… is, in my opinion that a car like that cannot be kept a secret for as long as the Troopers in the novel did. Someone’s bound to think “There’s money to be made here!”, and go for it.
Loyalty be damned.
As for the rest, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Christine , but I liked King’s characters and how he allowed them to narrate the story.
I also appreciate the fact that SK at least credited Bob Dylan’s From a Buick 6 within the tale.
I’m a King fan. Have been since Carrie, but I sometimes wonder if we buy the books just because they’re King creations?
Ditto your comments on the narration, but I don’t know about whether or not anyone would have let the secret spill; small, closeknit troop - maybe, maybe not.
As to buying stuff because it has King’s name on it; known brand. When I buy one of his books, I know there’s at least a halfway decent I’ll enjoy the read.
I finished it last night. I liked it better than The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and I liked the ambiguity…the mystery behind the car was never solved. I liked the puzzle analogy…You’re trying to fit a puzzle piece into a jigsaw puzzle, and no matter what you do, it won’t match up. Then you realize the back of the puzzle piece is red while the back of the puzzle you’re working on is green. Sometimes things don’t fit.
King very briefly mentioned Sept 11 at the beginning of the book. I would have liked it if he had spend a little bit more time incorporating such an earth shattering event in the book. Nothing overwhelming, maybe on Sept 11 the Buick had its biggest light show ever or something.
It was a story about what happened, but not why. Maybe it’s a set up for another book, like how Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne were linked, or how Derry is featured in Tommyknockers and Insomnia.
Did anyone notice the author photo of King? His beard is getting very gray. I know he’s in his 50s or so, but I thought maybe the accident had something to do with it.
I haven’t bought the book yet but I am dying to. The reviews have been pretty good considering reviewers usually slaughter King. One review for a different book, IIRC, said something along the line of “King could publish his groecery list and have a best seller. Oh, wait, he did and this is it.”
I read “Everythings Eventual” and thought it was some of Kings best work yet and the reviewers seemed to agree. So I am looking forward to this book.
ivyLass,
King has a long history of alluding to different stories and characters in different books. I think it is pretty cool because if you haven’t read the other stories it doesn’t matter but if you have read the bulk of his work you can see little lines like a spiderweb crisscrossing his work.
Also, King is getting old and he is also slowly going blind due to macular degineration.
King himself has cited the repetition of a haunted car at the center of both Buick 8 and Christine as one of the reasons for hanging it up as a published writer.
This one was one of his better books, possibly the best of the latter half of his career. I loved how there was no resolution in the story, and no explanation.
This was a book about faith, and September 11th, and his own accident, without ever really mentioning any of those things.
He said in the author’s note that this was started before his accident- I wonder what in the book was pre accident and what was post accident.
I haven’t read the book yet, but my husband bought it for me last week, so I plan to. ANd to answer your question, my husband buys me King’s new books as soon as they come out simply because they are “King creations”. Good thing that I pretty much love all of his books.
I’m in the middle of it right now, and I must confess I’m underwhelmed. OK, we have a car–or more accurately, something that resembles a car–that functions as a gateway to another dimension. And then what? There’s no plot, no narrative structure, just one damned thing after another. reading the book, one sense that King himself has no idea what the book is about.
Your question is answered, sort of, in this article, specifically at the top of the second page:
I’m very much looking forward to reading this book myself. I bought it a couple weeks ago, but I’m currently reading Robert McCammon’s excellent (so far, anyway) new novel Speaks the Nightbird and I want to finish that first. From a Buick 8 is next on the list.
I’ve been reading King since I was 11 or so… his voice is a comfortable one to me and I know that I’m almost guaranteed a good read with one of his books, as I’ve rarely been disappointed by him. It’s not so much the “brand name,” but his style that I’m comfortable with and his stories that I enjoy. As long as he keeps publishing books, I’ll probably keep reading them.
Whoever his proofreader is, he or she is doing a horrible job. The last couple Stephen King novels have been full of typos, duplications, and other easy-to-correct errors. Slacker proofreader! It irks me.
I’m only a couple of chapters into the book thus far. It’s not so bad.
