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    From a Buick 8: A Novel
    From a Buick 8: A Novel
    From a Buick 8: A Novel
    Ebook480 pages8 hours

    From a Buick 8: A Novel

    By Stephen King

    3.5/5

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    The #1 New York Times bestseller from Stephen King—a novel about the fascination deadly things have for us and about our insistence on answers when there are none…

    Since 1979, the state police of Troop D in rural Pennsylvania have kept a secret in the shed out behind the barracks. Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox had answered a strange call just down the road and came back with an abandoned 1953 Buick Roadmaster. Curt Wilcox knew old cars, and this one was…just wrong. As it turned out, the Buick 8 was worse than dangerous—and the members of Troop D decided that it would be better if the public never found out about it. Now, more than twenty years later, Curt’s son Ned starts hanging around the barracks and is allowed into the Troop D family. And one day he discovers the family secret—a mystery that begins to stir once more, not only in the minds and hearts of these veteran troopers, but out in the shed as well, for there’s more power under the hood than anyone can handle…
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateSep 24, 2002
    ISBN9780743246798
    Author

    Stephen King

    Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection You Like It Darker, Holly, Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. 

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    Reviews for From a Buick 8

    3.5/5

    1,441 ratings41 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Some of his best writing, period; definitely one of his best books post-accident. I read this once or twice a year. Where some of his later books insert his accident midstream, interrupting a story that was otherwise about something else, this one integrates it smoothly and binds it to the story inextricably. It's a book about sons and fathers, about growing up, about questions that don't have answers, about the strangeness of worlds unseen. And it's also a book about this REALLY creepy car that turns up one day...It's told to a boy just about to graduate from high school, by people who knew and worked with his father, all of whom were tied up in the mystery/horror of the car in some way; the voices are strong and distinct, and the stories themselves were highly disturbing. I kind of loved this one!
    • 4/5
      This book has a lot more personal philosophy to impart rather than horror. This is about growing old. This is about mysteries in life. This is about sticking to duty. This is about the chains that we can feel but rarely know. The Buick 8 pulls up to the gas pumps at a full-serve gas station in Western Pennsylvania in 1979. While the statio attendant is filling the tank, the driver walks around to the back of the station and...disappears. The local police, two Pennsylvania State Troopers named Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox from Troop D, show up and almost immediately notice that this car isn't...right. For one thing, it can't be driven. And...it hums. You can't really hear it, but it's there. Troop D takes custody of it and they watch it. This is one Buick 8 that bears watching. And guarding. Whatever it is, it's not a car. Worse than that, it breathes. It exhales things out into our world and inhales things in to...who knows where. You don't want to know, and you don't want to go there. You won't come back. The car becomes Troop D's family secret, kept in Shed B and quietly but vigilantly guarded. When Wilcox is killed in a senseless accident in the fall of 2001, Ned, his 18 year old son, begins doing odd jobs around the barracks, trying to hold onto his father's memory. Ned discovers the car and the story behind it and he wants to know more. And the car is ready to give him far, far more than he will ever want.

      "From A Buick 8" is a wonderfully gripping read, full of the creepy crawlies, but mostly it's a moving, melancholy meditation on time and loss. Give this book a try, it's a great read.
    • 5/5
      I picked this book up on a 3 for 2 sale and didn't really expect much from it. It wasn't something I was looking for and I didn't really expect the subject matter to be in my area, but it was written by Stephen King and that is always a good sign, so I took my chances and began to read. I have to say that I was very quickly caught up in the story. It focusses on the strange goings on around a Buick 8 and how a group of Pennsylvania State Police go about dealing with the situation.

      The plot is almost entirely focussed in one place, but this is a strength of the book rather than a limitation. It helps focus on how a bunch of ordinary people go about dealing with extraordinary situations. As always, King's characters are down to earth and fully believable. The way the story is told is also very well done. It's pretty much a masterclass in story telling. I was hooked from the start and really liked the way the story unfolded, and how it didn't have cliches or predictable events. What it did have was credibility and character. This is a really good book. I enjoyed it a lot.
    • 3/5
      One of the better novels I've read by him. Horror and aliens mix in King's typical small-town scenario.
    • 3/5
      "Come close, children, and see the living crocodile..."Overall, I liked this. Reading a King book NOT set in Maine was pretty cool! And I liked the characters, especially Arky's accent. I also liked that the story was told by many of the characters, past and present, and the cool transitions between chapters. The state police of Troop D in rural Pennsylvania, and their Shed B, made for interesting reading. (As did the several aside mentions of the Amish!) For me though, the story really dragged. It wasn't scary, and for me, didn't get interesting until the summer of 1988 story. I did enjoy very much, the ol' switcheroo at the ending of who died. That really fooled me! And I liked reading about the origins for this story in the "Author's Note" at the end! But:SPOILER ALERT:I did not like that we did not get to know more about the Buick's origins and who? what? why? it was there. Frustrating!
    • 3/5
      In rural Pennsylvania Troop D performs all the usual work that a small town police force performs. They answer the calls, assist the public and keep order. But Troop D provides one other not so public service. Out behind the station house in an unremarkable shed they have worked since 1979 to keep one very big secret. A strange abandoned Buick 8, which is not really a Buick 8 at all, but a portal of some sort. A portal that occasionally brings strange creatures forth into our world. And on the rare occasion snatches someone from our world and takes them ‘elsewhere’. Stephen King has managed to blend a traditional haunted house story into his fable of an otherworldly Buick that is far more than it first seems. As the troopers tell their spellbinding history to Ned, the son of one of their fallen commands the Buick listens and it waits…
    • 5/5
      The officers of the Troop D state police in rural Pennsylvania have kept a secret since 1979. Since then, stowed out behind the police barracks in Shed B, has been a classic car - a Buick Roadmaster. In 1979, Troopers Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox answered a call from a gas station just down the road and came back with the abandoned Buick. Curt Wilcox knew old cars, and he knew immediately that this car was...wrong, just wrong. A few hours later, when Trooper Rafferty vanished without a trace, Curt and his fellow troopers knew the old Buick Roadmaster was worse than dangerous - and that it would be better if John Q. Public never found out about it.With Curt's avid curiosity taking the lead, they investigated Trooper Rafferty's disappearance as best they could, as much as they dared. Over the years, the troop eventually 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 whatever world it came from. In the fall of 2001, some time after Curt Wilcox is killed in a gruesome auto accident, his 18 year-old son Ned starts coming by the barracks. Ned does various odd jobs around the barracks - mowing the lawn, washing windows, shoveling snow.Sergeant Commanding, Sandy Dearborn, knows it's just the boy's way of holding onto his father, and Ned is allowed to become a part of the Troop D family. One day, Ned happens to look through the window of Shed B and discovers the family secret. Like his father, Ned wants answers, and the secret begins to stir; not only in the minds and hearts of the veteran troopers who surround him, but in Shed B as well...I must say that I enjoyed this book much more than I thought I would. It was very exciting and my goodness, what an imagination Stephen King has. I've said before that I'm always a little wary of reading Stephen King's longer novels - the plots of many of his books start off brilliantly, and then they seem to go off the rails slightly, at least in my opinion. Anyway, while I found that some passages in From a Buick 8: A Novel were slightly verbose, overall, the book managed to capture my attention and successfully hold it until the end. I give this book an A!
    • 3/5
      Maybe it was because of lowered expectations but I didn't think this book was as bad as some of the reviews said it was. I saw a lot of articles that commented on how this was just another scary car novel, a la CHRISTINE. And how this wasn't some of his strongest writing. And I believe it was after the release and some of those reviews that King announced his planned retirement, a retirement that I'll believe when I see. Personally I think that he'll be like The Rolling Stones or Ozzy or Cher who announce their retirement but then keep on doing what they love. And even now King has announced his plans to do a crime novel called THE COLORADO KID. But I digress, back to FROM A BUICK 8.I'll agree that it was not one of his better books. Since there is no active threat, no monster looming or no quest driving folks forward, the action was minimal. The tale unfolds as several troopers reveal the history of a car that was impounded many years back. Their recipient of the story is Ned Wilcox, a young man who recently lost his dad, a fellow trooper.While the story is interesting and intriguing, there is also a level of detachment to the telling. This is probably due to it being told to Ned while sitting around a picnic table rather than experiencing the story live, so to speak. I'm not sure if this hurt the story or not but I know that I wasn't pulled into it as much as I am with other novels. At the same time though, Stephen King on his off-days is still tons better than a lot of other stuff out there. And for you completists, it does tie-in to the Dark Tower series but more on the peripheral than directly. In that regards it is a nice complement to Hearts In Atlantis.
    • 4/5
      I never did figure out exactly wtf the Buick 8 was supposed to be, but I think that was the point. The book was damn good anyway.
    • 4/5
      This is not one of the Stephen King books most people talk about, so I didn't expect much, but I liked this one. I thought Christine was creepier, in an evil, killer-car sort of way, but the alien car in From a Buick 8 is pretty weird, as is the guy who flits through the story early one to convey the car to the small Pennsylvania town where it lodges itself. Mostly, this book is about small-town life from the perspective of a boy whose dad was killed on duty. The kid is brought up by the rest of the men in the police precinct, and gains a more grown-up perspective on life and his own place in the world. Threaded into this coming-of-age novel is the alien car, which may be responsible for a lot, or maybe almost nothing of what happens in the boy's life, as it mostly just sits in a shed doing nothing, for most of the book.
      I love the idea that the car is a portal lock sent through a science experiment that began in a lab on some other planet where scientists are experimenting with high energy physics and time/dimension/large distance travel, but this book never really tells us what the car is, or why it turned up where it did.
    • 3/5
      If I didn't have to drive right now I would never finish a book these days - it's the only time I get to read/listen. This just plodded. Underwhelming. Bound to happen to him sometimes!
    • 4/5
      Like "The Colorado Kid," "From A Buick 8" uses the narrative device of having old codgers tell a young person about something that happened in the past. The story begins in 1979 when the mysterious Buick is abandoned at a gas station in western Pennsylvania. Most of the book consists of the now-middle-aged state troopers who impounded the car relating the events over the past 20 years that convinced them the Buick is actually a portal to another world. This book is far more philosophical than typical early King novels – not a lot of action and not much resolution. The Buick becomes a symbol of the mysteries of life and the nature of obsession. Those who prefer classic King might not appreciate this book, but I enjoyed it. Stephen King has become so adept at character voice that I can hear each one of them speaking. And occasionally there are bits that sound more like poetry than prose. Another King novel with something of the same flavor is "Lisey's Story" -- a lot of mysterious and unexplained happenings, with the reader left to draw his own conclusions.
    • 3/5
      Read in 2003 I think and I remember that I did not like it as much as I did his other books. I want to re read some of his books. Read them in English for the first time although I must say the Dutch translator of his work back in the days when I bought his books the minute they were in the shop, did a fantastic job.
    • 5/5
      One of King's 21st -century masterpieces. Flawlessly handles mutliple narrators and delivers a story of mesmerizing impact.
    • 4/5
      The state police of Troop D in Pennsylvania have kept a very deep secret in Shed B outside of the station since 1979. When Troopers Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox went to the gas station and came back with a Buick Roadmaster. Curt Wilcox knew old cars, and he knew right away that this one was wrong. A few hours later Rafferty vanished. Wilcox and his fellow police men knew the car was worse and that it would be better if the Public never found out about it. This was a great mystery/horror book that Stephen King wrote, in my opinion. This book kept me sitting at the edge of my seat waiting for more. I would highly recommend this novel to anyone who likes to sit at the edge of their seat waiting for more. I personally never liked horror books, but after reading this book I might have to change my thoughts about horror books.-ERICH
    • 3/5
      Not one of my favorites by King, & I generally LOVE him. This book evokes Christine, just a TINY sliver, as both cars were extant, seemingly self aware. Both are menacing, creepy, killers. However, the difference with the Buick, is that it's an impossible car to begin with. And that's where the utter weirdness of this car starts. It "spit out" a batlike "alien" type being, it has occasional "lightning storms" in the garage/shed that it "lives" in because the police department doesn't know what else to DO with it, & it's a mystery in it's own right that they can't solve. In many ways, the Buick is the ultimate puzzle, that affects a lot of people over the years since it came to be in the possession of the police.
    • 3/5
      A Buick from another place and the damage that it does. A son coming to terms with the death of his father and Stephen King's usual storytelling flair. Didn't really grab me at all but nothing wrong with the novel.
    • 3/5
      King not even getting out of third gear in a a classic tale of small town Americana, full of iced tea and 'right-back-atchas'. As always with King, there is a darkness looming in the background. However, From A Buick 8 fails to present the Constant Reader with any memorable characters and feels like an extended short story. Worth a read nevertheless.
    • 5/5
      It's a mistake to compare Buick 8 to Christine simply because the two stories are about cars. For one thing, the Buick isn't really a car... it's a metaphor on one level, and an alien artefact on another. Christine was full of murderous rage, both possessed by and possessing her owners - the Buick is never conclusively considered sentient.A further difference between Christine and Buick, is the ending - Christine is a fully formed story, with a beginning, lots of guts, and the perfect horror-story ending. Buick is a story about how stories unfold in real life (an increasing preoccupation in King's writing) and how they don't necessarily come tied up neatly with all four corners properly inside the wrapping. In this respect, Buick has more in common with later work, such as The Colorado Kid, and even Cell or the Dark Tower.Buick 8 is readable, thought-provoking and full of things that make you go 'dude, gross'. It's an important part of any King collection.
    • 4/5
      Usually I hate to see a story narrated by several different characters. It tends to complicate and confuse, but King pulls it off in Buick 8. I'm still trying to figure out the whole point to the story, but perhaps that is the point ... there is none. Not one of King's best, but an interesting read all the same.
    • 3/5
      While From a Buick 8 is neither as strong nor as compelling as King’s best books, it’s eerie that the central theme so closely paralleled my own thoughts in recent months. On the surface, this book is about a strange car that looks like a Buick, but only if you don’t examine it too closely, because then you’ll see that it is like no other car ever imagined. Abandoned at a western Pennsylvania gas station by its equally weird driver, the Buick is impounded by the State Police and kept out back of the barracks in Shed B, where it occasionally shows signs of life. Sometimes things come out of its trunk, and sometimes people go in.That’s the plot in a nutshell – your basic horror yarn. But this book is not about a Buick from another dimension, not really. It’s about the senselessness of death. It’s about how we, as human beings, try to impose some sort of pattern and meaning on our lives, when everything really is just chains of random events linked together. There are no easy answers to all these questions what we all ask, but which really come down to one thing: Why? We can’t even hope to understand death, no matter how much science we apply to it, no matter how many frustrated emotions we throw at it, not matter what we do.So, while FaB8 is not the intricate, suspenseful epic story that characterizes my favorite King books, there is a lot going on here – a lot more than in many of King’s more ordinary horror tales. Perhaps that’s why it feels so unsatisfying at the end – because that’s the point. The reader – like the character of young Ned, who lost his father in a traffic stop gone horrifically wrong – will never get any satisfying answers, and in the end, the reader – like Sandy Dearborn, the cop who has lived with the weird Buick for two decades – will just have to accept that.
    • 4/5
      This probably would have worked better as a short story rather than a full sized novel, but overall it was a good, quick read that held my interest.
    • 3/5
      A mysterious man with a beautiful car stops at a gas station in Pennsylvania. The man goes to the men's room and never returns. This leaves the Buick in the hands of the man who runs the gas station. The police acquire the auto and place it in a shed in the back lot of the station. From there, strange things happen. One officer enters the shed and never comes back out. The temperature changes in the shed, and then the officers all know that there will be another incident. There is one officer who loses his life being run over by a drunk. His son keeps coming to the station and doing maintenance stuff. He is trying to stay close to his father. I thought that this was an OK Stephen King novel. I am a huge fan and this was not a disappointment by any means. You felt the anguish of all involved.
    • 4/5
      I love this book, but it was not one of King's best works. A mysterious car that is a portal to another world spews out monsters that die immediately (because they can't breathe in our atmosphere) and also sucks people into the other world. Creepy, yes. Could it have been creepier? And improve the story? I'm not sure. It is still good enough to recommend.
    • 5/5
      I've read several evil-possessed-car stories by Stephen King. This one was by far the best.
    • 4/5
      Stephen King writes some of the best suspense stories today. H.P Lovecraft wrote some of the best "strange" stories of his day. Now, imagine if they went out for a few drinks and collaborated on a novel. That is what you have in "From a Buick 8".While not directly connected to the Dark Tower stories, the title vehicle is a car that probably came from next door to Roland's world. The car is a doorway to . . . somewhere else. What sometimes comes through bears no resemblance to anything as nice as what came through the Wardrobe from "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe".The excellent job of the narrators only adds to the flavor of the story.
    • 3/5
      Looking at the reviews, this one didn't seem to go down that well. It's pretty different to most of Stephen King's other stuff -- very little actually happens beyond some old guys telling a story -- but I did like it. It's a story about stories, I think, how they don't really end, and I'm actually surprised that it got as much of an ending as it did. I was half-expecting the Buick to sit there for a couple more generations.

      It's interesting that, I think, I identified most with Ned and Ned's father, yet we never hear anything from their points of view. We can't hear anything from the father's point of view. I feel like I'd feel the same draw of curiosity. Ned's father was possibly the most vivid character of the lot: the others, who just tried to get on with their lives, don't have that much to define them, so they blur into each other. But Curtis is pretty vivid.

      I really liked From A Buick 8, anyway. It's not perhaps the most satisfying read in the world, but the idea is fascinating and the narrative just kept on ticking, pulling me on through the story. If you need a hard and fast end, though, if you need answers? Definitely not the book for you.
    • 2/5
      This one took me a while to finish because I didn’t find it that compelling. This time instead of just starting out the tale on the stoop or in a gazebo, where one old timer talks to a young kid, he kept the whole story on the smoking bench. Each person told his or her part of the tale. I think because I read it in spurts, I had trouble remembering which character was which. I couldn’t keep Huddie and Eddie straight and the janitor, Arky, with the Swedish accent just bugged me. All I could think of was the Swedish Chef on the Muppet Show.The writing was fairly good although I think he kind of lost interest in the characters after a while.
    • 4/5
      Stephen King tends to get hammered in the press and by literati. He’s pulp, they say. He’s popular, they say. Nobody can be as productive (he publishes an average of two books per year) and still write quality, they say. I remember starting college in Boston in 1988, shortly after U2 released their huge Joshua Tree album. The established U2 fans rejected it outright as a ’sell out’. They couldn’t believe that their heroes sold out to ‘the man’ and became… popular. I think King gets painted with a similar brush.But the truth is, much of his writing resonates quite deeply. His work can be touching. It’s relatable, and has as much symbolism and depth as one chooses to see. Is everything he touches great? No. But as a rule, is it schlock? Absolutely not.I only discovered Stephen King as an adult. And over the last few years, I’ve been working through his catalog, kicking myself for not having given him a chance sooner. Fortunately, I have a whole lot to look forward to.From a Buick 8 was published in 2002. The actual writing took place in 1999 and was finished shortly before it was published, bracketing King’s well-publicized auto accident, which almost took his life. The story’s emotional focal point centers on the accidental death of a police officer, Curt Wilcox, who was killed by a drunk driver while investigating a truck’s mechanical problem on the side of the road. The exposition surrounding the officer’s death is detailed and pain-laden, and I couldn’t help but view my analysis of the story through the lens of King’s accident until I got to the author’s notes where King is swift to point out that the scenes of the accident were written before his own and were only moderately edited after. It was just coincidence, which brings us to the crux of King’s story. How much in life has a natural beginning and end? How many of the threads of our existence have a natural continuance or succession? How much happens that is explainable or simple coincidence?From a Buick 8 is equal parts science fiction, horror and Lovecraftian ode. Many readers anticipate that the eponymous Buick is a sort of “son of” Christine — the evil car gone amok in his 1983 novel (and movie), but this is not the case. Stephen King’s 1953 Buick Roadmaster has nothing to do with Stephen Kings’s 1958 Plymouth Fury.When the story begins, it’s 1979 and a stranger in a black jacket pulls into a gas station in rural PA. He asks for a fill up, indicates he needs no oil and heads to the john. 30 minutes pass, the strange man never returns, and leaves his Buick 8 behind. Local Police Troop D is brought in and the mystery is off and running. The car is like nothing anyone’s seen. It has no functional parts, sucks the heat out of the shed in which it sits, and belches horrible creatures from its trunk.From a Buick 8’s narrative thread focuses on Officer Wilcox’s son, Ned, several months after his father’s death in 2001. The story is a journey taken together by two characters: Ned, and the current Chief Commanding of Troop D, Sandy Dearborn. The journey is one that covers time rather than space as vignettes connect the past and present of Troop D’s interactions and investigations of the Buick over the years. It’s Ned’s journey of understanding and acceptance. It’s Sandy’s story of reconciliation with what the Buick means and the role it’s played in the collective past of Troop D.Sandy’s journey started years ago but doesn’t end until the present. Ned’s is happening in the narrative real time.There’s much sitting around and talking… telling stories, drinking and eating. One might make a symbolic connection to the Last Supper: Jesus (who is probably Sandy, but could also be Ned at times), surrounded by disciples (the other officers and caretakers), mostly younger but some the same age, who sit at his feet while he tells tales and waxes poetic. King even references that the storytelling group appears to look like a “little council of elders… surrounding the young fellow, singing him our warrior-songs of the past.”The real theme of From a Buick 8 is about learning how to let go. Let go of the past… Let go of blame… Let go of finding fault and reason and answers. Chief Sandy uses the imagery of a chain when discussing cause and effect. And his idea of a chain surrounds, ties, and binds the story and characters. For example, the gas station attendant who witnesses the man in the black coat leave the Buick is the same person who, years later, hits and kills Curtis Wilcox.Sandy considers: I didn’t know about reasons, only about chains — how they form themselves, link by link, out of nothing; how they knit themselves into the world. Sometimes you can grab a chain and use it to pull yourself out of a dark place. Mostly, though, I think you get wrapped up in them. Just caught, if you’re lucky. Fucking strangled, if you’re not.Is there simply cause and effect? Ned’s father’s death is suggestive of nothing beyond coincidence. The book sets the tone with the following quote from Sandy regarding Curtis’ death: If there was a God, there’d be a reason. If there was a God, there’d be some kind of thread running through it. But there isn’t. Not that I can see.This story didn’t have the emotional depth that makes King’s memorable work… well, memorable. Despite the incorporation of a dog who senses evil and a teenager whose father just died in a violent accident, it just didn’t touch me.The elements of horror are definitely creepy. There are some gross-out moments, but nothing flat-out scary. Lovecraftian ‘cosmic horror’ is a place King loves to go. But Lovecraft, for all of his bombast and grandeur, had a certain subtlety about his pacing and finales. Lovecraft is all about the glimpse… the merest horrified glimmer of ‘eldritch horrors’ that one sees in the periphery. King, for all of his own vivid visualizations, is not beyond that Lovecraftian subtlety.Sandy thinks back on the first time he entered the shed where Troop D kept the Buick: In the twenty-odd years that followed that day, he would go inside Shed B dozens of times, but never without the rest of that dark mental wave, never without the intuition of almost-glimpsed horrors, of abominations in the corner of the eye.And King always works one or two Lovecraft code words into his work. In this case, I didn’t catch a reference to ‘cyclopean’ structures, but I did see something that was “lit up a pallid, somehow eldritch yellow.”From a Buick 8 ends in very Lovecraftian fashion, which will disappoint people who desire a very conclusive and explosive finish. If you’ve read later-era Stephen King, you’ll relate the ending in From a Buick 8 to the big finale in Revival. It’s pretty dramatic, but King doesn’t give it to you: he leads you to the water and you have to drink it in. But he does this with a very clear purpose. Some things end and have a clear conclusion. And sometimes things just don’t. Ned searches for an answer to his father’s accidental death. Of course, there is no answer. Things happen. Sometimes bad things. Sandy, our own personal Pennsylvania Jesus, tells Ned at one point: Sometimes there’s nothing to learn, or no way to learn it, or no reason to even try. I saw a movie once where this fellow explained why he lit a candle in church even though he wasn’t a very good Catholic anymore. “You don’t fuck around with the infinite,” he said. Maybe that was the lesson…This is a good book. Not one of my favorites from King, but enjoyable and uncharacteristically short. If you’re a King fan you’ll enjoy it, though it may not be tremendously memorable. If you’re a Lovecraft fan, you’ll enjoy it as well.
    • 2/5
      Not one of his better books simply because it's too long. This was a novella stretched out to a novel, and should have been cut down to about half its length. It's a good story and was worth the read.It has a wonderful theme. The young boy, Ned, eventually learns that in life there may be no point to the story, there may not be a satisfactory conclusion that wraps up all the loose ends. Sometimes life leaves us with more questions than answers and we just have to learn to live with that.

    Book preview

    From a Buick 8 - Stephen King

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