Duma Key

Duma Key is a novel by American writer Stephen King published on January 22, 2008, by Scribner. The book reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller List. It is King's first novel to be set in Florida, as well as the first to be set in Minnesota. The dust jacket features holographic lettering. Plot Edgar Freemantle, a wealthy Minnesotan building contractor, barely survives a severe worksite accident wherein his truck is crushed by a crane. Edgar loses his right arm while suffering severe head injuries impairing his speech, vision, and memory. During his long recovery, he experiences suicidal thoughts and violent, abusive mood swings, spurring his wife to file for divorce. On the advice of his psychologist, Dr. Kamen, Edgar relocates southward and rents a beach house on the island of Duma Key, off the Florida coast. Kamen further advises Edgar to rekindle his onetime sketching hobby as a restorative. Edgar retains local college student Jack Cantori as a part-time personal assistant. Soon after, he meets and befriends the island's other full-time residents, octogenarian heiress Elizabeth Eastlake (sufferer of final-stage dementia, whose family trust owns most of the island) and her live-in attendant, Jerome Wireman, himself a once-gifted attorney whose wife and daughter's tragic deaths led him to (unsuccessfully) attempt suicide via gunshot wound. Decades-old paranormal phenomena revisit Duma Key as Edgar delves obsessively into his art, lapsing into a semi-conscious haze; his artwork captures psychic visions, revealing his ex-wife's affair, his friend's suicidal depression and his younger daughter Ilse's fleeting marital engagement. Later, Edgar uses his newfound artistic powers to manipulate the outside world, healing Jerome's degenerating neurological condition and suffocating a child murderer in his jail cell. When Ilse visits the island, she and Edgar drive to a disused, overgrown area where colors seem unnaturally vivid, and Ilse becomes violently ill. Elizabeth warns Edgar that Duma Key "has never been a lucky place for daughters" and that his paintings must be sold to multiple geographically distant buyers, lest their otherworldly power grow too concentrated or dangerous.