OK, it’s a Stephen King book and it’s about a supernatural car. I suppose comparisons to Christine are inevitable. But really, is it so inconceivable that an author can write two book centering around cars and they be two completely different books?
From a Buick 8 proves the point, for me. As far as I’m concerned, it couldn’t be more different from Christine, despite the spooky car angle they both share. Christine isn’t one of my favorite King books, really, though it’s not one of his worst either. It’s a pretty straight horror story, well-told but fairly typical of King and the genre in general. Nigh-invulnerable (SPOON!) killer car goes after a bunch of kids… Friday the 13th for the automotive set, gotcha.
From a Buick 8 has very little in common with Christine, though, other than an old car with supernatural overtones. Buick 8 is so much more about buildup and characterization. It’s a story about people, and as a story which is told from the perspective of 5 or 6 different narrators (very convincingly, I might add), it’s also a story about storytelling.
It’s a story in which very little actually happens. There are very few cataclysmic events or shocking revelations. The spooky car in Buick 8 never goes on a rampage or kills a bunch of people in nasty ways (at least, you’re never sure that it does). It spends 95% of the story in a shed behind a rural police station, throwing off the occasional light show and spitting out the occasional oddity… and at least one monster. But the car itself does very little.
Buick 8 is a mystery, but not in the Agatha Christie sense of the word, because it’s not all wrapped up in a neat little bow at the end. It’s a book that observes that there are very few concrete answers in life, especially for the “big stuff.” It’s a story about how even the strangest events get incorporated into our everyday lives. We deal with them, we do what we have to, and we move on. It’s not always the most dramatic or the most satisfying, but it’s the way things are.
The message of the book seemed (to me) to be encapsulated near the end, when Sandy observes this: “The world rarely finishes its conversations.” It’s a truth that King himself seemed to understand when writing the book, something absent from much of his earlier work.
From a Buick 8 is worlds different from Christine, literally and figuratively. It’s a far much more mature book, and it shows King’s growth as a writer more clearly than anything other the the Dark Tower series. It deserves to be noticed as the work of a mature writer, independent of his previous work.