From a Buick 8

King, Stephen

ISBN 10: 0743520955 ISBN 13: 9780743520959

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audioworks, 2002

Synopsis

The state police of Troop D in rural Pennsylvania have kept a secret in Shed B out back of the barracks ever since 1979, when Troopers Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox answered a call from a gas station just down the road and came back with an abandoned Buick Roadmaster. Curt Wilcox knew old cars, and he knew immediately that this one was...wrong, just wrong. A few hours later, when Rafferty vanished, Wilcox and his fellow troopers knew the car was worse than dangerous.

Curt's avid curiosity took the lead, and they investigated as best they could, as much as they dared. Over the years, the troop absorbed the mystery as part of the background to their work, the Buick 8 sitting out there like a still-life painting that breathes -- inhaling a little bit of this world, exhaling a little bit of what world it came from.

In the fall of 2001, a few months after Curt Wilcox is killed in a gruesome auto accident, his eightee-year-old boy, Ned, starts coming by the barracks. Sandy Dearborn, Sergeant Commanding, knows it's the boy's way of holding onto his father, and Ned is allowed to become part of the Troop D family. One day he looks in the window of Shed B and discovers family secret. Like his father, Ned wants answers...

From a Buick 8 is an audiobook about our fascination with deadly things, about our insistence on answers when there are none, about terror and courage in the face of the unknowable.

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

"Publishers Weekly" Terrific entertainment...Goes down like a shot of moonshine, hot and clean.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audioworks
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743520955
• ISBN 13: 9780743520959
• Binding: Audio Cassette