In Stephen King's From a Buick 8, a group of Pennsylvania
State Troopers find, and keep secret, the Buick 8, a "car" that is a portal
between our world and some world far more horrid. Animals and occasionally
people disappear around the Buick 8 and every so often something unpleasant
comes through from the other side. The alien monsters here are creatures
of pure disgust; King terrifyingly argues here that somewhere in the universe
there are things for which we can have no fellow-feeling. All of the narrators
are marked by the Buick 8--it is a focus for personal disaster--but they
believe, rightly, that they are the competent authorities, that to hand
it over would make things worse. After the death of one of the original
Troopers, the rest gather round his teenage son, and tell him the tale;
this is a book about storytelling and about listening and about not hearing
what you are told. As such, it is a worthy fictional companion to King's
excellent On Writing; significantly, its considerable strengths come partly
from King's imagination, partly from the technical mastery that lets him
play the narrators off against each other, and partly from research, from
King's own capacity to listen to real cops.
Stephen King was my all time favourite author for a very long time, only
surpassed by a non-horror writer - Iain
Banks.
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