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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
The master of horror ends his recent slump with this skeptical tale about a strange car, a troop of state police and the fundamental unknowability of the universe.
Sep 19, 2002 | Whatever the vintage Buick Roadmaster stashed in a shed behind the state police barracks in the western Pennsylvania town of Statler may be, it isn't a vintage Buick Roadmaster. As the only scientist who ever examines it remarks, it isn't an automobile of any kind. One character in Stephen King's new novel observes -- shortly before dying in an especially gruesome fashion, which may or may not be the Buick's doing -- that the thing may not even be real, in the ordinary sense of that word. Curt Wilcox, Sandy Dearborn and their fellow members of Troop D perceive it as a Buick, or at least as a half-convincing imitation of one, because they have encountered it and, well, they have to perceive it as something.
It's certainly to King's credit that he never gets specific about what the mysterious noncar in "From a Buick 8" actually is. Oh, it's a channel or a portal or a transportation device of some kind, but where it came from, why it's here and who the waxy-looking, black-caped stranger was who "drove" it into Statler one July morning in 1979 -- we never learn any of that. As sinister and powerful as the Buick turns out to be, one possibility is that its presence in Statler isn't part of any diabolical scheme or interstellar invasion or anything like that. It might just be an accident, a forgotten hunk of unknowable junk, a random artifact of another world left behind in a dusty corner of our own.
Furthermore, I'm not giving anything away in telling you the above, because the point of "From a Buick 8," more or less, is that we don't get any answers to the Big Questions. Strange things happen, and more often than not they can't be explained. Life ends in death, and more often than not it's a horrible, wrenching experience (at least for those of us left behind). Where have the dead gone? We don't know, but from here it looks dark and far away. In an author's note at the end of the book, King himself describes the novel as "a meditation on the essentially indecipherable quality of life's events, and how impossible it is to find a coherent meaning in those events."
Trooper Sandy Dearborn, King's principal narrator and authorial stand-in, puts it a bit differently, if not with much more certainty. Even before the question of the mystery Buick sitting out in Shed B arises, teenage Ned Wilcox wants a reason why his dad, Sandy's friend and comrade Curt, was run down a year earlier by a drunk on the roadside.
"I thought of telling him I didn't know about reasons, only about chains," Sandy muses, "how they form themselves, link by link, out of nothing; how they knit themselves into the world. Sometimes you can grab a chain and use it to pull yourself out of a dark place. Mostly, though, I think you get wrapped up in them. Just caught, if you're lucky. Fucking strangled, if you're not."
Sandy's a chain-smoking bachelor who, like so many King protagonists, is closer to being fucking strangled by the chains of the past than he'd like to admit. Before this evening in 2002 is over, he, along with a full roster of his Troop D comrades (the usual crew of Hollywood-ready crusty rural types found in a King novel), will tell Ned the whole story of the Buick 8 his father was so obsessed with. Sometimes the temperature in Shed B drops hard and fast. Sometimes things disappear in that car. Sometimes things appear. Little things, mostly. Oddities. Except for that horrible day in 1988.
Ned's dead father thought that whatever inexplicable energy ran through the Buick was beginning to run down and dissipate, the way an old watch lost in the forest might tick on fitfully, slower and slower, for years. So why are Sandy and Huddie and Arky and Shirley and the other troopers so eager to indoctrinate eager, wounded Ned into the Buick's mysteries? And do they notice how cold it's getting out in that shed, on the night of all this storytelling?
