Rating: 
Summary: good king...not great
Review: A quick-read page-turner bound to satisfy most King fans.
With all the focus on the "monster" I did think some of the characters fell off into the background, including Ned. Great picture of rural Pennsylvania, and police procedures in general. King displays his usual fine skill at ratcheting up the tension and the thrills as the novel moves along, although I have to confess the disections-by-cop seemed a bit hard to accept. All in all a good weekend-passing read.
Rating: 
Summary: Better than most other authors, but not one of SK's best
Review: The book starts off good, and the 1st Person Now/3rd Person Then (it's narrated in flashbacks) narration helps it move along. However, the more they concentrate on the 'Now', the less interesting it gets. The main Narrator (Sandy) tells us that he's getting angry at his main audience (Ned), but it rings hollow, because the typical reader will identify with Ned's point of view way more than it will Sandy's.
The finale also betrays its source; without getting into too much detail/spoilers, the moral of the story is supposed to be 'You can't always learn the truth' -- but then in the finale we do get definitive answers to a couple of questions that while we may have believed to be true, we had no way of knowing for sure.
There will be inevitable comparisons to Christine, but I think they're pointless. The real comparison will be with The Mist.
To summarize, yeah, it was ok, but nothing that special. If this is indeed SK's final non-Dark Tower novel, then it's not the best note to end on.
Rating:
Summary: Going Out On Top
Review: Stephen King is rumbling again in the press that he's going to stop publishing after the DARK TOWER series concludes. I understand that he doesn't want to overstay his welcome on the literary scene, but if he still has within him the capability to write something as compelling as FROM A BUICK 8, then I think leaving the scene now is just kind of sad. As a voracious reader of all types of fiction, I know my own world will seem a little smaller once the King has left the building.That said, definitely pick up FROM A BUICK 8 as a chance to see a great writer spin a terrific tale -- perhaps one of the last he intends to share with us. And be aware going in that a tale is exactly what this book is. Not a lot "happens" over the course of the book's 350 pages, but at no point does King's voice ever waver. That voice is like clear and simple music in this book, and it will keep the reader turning pages right up there with the best of King's work. Something really interesting happened to King's writing a few years back (starting, probably, with DESPERATION and blossoming in his masterpiece, BAG OF BONES): he became somehow calmer, more centered, less concerned with effect and more concerned with texture. FROM A BUICK 8 is an excellent example of a fairly simple story elevated by the abilities of its author to provide texture and nuance and graceful contemplation to one of the oldest forms of entertainment: simply telling a story. Steve, I'll miss you. The reading world in general will miss you. But thanks for this great campfire story, and all the great campfire stories that came before it. Even when you aggravated the heck out of me (everyone knows which books I'm talking about), you still kept me reading far into so many wonderful nights.
Rating:
Summary: An entertaining ride
Review: Once again Mr King has managed to chill us all with this easy paced novel of a rather suspicious car which arrives quite unceremoniously and "lives" out its "life" in a shed at the back of a local police authority. There is weaves its spell over the police officers who work there, and this tale is told to the teenage son of one of these officers, now deceased. This is a chilling book rather than terrifying. Mr King takes great care to show how the car has woven its spell, but that the people involved still manage to have what passed for normal every day lives. The wonderful part of this book is in the detail - you can really see the car which is not quite right, and you can imagine the world that it opens a door to. The visitors that come from that world occasionally keep up the interest and the "horror" aspect. But ultimately it is a tale of how we are all drawn to things that we know in our rational selves that we should leave well enough alone, and it is done very, very well.
Rating: 
Summary: The King Does It Again...
Review: The King Of This Genre Does It Again In, "From A Buick 8." Nonstop action, page turning intrigue, and spine-tingling suspense. A Book You Won't Want To Miss.
Rating: 
Summary: A SNOOZE FEST!!
Review: I have read this book a couple of month's ago. It was in Holland already published.
I picked it up after the very, in my opinion, poor black house and wanted it to be a wonderfull book....I'm sorry....it isn't!
The story lacks tension and I found it to be a bit of a bore.
It didn't " come alive " for me, the characters didn't do anything for me...quite frankly...I just didn't care for them.
And the story just went on, and on, and on..a complete let down. It's not that I dislike books who builds up ,( i finished " the emperor of ocean park" Great book!!) but this just isn't going anywhere.
I wrote it before, no more king for me, alas.
Rating:
Summary: The King Remains on Top!
Review: People have already begun chastising Stephen King because From A Buick 8 is about a strange car. He actually tangled the possessed-car storyline with Christine and so people think he has begun repeating himself. Those people have not read From A Buick 8, because it is a truly original work that displays some of King's best writing, and more! Ned Wilcox has grown up without a father. You see, his father was a trooper who got killed while on the job. Ned is now 18 and kind of lost in his life. So he gets a job at the very same station his father worked at before his death. It is here that Ned will discover what Troop D has kept hidden in Shed B since the late seventies; an old buick that is everything but. As Ned listens to Sandy (the chief) tell the story of the old Buick (with the help of a few other troopers), he will soon learn that appearences are, more often than not, highly misleading. But most importantly, he will finally be able to learn about his father and about the things he did before his death. Ned will finally be able to start the grieving process now that he knows who his father really was. The car itself isn't haunted or possessed. It is just... weird. It looks real but isn't. It keeps silent most of the time, but then sometimes wakes up to cause havoc. It makes things disappear and makes monstrous things appear. The book is so well written that it practically reads itself. Written in the first person, reading this book is like listening to someone tell a great tale while sitting around a campfire on warm summer night. From the very first page, you get lost into the story. First thing you'll know, you'll be reading the very last page, something you'll do with regret because this is one story you won't want to see end. The book is often funny, touching, very scary and extremely suspenseful. This is Stephen King at his best. Take Bag of Bones, mix it with a little bit of IT and a little of The Dark Tower books and what you'll get is something resembling From a Buick 8. It's a shame that King is thinking of retiring when he is writing the best stuff of his career!
Rating:
Summary: YUCK!
Review: Yet another piece of impish immmature drivel from the master of bad grammer. I would have thought by now the man would have learned the basics of sentence structure and grammer. Since he has a great following, he must hold some quality for the masses which intices them to buy his books. It is obviously neither great writing nor flawless logic as this book demonstrates once again.
Rating:
Summary: A peephole into the Other
Review: If, as King has declared, this will be his last published novel (a declaration to which the response of his fans is bound to be, "Come on, Stephen, tell us another one!"), then he is going out on a pretty high note. Not with one of his half-dozen classics, but with a memorable and satisfying finish. In his book length study of horror fiction, _Danse Macabre_, King wrote that he wanted to instill horror in his readers, and if he couldn't manage that, he'd go for terror, and if he couldn't manage that, he'd try for shock, and if he couldn't manage that, he'd settle for grossing them out. In _From a Buick 8_, he pulls out each of those stops at one point or another. But this time out, true horror occupies the story's center: the absolutely other, the absolutely alien, the sense of being confronted with the indescribable. Somehow the book's wise and weary cops manage to communicate the author's conviction that in the final analysis, all special effects and spooky stories aside, that's what ordinary life has always confronted us with. The book is nothing like _Christine_. If King is repeating himself this time (and he isn't), what he's repeating is the marvelous novelette "The Mist". In that story, the Other surrounded the world and closed in on it. In this one, our own world surrounds a pinpoint of the uncanny: the Buick that's not a Buick in the state troopers' Shed B. The unBuick is only a peephole into the Other, but a peephole is all that's required to rip apart the scaffolding of reality. The troop's mascot, Mister Dillon, whimpers in fear when the peephole periodically widens, yet scratches to get into its shed. The Buick is demonic, but whatever is demonic, as Rudolf Otto taught us, is also "holy" - it induces not just a mysterium tremendum but also a mysterium fascinans. And the troopers, in their varying degrees, experience both of the effects that Mr. Dillon feels. Entwined with the horror story is an appreciative study of life in a rural Staties' barracks, of the matter-of-fact heroism of the men who stand in the thin grey line, shielding John Q Public from all the disruptions of his comfortable order that he would rather not know about, be they alien or earthly. What would be a solid police procedural if only any of the police procedures applied. But in the case of the car with the crocodile smile, none of them do.
Rating:
Summary: Strong King entry
Review: In 1970, a car stops at a gas station in the small western Pennsylvania town of Statler. The driver asks the attendant to fill up before he disappears in the vicinity of the bathroom. When the customer fails to return, the attendant calls the state troopers. Troop D company impounds the vehicle and take it to shed B as they realize that this car is dangerous and not of this world. In 2001, a drunk driver kills Trooper Curt Wilco. His son Ned starts hanging around D Troop and Curt's peers take care of him. It's only a matter of time before he sees the 1957 Buick in Shed B. The troopers all take turns telling the high school senior what the car has done over the years including causing one trooper to disappear. It periodically gives off a weird light show and from time to time it regurgitates strange objects and life forms. Ned becomes caught up in the story as deeply as his father was enthralled by the car. It is always amazing how Stephen king can take an ordinary object like a car and twist it into such a frightening terror that readers will never be able to forget it. The '57 Buick is more than just a car, but what it is become is the subject of reader imagination. The structure of FROM A BUICK 8 is absorbing as each trooper tells Ned about his dealings with "the car" leading the audience to think twice before entering a strange vehicle. Harriet Klausner
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