"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. But Duma, the house where he is staying, where the shells grind in the tide at night, is tightening its grip on him, and there is something dark waiting to pounce.
It turns out he has talent, buckets of it – the paintings, Dali-esque sunsets, strange ships, creepy children/dolls – pour out of him. "I scratched the word HELLO in small letters … And as names go, it's a good one, isn't it? In spite of all the damage that followed, I still think that's the perfect name for a picture drawn by a man who was trying his best not to be sad anymore – who was trying to remember how it felt to be happy." He rents a house on Duma Key, a deserted strip of island on the Gulf of Mexico, and he starts to draw. You need hedges … hedges against the night." "Edgar, does anything make you happy?" "I used to sketch." "Take it up again.
His doctor guesses, stops him, tells him to try something new, somewhere else. His wife leaves him, after he attempts to throttle her. "Bring over the fucking pal, you dump bitch … Bring over the chum and sick down!" It was the closest my rattled, fucked-up brain could come to chair." "Sit in the friend." "What do you mean, Edgar?" she asked. Edgar's brain has been damaged, leaving him without the right words for things, filling him with rage. King is telling the story of Edgar Freemantle, a construction man who has made a fortune, but is hit by a crane and loses an arm as well as seriously injuring his head. I've reread it over the past few weeks, and it's had just as strong an effect on me. I first read it – of course I did, I'm an addict – on publication, and have a clear memory of being about halfway through, drying my hair, and having to repeatedly stop and turn the hairdryer off, it had made me so ridiculously jumpy. For me, holiday reading, and particularly beach reading, is best when it's scary, because there's little to compare to the thrill of a proper chill in hot sunlight.ĭuma Key, one of King's more recent novels (it was published in 2008) more than accomplishes this. So began a love of horror, and particularly of King, which lasts to this day.
I also, furtively, picked up a creased old paperback of Different Seasons by Stephen King, read Apt Pupil, and discovered for the first time the delights of being thoroughly terrified. I ventured into The Silence of the Lambs, probably much too young, and was disturbed by the dark imaginings of Thomas Harris. On holiday with my family in Portugal, aged around 11 or 12, I found a stash of deserted books left behind by former residents of the place we were staying (and isn't that one of the nicest things about holiday reading, picking up someone else's unexpected leftovers?).
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