Duma Key
Published: 22, January 2008
Author: Stephen King
Genre: American, Fiction, Horror, Mystery, Occult, Parenting, Psychological, Relationships, Supernatural, Suspense, Thriller
Check out the review of this book here:
Summary
Edgar Freemantle, a wealthy Minnesotan building contractor, barely survives a terrible work-site accident in which his vehicle is crushed by a crane.
Freemantle loses his right arm as a result of serious brain injuries that affect his speech, vision, and memory. Throughout his lengthy recuperation, Edgar has suicidal thoughts and severe abusive mood swings, prompting his wife to petition for divorce.
Edgar moves south on the suggestion of his psychotherapist, Dr. Kamen, renting a beach property on the Florida island of Duma Key. Kamen also recommends Freemantle to rediscover his old drawing pastime as a kind of therapy.
Edgar hires a part-time shopper and personal assistant Jack Cantori, a local college student. Soon after, Freemantle meets and befriends the island's other full-time residents, octogenarian heiress Elizabeth Eastlake (who suffers from final-stage dementia and whose family trust owns the majority of the island) and her live-in attendant, Jerome Wireman, himself a once-gifted attorney whose wife and daughter's tragic deaths led him to (unsuccessfully) attempt suicide by gunshot wound.
As Freemantle immerses himself compulsively in his work, decades-old unexplained happenings return to the island.
Edgar works with feverish intensity, slipping into a semi-conscious haze; his paintings and drawings catch psychic glimpses, showing his ex-passionate wife's affair, a friend's suicidal melancholy, and his younger daughter Ilse's brief married engagement.
Later, Freemantle used his newly discovered creative abilities to affect the outer world, curing Wireman's degenerative neurological condition and smothering a child killer in his jail cell.
During Ilse's visit to Duma Key, the father-daughter team drives to a derelict, overgrown area of the island where colors appear abnormally intense, and Ilse feels severely ill.
Through phone conversations, Elizabeth Eastlake tells Edgar that Duma "has never been a lucky location for daughters," and that his paintings should be sold to numerous physically remote purchasers, lest their supernatural power becomes too centralized or harmful.
Freemantle discovers that Duma Key's beach house has hosted many successful artists (including Salvador Dal) during its eighty-year tenure, that Elizabeth Eastlake was a prodigious artist as a child, and that both Edgar and Wireman manifest pronounced psychic talents while on or near the island, presumably as a result of their debilitating brain injuries.
Freemantle's paintings get increasingly colorful and disturbing as they progress, depicting ship-and-seaside landscapes in which the vessel and enigmatic red-cloaked passenger edge closer to shore in each subsequent painting.
As her dementia develops, Elizabeth becomes alternatively rational and confused, scattering her precious china figurines, moaning, "The table is leaking," and pleading for Wireman to toss one faceless sculpture into her koi pond.
Eastlake asks Edgar whether he has started painting the ship yet, in a scary moment of clarity.
Freemantle's paintings are well-known throughout the state. He stages an art gallery and related seminar at an expensive Sarasota gallery, attracting a loyal audience (including Edgar's visiting loved ones) and generating a half-million-dollar profit.
Elizabeth Eastlake makes a rare appearance at the show, reacting angrily to Edgar's ship-and-seaside paintings, cryptically referring to her childhood toys and long-drowned sisters, and warning that "She has grown so powerful," "The table is leaking," and "Drown her back to sleep," before suffering an incapacitating (and ultimately fatal) stroke.
In his art, Freemantle discovers previously unnoticed details: the ship's deteriorating sails, children's toys littering her decks, and screaming faces hidden in its frothy wake.
Timelines intertwine as Edgar Freemantle's present-day horror matches the Eastlake family tragedy of 1927.
Young Elizabeth, who had a brain injury in a horse-carriage accident as a toddler, turned to sketching and scribbling as a kind of therapy.
"Perse," an outside force, communicates to Elizabeth, sometimes in her head, sometimes through her rag-doll, filling her with information, reality-altering powers, and a creeping infiltration of dark impulses.
Elizabeth leads her bootlegger father to a pile of ship debris in the shallows, where he discovers a red-cloaked porcelain figurine.
The girl's doodles become increasingly weird and demonic, until she rebels against Perse, inciting the entity's fury. Elizabeth's twin sisters are enticed into the water to perish as a form of retribution.
Only Elizabeth's caretaker, Melda, takes direct action; when Perse's drowned-sister monsters rush beachward, the governess uses silver jewelry to keep them at bay while Elizabeth nullifies the Perse sculpture.
While investigating the Eastlake mystery, Freemantle meets comparable supernatural perils. When he gets home, he notices "Where our Sister?" painted on an unused canvas in a childish manner.
Edgar then realizes that persons in possession of his artworks either die or are possessed by "Perse" and led to violent acts. He persuades his loved ones to throw away their paintings, but not before his daughter, Ilse, is drowned by a co-opted art critic.
The zombie passengers of the ghost ship return for Edgar, Jack, and Wireman as they strive to find the mystery of crazy Persephone's ascendancy and subsequent deportation.
Fighting their way to the island's overgrown region—Roost, Heron's the old Eastlake manor—the trio discovers the Perse-carving, caught in fresh (rather than her native salt) water and encased in a (water-filled) porcelain keg of table whiskey, in which a crack has formed over time ("the table is leaking").
Edgar returns the figurine to its fresh-water sleep and confronts one more Perse-temptation, this time in the form of his drowned daughter Ilse.
The figurine is then dropped into Lake Phalen's watery depths by Freemantle and Wireman, where it will remain undisturbed for the rest of its life.
Wireman decides to relocate to Tamazunchale, Mexico, and open a hotel. He invites Freemantle to join him when he is ready and if he desires.
Wireman, on the other hand, dies of a heart attack barely two months later in Tamazunchale's open-air markets before Freemantle had another chance to visit him.
Edgar Freemantle then begins his last painting, which depicts a large tropical hurricane devastating Duma Key.
Useful Search Related Words & Keywords
Bag Of Bones, Character Development, Dark Tower, Edgar Freemantle, Highly Recommend, King At His Best, King Novel, Liseys Story, Long Time, Page Turner, Salems Lot
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