Critics and Stephen King's "constant readers" have been quick to draw the
obvious comparisons between From a Buick 8 and his early-career car-gone-mad
novel Christine -- both feature a classic car as the villain, and both focus on
unraveling the complex adolescent male need to make sense of the world and
everyone's place in it. A closer side-by-side reading yields a more fascinating
discovery: the evident maturation of a bestselling author who has had to make
his peace with critics' assessment of him as a hack, but who has risen far above
those critical expectations -- even if those literary types refuse to
acknowledge it.
A
handful of colorful narrative voices tell the tale of the impersonally
malevolent counterfeit Buick Roadmaster that has seized the imaginations -- and
more than once, the lives -- of certain members of Pennsylvania State Patrol
Troop D. It's a reluctant retelling, but something that Sergeant Sandy Dearborn
hopes will lay to rest the demons haunting eighteen-year-old Ned Wilcox, whose
trooper father Curt was lately killed by a drunk driver. But rather than putting
those demons aside, the revelation of this hidden aspect of his father's life
stirs up a dangerous fascination in Ned about the vehicle locked in Shed B --
the very sort of obsessive fascination that may have helped kill his father.
In 1979, a gas station attendant calls in a report about a cherry Buick
abandoned at the pump by an uncomfortably strange man who has himself vanished.
Then-Sergeant Ennis Rafferty and Trooper Curtis Wilcox answer the call, and they
know almost immediately that there is something wrong with the car. Certain
details are just...off, like the oversized steering wheel that's more like
something one expects to see on a ship. Or like the fact that it's got no
discernible engine. On a hunch, the troopers confiscate the vehicle, and soon
very strange things start happening, like thirty-degree temperature drops around
the car in midsummer, blinding lightquakes in Shed B, the company dog's weird
attracted-repelled reaction to the Roadmaster. Then the "car" spews out an
unholy creature that dies almost immediately, and soon after Sergeant Rafferty
disappears.
Now some twenty-odd years later, the car is still in the shed; the
lightquakes less brilliant, the temperature drops less common. The company dog
is long-dead, Curtis Wilcox more recently so, but the supposed Buick is still
under determined guard by Troop D. Only, sparked by Ned's growing fixation, it
seems to be gearing up for one last great granddaddy of a show, and it may be a
bigger show than Sandy and the handful of other Troop D veterans can pull Ned
back from.
From a Buick 8 is a masterful, spooky novel about grief, loss, the inexplicable nature of the world and
cruel fate.
For as little as really happens in the novel and for its mostly flashback form,
it is still absolutely un-put-down-able. King (who was, in an odd coincidence, struck by a drunk driver after
starting this novel) proves himself to be at the top of his form. But the reader
gets a real sense, especially in this novel's almost elegiac tone, that the horrormeister
is looking back over his career and preparing to sing his own eventual swan
song. There are several promised novels yet unpublished, but constant readers
best savor them -- and their author's mastery -- as springing from a necessarily
finite well.