From a Buick 8

Rating:
Summary: Sometimes the horror of the unknown is that it stays unknown
Review: Just because there is a car, or at least something that looks like a car, on the cover and in the story Stephen King tells in his latest novel, "From a Buick 8," is no reason to think this is "Christine" revisited. This is not a novel about a possessed car and half the fun is trying to speculate along with the book's characters as to what exactly is that thing in Shed B. The strongest similarity between the two novels is actually the switch from first person to third person narrative, although this new novel does that with much more frequency that the other work, which was divided like Gaul into three parts. King has announced he is in the final stages of cleaning out his literary cupboard and it is fairly clear that the blaze of glory he intends to go out on and write "fini" to his career is going to be the three volumes ending his epic of Roland of Gilead and the Dark Tower. So I did not start reading "From a Buick 8" expecting something on a par with "The Stand" and "It." I was hoping for something more akin to "The Dead Zone," and that is closer to the mark in terms of where this novel stands in the King oeuvre.

The idea that the greatest horror of all is the unknown is not exactly a new one and King has explored it before, albeit to lesser degrees than he does in this novel. The Pennsylvania Troopers of Troop D are telling high school senior Ned Wilcox the story of the mysterious Buick in Shed B. Ned's father was a trooper who was killed by a drunk driver and the boy has been hanging around the Troop, learning dispatch codes and such, in an obvious effort to connect with his dead father. As the Troopers take turns telling the story they kept warning young Ned that there is not going to be a punch line; as much as the boy wants answers, they just are not going to be forthcoming, get used to it, kid. Even as the story sticks to this line through the final downward path of the novel you find yourself wondering how far will King go. Will he actually come clean and resolve the mystery he has been developing, will he stick to his guns and show that sometimes there are no answers to the big questions, or will he find a middle ground that provides some inadequate explanation that preserves the uncertainty that is the story's compelling hook? Usually my disappointment in a Stephen King novel comes when the ending does not live up to the set up, and while it might simply be a case of lowered expectations this time around, I think he does manage to have his cake and eat it too at the end of this one. The ending is satisfying, even if it is not as memorable as what he has provided on occasion.

I heard tell that as he was recovering from his own close encounter of the worst kind with a motor vehicle King was tooling around Western Pennsylvania in the company of State Troopers. The geographical setting of the novel does not seem distinct from King's beloved Maine, but he does seem to capture the authenticity of police work for State Troopers (who are not exactly high up on the list of law enforcement types who are the subject of fictional narratives). You get the feeling that most of the stories that make their way into "From a Buick 8" were told to King while he was in the company of those real Troopers, and the Author's note in the back of the book confirms as much. This speaks to what has always been the backbone of King's work, which is not so much his ability to come up with nightmares a plenty, but rather how he could consistently convince us that his horror stories and tales of terror are taking place in the real world in which we live. Laurell K. Hamilton has come up with some horrific conclusions for several of her Anita Blake novels, but her alternative reality would never be confused with the real world. King simply tapped into our cultural consciousness and served as our conduit to what was out there on the other side. "From a Buick 8" is simply the latest reminder of that particular truth.

Rating:
Summary: End of the road? Maybe its time.
Review: I fell in love with Stephen King when I was 10 and picked up a copy of Carrie. I've been reading his books ever since so it's with sadness that I have to say that this is one of the weakest books he's ever written. King has announced that he's retiring. I was sorry to hear this but haaving read Buick I think it may be time for him to hang it up. This book is not scary so it fails. A romance book is supposed to be about love. A mystery has to have a central puzzle. A horror book is suppose to have at least one good really good scare in it. Buick 8 doesn't live up to it's genre.

Buick is about a car from another world and the 20 years it spends sitting in a police barracks garage. Occasionally it spits out monsters and occasionally it eats people but that's about it. Buick would've been a superior book if King has either skipped the supernatural and wrote a Shawshank type story or if he'd allowed the Buick to do more. We never learn the who, why or where of this car and the ending reads like King just got bored. Lump this in with King's other unsatisfying efforts like Dreamcatcher, Hearts in Atlantis, Bag of Bones,Tom Gordon, and Rose Madder.

Rating:
Summary: Boring - doesn't go anywhere
Review: Not a great book - I like a lot of King's works, but this one is pretty bad. The idea of the story is okay, but it just doesn't go anywhere - very boring reading. Not recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A Thriller with a Scientific Approach
Review: Lately I've read each new Stephen King book with apprehension, not knowing what each will bring. My apprehension was unfounded with this intriguing thriller that combines the threads of human lives with the investigation of a mysterious phenomenon.

We meet teenage Ned Wilcox at the very beginning of the story. His father was the late Curtis Wilcox, a state highway trooper with Troop D of the Pennsylvania State Patrol. Ned helps around the barracks, cleaning, sweeping, and talking with the troopers. We immediately identify with Ned, seeing his activities at the barracks as one way of connecting with his lost father, killed in the line of duty. Ned becomes so much a part of the troop that the troop lets him in on a secret they have kept for 20 years; a mysterious, chilling secret.

One day, a long time ago, a man in an overcoat stopped at a gas station and asked the attendant to fill the car with gas. The man disappeared around the corner of the gas station to the back where the restrooms are. A long time after filling the car up the attendant realized the man had not come back from the back of the gas station, and went looking for him. The man was no where to be found, and the attendant called the highway patrol.

One of the two troopers responding to the call was rookie Curtis Wilcox. Their investigation of the car was anything but routine. The car's engine had many of the correct components, but they were not connected to each other. The configuration of the engine was such that there was no way the car could ever have run. The state highway patrol decides to impound the car. During the initial investigation of the car, Curtis's partner disappears, further compounding the mystery of the car.

Curtis Wilcox becomes obsessed with investigating the mysterious car. Soon strange things begin happening; mysterious brilliant flashing lights that accompany electronic disturbances; things come from the trunk; things left in the car disappear from their cage. There is something very wrong with this car.

Stephen King has written many horror novels where the villain is a werewolf, a vampire, a spirit, or even Satan. In this novel we never meet the real villain, and we try to understand the nature of that villain from the artifact that the villain created. The car itself is not evil, but what it does is evil, and perhaps where it comes from we might perceive as evil. The troopers treat the car scientifically, investigating the car as methodically as they can. They form theories and test their theories. They record their observations as would any scientist. They are also careful and cautious with their discovery, because they have found that bad things can happen to the unwary.

The story of the investigation of the car is told from multiple viewpoints, and in the past and the present; an extended story told to Ned Wilcox about the passion his father had for investigating the car, a passion that Ned was unaware of even as he neared adulthood. The story telling can be a bit confusing if you lose focus on the story, but keeping track of the multiple main characters and their perspective is rewarding to the reader.

I liken the story-telling style of this novel to "Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke. In that novel Clarke tells the story of humans investigating an alien ship that has entered our solar system. There is speculation as to why the ship is there, where it is going, and the nature of the ship's creators. The story is told in a scientific way that in many respects is boring because there is no "Alien" hiding around the corner, but is still intriguing because these investigators are in a totally unique situation, and they deal with it as best they can. King's approach to this story is similar as he centers the story on a place that most of us would consider an unlikely location for a suspense, thriller or horror novel, a highway patrol barracks. Yet, we find the scientific approach of these officers to be plausible.

The story has its slow moments, but I remained intrigued once King intimated the nature of the car. By the last 50 pages I found myself glued to the book to see what was going to happen. This book will not please Stephen King fans expecting a ghost story or something with fangs. For fans with eclectic tastes that run into science fiction, particularly if you enjoyed Arthur C. Clarke's "Rama" books, this novel is a good read. Fans expecting a scaly claw grabbing a victim by the throat and pulling the victim into the car will be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: An element of horror in everyday life
Review: This newest effort by Stephen King is something that to my knowledge he's never tried before. He's taken something that comes from the deepest recesses of his own mind - in this case something that looks like an old Buick (but knowing Stephen King it's anything but that) - and incorporated it into the daily lives of a novel's main characters.

In this case the main characters are the members of a Pennsylvania State Police barracks. One day, years ago, one of the officers responds to a call about an abandoned car. At least that's what it starts out as, but since we're dealing with a Stephen King novel we know from the get-go that it's not a car - and it probably wasn't abandoned either; rather, it was deliberately left at the gas station where it was "found".

The "car" gets towed to the barracks and gets stored in a shed, where it quickly becomes apparent that it's more than just a car - but exactly what it is isn't really made clear; it looks like King wants to leave the reader with a little mystery in the story.

He then tries to integrate the "Buick" and its actions into the daily lives of these troopers. They run various experiments in an attempt to discover exactly what this thing in their garage is. They don't come up with any definitive answers, but along the way a lot of weird things happen - and I won't spoil anything for the reader by going into detail about them.

The troopers can't be sure what this thing is, but they'd rather keep it under lock and key in their shed than let it loose on an unsuspecting world (now there's a tired old cliche if ever I've heard one!), so that's exactly what they do. And so over the next several years, in between the usual things that happen to state troopers, they keep the "Buick" confined to the shed and watch what it does with something more than a dispassionate eye.

All this doesn't mean that the book isn't as scary as King's best work. It's plenty scary - and the fact that King doesn't resolve exactly what the "Buick" actually is makes it even scarier.

This is definitely a worthy addition to the canon.

Rating:
Summary: not "classic King" burger but more like an acquired taste
Review: Bought this on a whim in a used book store, not planning or thinking of Stephen King at all since I thought I had "out-grown" his fiction (last time I read his stuff was 7 years ago and before that not since high-school when I devoured every King book I could find at the time). Something about the sparkling car on the book's cover caught my eye.

I quickly found it to be an easy read and enjoyed seeing King grow as a writer. It's got the best of King's writing style (his panache for catch phrases and his campfire "gather-round-I'm-gonna-tell-you-a-good-yarn" energy) but the narrative structure and themes in the work seemed more mature than I have seen in the past. Basically we learn the events surrounding a boy's father's death and the mysterious Buick 8 car through a series of flashbacks, all told to the boy in a span of a few hours from a group of the town's older generation, as they stand outside the local Sheriff's building, drinking and eating sandwiches. This setting allows King to combine his love for oral tradition of story-telling and lets him touch on several themes of most striking of which, the need for humans to make a story of everything, to make narrative chain's of unrelated events, to give answer to the world mysteries, which are ultimately sometimes unanswerable. Something King has always touched on but more profoundly here which is due to King's fairly recent car accident.

There's a lot going on in this book if you give yourself to think about it a bit, and while not a rollercoster-ride as compared to other action-packed King books, I nevertheless found it to be an engaging read, sharing the boy's need to discover and give meaning to the past events. Not your typical King burger, but more like a hot turkey dinner with a good cup of red wine, maybe not as tasty but somehow more satisfying in the end.

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Summary: CREEPY... (but full of beauty)
Review: I've read a lot by Stephen King of late. Books like The Green Mile, Bag of Bones and Desperation have made me appreciate his depth and skill as a writer--the Dark Tower series has blown me away. Now...along comes From a Buick 8. It, like the enigmatic "vehicle" mentioned in its title, is truly unique.

Here we have the powerful sense of camaraderie common to his greatest novels and novellas. The bond between the group of law officers in this book is strongly reminiscent of that between the prisoners in Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption and the guards in the Green Mile. King has done well with ensemble groups of characters--this book is no exception.

From a Buick 8 also does very well in making each character of the ensemble "deep." There are no stock characters here. In this sense, this book approaches the emotional heights of Desperation and the last couple of Dark Tower books.

From a Buick 8 is genuinely creepy without becoming overly grotesque. This is not necessarily always a plus when it comes to books from the "horror" genre, but it works to great effect in this story. I was reading this book while camping in the wilderness. The woods seemed to make a little more noise of the suspicious variety if I read some right before bed.

There is also a scene recounting a father's feelings towards his son that holds forth a deep truth. It should not be missed or simply passed over.

From a Buick 8 is not, in my opinion, King's best work--but it is still darn good. He continues to impress me as a writer growing in skill and importance as he ages. There are rumors that he may retire after the publication of the final Dark Tower books.

If this book is any indication of what might still be over the horizon of his imagination, I sure hope these rumors don't prove true.

Rating:
Summary: Not King's Best Work
Review: I listened to the unabridged audiobook version of this book and was not terribly impressed. But it did have enough sprinkling of classic King horror elements to keep me interested enough to finish the book.

Let's start with the negatives. To me, this novel felt a lot like a short story that had been drawn out with filler until it was long enough to be a novel. There were too many similar characters being developed, many of which were named and I could not be bothered to remember enough about their story to distinguish between anyone but the four or so main ones. Even when the lesser characters became the narrator of the story for a short while, to me they were still just one of a muddled group of not important State Troopers.

The biggest negative, in my mind, was with the main reader of this audiobook. His reading was extremely dry and ruined the story for me in several places. I think he may have been attempting to act, but to me the emphasis was unnaturally placed and sounded super-fake. I did enjoy the woman reader and most of the other male readers.

As for positives, the great thing about this book is that King did not fail to present us with what the majority of his readers really want: wierd and horrible things that we could not have imagined before. Also I liked the forshadowing of future wierd and horrible things that were going to happen later in the novel. This was all that kept me going through some of the duller plot areas, especially in the beginning. I was not going to stop listening then and miss out on this promised future wierd and horrible thing.

All in all it is worthwhile listening (or reading) this book for true King fans. Like the Buick 8, I think King is winding down these days. Faithful readers have to take what they can get, and I think the classic King horror elements of this book make it worth the time spent slogging through the slower parts at the beginning.

Rating:
Summary: better than average
Review: This book combines most of SK's strengths and manages to avoid his occasional weaknesses. It's a fairly short read; 400 pages in paperback, or about 3 hours all told.

The writing is lyrical, and the story is told from alternating POV's of various characters (think Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying").

The characterization is good; the group that is Troop D comes across as an authentic group of people. Some of the individual characters are a bit cliched (espically Dearborn--any Dark Tower fans recognize the name?). However, the group as a whole is more realisitic, which works, because as far as characters go, it seems the whole Troop is the centeral character, rather than it's members.
This is not a typical horror story; as one of the editoral reviews noted, there really isn't anything akin to an active menace; just a car, that occasionally takes things to or brings things from somewhere else. It doesn't seem to really be an active evil, just a teleporter that kicks up now and then. The fact it results in some death and unpleasentness is incidental, although very relevant to the story.

It's really a story of how people deal with the unknown when it intrudes--this is clear from some of the specific scenes, such as when the humanoid-ish thing is brought over and killed.

It's also a story about interpersonal interaction, which almost all writing is; how the people handle that active unknown within thier community and how the balance it with the other normal aspects of thier community. It's also about a boy coming to terms with his loss through using the unknown as a catharsis.

All in all it's an interesting read, both for some of it's concepts, and for it's storytelling. It's also just plain fun, which is always nice.

Rating:
Summary: Little plot and lots of filler. In a word: Boring
Review: This has to be one of the dumbest books ever written, and also one of the most boring. I'm listening to the audio version and I can barely get through it. There is such little action--and so much unnecessary character development--that you want to curl up and go to sleep.