From a Buick 8 - Softcover

King, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340952660 ISBN 13: 9780340952665

Publisher: Hodder Paperbacks, 2007

Synopsis

For twenty years the officers in the Pennsylvania State Police Barracks have kept a secret in Shed B. A vintage Buick which lures the troopers to come and take a look. Now young Ned Wilcox, son of the recently deceased officer Curt, has started hanging around the Barracks. One day he can't resist peeking through the windows. And it's time to share the secret. So the veteran troopers sit Ned down on the smoking bench and tell him every skin-curdling detail - from the Buick's arrival to the terrifying light-shows and what it sucks in and breathes out. For the Buick is a conduit to another world. As King puts it, 'when we confront the deep and authentic unknown, we glimpse that place where our familiar universe stops'.

About this title

Review:

In Stephen King's From a Buick 8, a group of Pennsylvania State Troopers find, and keep secret, the Buick 8, a "car" that is a portal between our world and some world far more horrid. Animals and occasionally people disappear around the Buick 8 and every so often something unpleasant comes through from the other side. The alien monsters here are creatures of pure disgust; King terrifyingly argues here that somewhere in the universe there are things for which we can have no fellow-feeling. All of the narrators are marked by the Buick 8--it is a focus for personal disaster--but they believe, rightly, that they are the competent authorities, that to hand it over would make things worse. After the death of one of the original Troopers, the rest gather round his teenage son, and tell him the tale; this is a book about storytelling and about listening and about not hearing what you are told. As such, it is a worthy fictional companion to King's excellent On Writing; significantly, its considerable strengths come partly from King's imagination, partly from the technical mastery that lets him play the narrators off against each other, and partly from research, from King's own capacity to listen to real cops. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

A beautiful excursion into new narrative territory showing an accomplished storyteller making unusual choices and resisting the obvious at every turn...a portal into King's incredible imagination (Independent on Sunday)

Excellent on police lore and procedure...enriched by a double plot that shows men ageing, changing and disappearing over two decades...Impressive in its handling of narrative voice and structure as well as character (The Sunday Times)

A voice as distinctive as it is compelling (Scotsman)

Stephen King is blessed with an apparently inexhaustible imagination and a talent for storytelling that shows little sign of waning. In his hands at least, the art is far from being lost (Daily Mail on EVERYTHING'S EVENTUAL)

Still on top of his game...An unusual and disturbing mix that no other modern writer could pull off (The Times on EVERYTHING'S EVENTUAL)

Astonishingly good (Independent on HEARTS IN ATLANTIS)

Accomplished...unputdownable...his mesmerising best (Observer on BAG OF BONES)

King has inspired a whole generation to read. He's made them read good, witty prose...a fabulous teller of stories who can create an entire new world and make the reader live in it (Express on DREAMCATCHER)

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0340952660
• ISBN 13: 9780340952665
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496