Book 4: Duma Key by Stephen King

Summary:
Edgar Freemantle, a successful building contractor, is in a horrible work site accident near his home in Minnesota. He loses an arm and part has some initial brain damage to the point where certain words are hard to say/remember and his personality is changed. He lashes out in anger often at first, and this eventually alienates his wife who divorces him. He contemplates suicide, but his therapist warns him that even if he tries to cover it up as an accident, everyone will still know the true cause. He also suggests that Edgar find something that he used to enjoy doing and to maybe relocate in the hopes of changing his mood. Edgar does leave and finds a house to rent on the nearly empty island in Florida called Duma Key. There are only a few homes along the beach and they are all owned by one old woman, Elizabeth Eastlake, who is the only permanent resident of the island along with her caretaker, Jerome Wireman. Edgar stays in a house that he nicknames Big Pink due to its color. It has been used by artists, including Dali, in the past as a retreat to allow them to focus on their art which ties nicely in to Edgar since that is what he decides to return to as something to occupy his time. Eventually weird stuff starts happening in association with Edgar's paintings. Her gets an overwhelming urge to paint and after he does he often can remember very little, but the paintings are amazing. He learns things he shouldn't be able to know like who his wife is sleeping with and who his daughter is dating. He eventually learns that he can use his paintings to affect the real world when he paints a child killer with no mouth adn the man dies in jail because he can no longer breathe. He also uses this power to help Wireman who has a bullet lodged in his skull from a failed suicide attempt in his past. Edgar's paintings start to attract notice and one of the art galleries on the main land have a show of his work. All his family and friends from back home fly down for the show. This all turns to horror when Miss Eastlake dies the same night. There are also forces on the island which are set loose and Edgar, Wireman, and Jack (Edgar's part time assistant/gopher) have to find the cause of the evil and defeat it. It's all tied in to Miss Eastlake's past and what she and her family went through in her youth to capture and hide the evil back then. This is all done in a typical Stephen King scary way.

My Thoughts:
This is honestly the best Stephen King book I've read since at least Black House. It really pulls you in and holds you enthralled until the end. It's not quite as straight forward as Cell, but it doesn't try to do too much like I think Lisey's Story did. It's just a story, but it has enough layers and is complex enough to make it really enjoyable. If you're looking for one Stephen King book to read from the last 10 years, I'd give this one a go. You wouldn't regret it.

Trivia:
Edgar's last name is Freemantle, which is the same as Mother Abigail's from The Stand. A posting on King's message board by the moderator states that Edgar is indeed a descendant of Abigail, but not the same one as in The Stand because the stories are set in different universes.

Links:
Amazon
Duma Key at Wikipedia
A Review at Charnel House

Bibliography of the edition I read:
King, Stephen. Duma Key. New York: Scribner, 2008.