I’m glad this thread came up, I’m half way through almost and this really drags, this is a boring book. I think I’m gonna dig ‘‘Christine’’ out and re-read instead.
I really liked this book. It really sucked me in and had me hanging on until the end. I really like King when he is subtle, and appreciate his later work more than his earlier stuff.
Of course, I really liked Insommnia too, and most people thought that was a snooze-fest.
You’re right, Doc! :smack: Man, my eyesight is really failing me–I checked the title before I posted just so as to avoid really a stupid error, like this! And thanks for the link!
How ironic. 
I really need to re-read Insomnia, I remember enjoying it but I don’t really recall why. If it’s much like Buick 8, it’s probably good enough to be worth another read.
Why in God’s name would I resurect a thread that’s a year old?
Because I finally read the book in question, silly! Strangely enough, most of what I wanted to say was posted by Avalonian a year ago. I liked the book quite a bit, although of King’s more recent work, That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French, scared the shit out of me like nothing he’s written before or since, so I guess Buick 8 couldn’t be called my “favorite” recent King story. Does anyone else have any new thoughts on this book?
Yeah. It inspired me to start a thread about boring Stephen King books.
From my OP:
And I liked Insomnia. The book, not actual insomnia, which I have right now, which is why I’m posting at 2:00 in the morning. 
Where’s my copy of From a Buick 8?
Yes! That thing’s one of the most chilling stories he’s ever written. Beautifully rendered, too.
Spoilers
I “read” the book on audio (unabridged – I have a helluva long commute). To tell the truth, I liked it, overall.
I’m unimpressed by claims of writing a book with an “unsolved” mystery – hell, that’s easy to do. Anybody can write a moody mystery if he doesn’t have to tie up all the loose ends at the conclusion. Writing a consistent and satisfying mystery without copping out is hard.
The gross-out parts didn’t bother me, either. Heck, King’s been yanking that string all along. So has Spielberg.
What did bother me – as a science fiction fan – was his instant equating with “alien = bad”, and expecting us to go along with the ride. This isn’t the only time King does it, of course, but here he expects the audience to go along with it on zero evidence – Aliens is bad ‘cause they’re gross. People lace into the Big Bad Alien at the end because it’s gross, and because their dog attacks it. Would you react that way if your dog attacked, say, a handicapped person from another country? No way I’m gettin’ dragged into lynching a visitor.
There’s also another odd element in the book – at one point the older cop gets annoyed with the rookie for just wanting to know about the Buick and the things it brings up, and not the stories he has to tell about the other policemen and their lives. I can’t help thinking that it’s King talking to his audience, berating him for wanting the horror stories and not the human-interest stuff. It’s like those UFO “contactees” or religious mystics who complain about the people who only want to heart about the supernatural aspects of their experience, and not about what they feel is the real message that the supernatural is only supposed to validate. But in context, it doesn’t read true – if Godzilla attacked your city, you’d want to hear about what he did and all about him, not about the domestic affairs of the guys who fought him.
I got a different impression from that segment. King was going for the exact thing that you were saying. The characters instantly attack the alien because it’s strange different and scares the crap out of them. At the end of the attack they figure out that they killed a sentient being. And that they were the monsters of the encounter.
They do indeed feel remorse afterwards, and conclude that they killed a rational being, but I still get the impression that King approved, and that they’d do it again, given the chance. Has there ever been a sympathetic alien in a King novel? Dreamcatcher, Tommyknockers…
I made myself go all the way through the book, and didn’t regret it in the end. Well, not really. It wasn’t the finest King I’ve read, but it wasn’t the worst book I’ve ever read, either. I found myself wishing he’d made more of the more dramatic events, like the killing of the sentient alien and such, but there’s something about his writing that has always left me feeling like a foreigner without the local knowledge to tell whether he was writing authentic dialogue or not.
I think the best King I have ever read, or what comes most immediately to mind anyway, is the story Everything’s Eventual, from the anthology of the same name. Short (by his standards), beautifully composed, elegant, tense, dramatic and perfectly finished off.
I really liked it, too: I saw it as an extended meditation on what SMART people do in a horror novel. No, they don’t go down into the basement alone; no, they DON’T read the book of demon-summoning spells aloud. They DON’T experiment with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. They lock the alien shit up and throw away the key.
Maybe it was a little boring, but I was very entertained by it, and recommend it to all Call of Cthulhu fans :).
Daniel
I recently read this on an airplane. It wasn’t the worst Stephen King book I’ve ever read, but I thought it was pretty boring, overall, and the ending fell completely flat. The worst of it was the basic idea had some potential, but I didn’t think it was well executed.
I don’t really have anythign to add but to ask why there is no preview box when you mouse over this thread. Is it because of the quotation marks? Sorry for the hijack.
I just wanted to pop in and add my voice to the crowd that liked it. I’d stopped reading King in recent years prefering to stick with my tattered copies of The Stand and It. But, for reasons I can’t recalled, I picked up Buick and Everything’s Eventual when they came out (I forget which came which and am at work so can’t check) I loved them both, especially Buick. It was a little different then the usual King, but I felt for the better. And I enjoyed the message I got out of it. The mystery isn’t whether or not the Buick is eating the men. The mystery is why it’s here, who left it and what, exactly is on the other side? Is is merely another dimension, another planet, what? And that never is resolved. It’s just this strange, miraculous thing, destined to forever be a mystery with no answer. I also found the storytelling and secondary themes well crafted and woven in with the main story nicely.
All in all, it’s been added to my favorites shelf. In fact, I think I’ll go reread it when I get home.
Is it really important that we concern ourselves with the public image of space aliens?
I had an interesting experience reading “From a Buick 8” in that I read it right after reading a horrible John Grisham novel, and thought, “Gosh, this was a pretty decent novel.” Compared to Grisham, how could it not be?
Then I happened to pick up “The Dead Zone” and re-read it for the first time in 15 years. Now, THAT was a great novel. Just head and shoulders above his recent work. It makes “From A Buick 8” look like a Babysitters Club book.