for you, Mr F, says his psychologist, why don’t you mosey on down to the Sunshine State and see if a spot of painting makes you feel better. I don’t know the first thing about art, protests Ed. I’m a construction engineer. That’s as maybe says the shrink, but this is a Stephen King book, and nobody would be impressed if he made yet another one of his heroes a millionaire best-selling author (see ‘Dark Half’, ‘Misery’, ‘It’, etc). So off he goes to Florida, and discovers that he’s actually a bit of a whizz at the old painting lark. Funny you should mention that, says his new friend Wireman, when I came here after my accident, I found I could read people’s minds. Maybe it’s something in the water. Ol’ Miss Eastlake who lives up the road, she seems to think there was some bad juju here in the twenties. She can’t tell us about it though, because she’s got Alzheimer’s. Guess we’d better see how this one plays out. Right you are says Ed. Lor lumme, now I can make stuff disappear just by painting it and then rubbing it out. Fancy that. But sometimes it seems like the paintings are a little too good, like they come a little too naturally. Who exactly is in control of that brush? ‘Duma Key’ is about many things. It’s about recovery; it’s about friendship; it’s about the weird power all creative people half-dread, half-depend on, what Kipling used to call his ‘daemon’; it’s about the buried horrors of the past. I’ll tell you what else it’s about. It’s about to scare the living craplights out of you.

One if his best books for decades, I felt bereaved after finishing this book (in one day) - sent shivers down my spine, made me laugh, cry and mourne when I realised there were only a few more pages to go

In the wake of the 1999 roadside accident that permanently altered his consciousness, Stephen King has turned the evanescence of health and sanity into his books' most disturbing source of fear. His use of horror is not what it used to be: it may still be the impetus for his stories, but it is no longer the foremost reason they're interesting. Sure, he can still use supernatural effects to scare you sh*tless. But lately he also shows off other interests, and I truly enjoy the change. DUMA KEY is about characters whose near-death experiences have given them psychic powers. That may make it sound fanciful, but this novel is frank and well grounded. It is a complex book, but its heart--as with all of King's best novels--belongs to its characters. The first person narrative puts readers solidly inside the main character's head, even as he tries to explain the unexplainable, the impossibility of comparing the act of creativity to something tangible. The "I" in the novel is Edgar Freemantle, a recent amputee who's become a painter out of desperation. But he is in fact a fantastic good painter, and he can't explain why: "You can't tell anyone what it's like. You can only talk around it until everyone's exhausted and it's time to go to sleep.""Art is memory...The clearer the memory, the better the art. The purer.""Our memories have voices, too," Edgar says. "Ask anyone who has ever lost a limb or a child or a long-cherished dream. Ask anyone who blames himself for a bad decision, usually made in a raw instant (an instant that is most commonly red). Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamour like raised arms in the dark."Edgar's two most important relationships--that with his younger daughter and his new friendship with Wireman--are as real as fiction can possibly reproduce. Even the tense détente Edgar finds with his ex-wife bears the patina of truth. The memories these characters experience are real, imagined, revised and occasionally just slightly out of their grasp.So, then, DUMA KEY concerns creativity and memory, and features a damaged man on whom a place acts like a psychic magnet: Duma Key, precisely - on the Gulf of Mexico, Florida. King's work has always been coloured by region and landscape, and here he seizes on and makes vivid an exotic world: the Florida Keys. It's a whole island, not a mere hotel this time, that calls to Edgar and almost demands his presence, so that a tale can be brought to its climax, or spun into another cycle. No other popular novelist, perhaps no other contemporary novelist, can take recognisable, ordinary people and put them through the wringer with such panache while always keeping sight of their humanity. King's characters are always fixed in the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day, wearing silly sneakers or gobbling down luncheon meat out of the fridge, and that's a huge part of his gift and success. He dotes on the creations he tortures and when Wireman says, "This made cocaine seem like Xanax," we're sure that the writer knows whereof his invention speaks. King understands crunching pain and the agony of the disarrayed mind. He's been there. One of horror fiction's central ideas is thus brought into play, namely how we perceive the relationship between our fear of chaos and our creeping sense that dreadful events are part of a fated and unstoppable sequence. "Trying to re-invent the ordinary, make it new by turning it into a dream," is how Freemantle comes to define his art, and this is King's quest also. He writes as always with energy and drive and a wit and grace for which critics often fail to give him credit. DUMA KEY is full of pleasures as well as a host of moments that make you really shiver and shudder. The book is perhaps too long and creaks a bit by the end, but on reading it I perceived throughout the thrilling sense of a master determined not only to flex his muscles but develop them too.

A man is badly injured in a construction accident, and after his recovery nothing is the same again. He moves to Duma Key to recuperate, forming unusual friendships with the neighbours, and discovering a previously hidden ability to paint. But there is something supernatural happening on the Key, linked to the drownings many years ago of twin little girls, the older sisters of his now-elderly neighbour. Duma Key is an eerie novel that takes a while to establish itself as a horror story. It's only the last part of the book that is properly frightening, but the development of the characters in the earlier parts of the novel is more complex and interesting, and as a whole makes Duma Key a rich, varied and interesting novel.