the last book I read

From A Buick 8 by Stephen King.

So here's Troop D of the Pennsylvania State Police - just a bunch of regular guys trying to keep the peace and uphold the law. We're out in the sticks here so it's not any of yer high-falutin' fancy big-city crime, just the usual drunk driving and domestic violence. 

Speaking of drunk driving, one of Troop D's number, Curtis Wilcox, has recently been rubbed out while on a routine traffic stop - not by the driver of the HGV he'd pulled over but by another guy, Bradley Roach, whose addled inattention led to Curtis being smeared along the side of the HGV by his car.

Following this incident Troop D pulls together to look after Curtis' family, in particular his teenage son, Ned, understandably hit hard by his father's death. Ned starts hanging out at the police barracks, doing odd jobs, even occasionally manning the radio, and develops a curiosity about how the whole operation works and what the various rooms at the barracks contain. In particular, Ned is curious about the outbuilding known as Shed B, which appears to contain a near-mint-condition 1950s Buick Roadmaster, just sitting there in the dark. The current commanding officer, Sandy Dearborn, decides that since Ned is pretty much one of the team these days, and given his father's connection to the place (and, it later turns out, his particular connection to the Buick), Ned is entitled to hear the story.

And so we do a wibbly-wobbly dissolve to twenty-odd years previously when most of the current force, Sandy included, were fresh-faced youngsters responding to a call from, coincidentally (OR IS IT, etc.), the very same Bradley Roach, at this time running a petrol station, about a fancy-looking Buick that some mysterious long-coated dude has just abandoned on the forecourt - the dude himself slunk off round the back of the site, ostensibly to use the bathroom, and has now disappeared without trace. The guys on patrol turn up with a tow-truck and take the vehicle back to the barracks, and almost immediately clock that there is something deeply wrong with it, most obviously that the engine is a motley selection of plausibly mechanical-looking bits that don't actually connect with each other, still less function, the dashboard dials are fake, and the exhaust system appears to be made of glass. Moreover the car seems to repel dust and dirt, and even heal itself if the paintwork is scratched. [This isn't a thought that could have occurred to King in 2002 when the book was published, but it's a bit like one of those AI simulations that look a bit like people but on closer inspection have twenty-three fingers, an anus for an eye, etc.] The tow-truck deposits the Buick in Shed B and there it stays, partly because the owner is definitely not putting in a re-appearance, and partly because it's not like anyone can start it up and drive it out of there. And partly for other reasons, too.

There are early hints - beyond the car not actually being a car, I mean - that rum doings are afoot, most notably the disappearance of Curtis Wilcox's patrol partner Ennis Rafferty, who most people on the force believe disappeared while inside Shed B. This leads to some unpalatable thoughts, like: did the car eat him in some way? A pragmatic sort of omertà develops within Troop D: no blabbing of any kind about Shed B to anyone outside of the troop, family, friends, senior police, and most of all the press.

Curtis Wilcox takes a particular interest in the Buick and its behaviour, which comprises occasional spectacular shows of light and electrical interference which stops police radios from working, but also the occasional vomiting up of living or recently-living creatures definitely Not Of This Earth, including a weird insecty-bat-type-thing which Curtis does some gruesome amateur dissection on, and some plant and fish things which decompose too quickly to yield much information other that that they are weird and they stink. These are pretty grim, but at least pose no threat to humans other than putting them off their dinner. The human-sized creature that subsequently comes through does, though, since it is not only not dead but also not especially keen on becoming dead and possessed of enough intelligence, not to mention tentacles, to do something about it. The members of Troop D who happen to be on duty persuade it otherwise by messily murdering it to death with a shovel, with a bit of help from the barracks dog, who subsequently dies of a spectacular case of heartburn.

So what is going on here? The best theory Curtis and his colleagues can come up with is that the Buick is actually some sort of portal between worlds, and that whatever hellish Lovecraftian netherworld the tentacly horrors that periodically appear in Shed B came from, that's where Ennis, and subsequently an escaped prisoner who strays into the shed and whose disappearance no-one particularly mourns, have gone, very probably to be messily murdered in their turn by a host of shovel-wielding space lobsters.

No satisfyingly conclusive information about any of this has ever been forthcoming - definitive news about the car's original driver's whereabouts, how it got onto the garage forecourt in the first place given that it can't be driven, how the exchange of biological material between worlds actually works and what prompts it and the periodic light-shows - which adhere to no particular schedule and outside of which the Buick just sits there refusing to get dirty - to happen. There is a general feeling among the troop that the intensity and frequency of the episodes has reduced somewhat over the years, but the car has definitely not stopped being periodically active even twenty-plus years later.

And so Sandy and his colleagues present this to Ned and say: here, you're up to date. Bit weird, no? Ned, it turns out, is young enough and naïve enough to have been hoping for some neat tying-up of loose ends that would have explained what was going on and perhaps even offered some sort of closure to his father's premature death, and isn't especially pleased to be met with Sandy basically saying: sorry son, life isn't like that. So dissatisfied is he with this, in fact, that he decides upon a dramatic course of action: douse the Buick in gasoline and destroy it, with himself inside if necessary, thereby sealing off the conduit between worlds in some final way and perhaps heroically preventing a future Earth invasion by radioactive space shrimp or something similar.

Sandy sees a number of problems with this course of action, most obviously the prospect of Mrs. Wilcox losing a son shortly after losing a husband, but also something with wider impact: what if the Buick acts as some sort of regulator valve that keeps something in balance between worlds, maybe even between universes, nay indeed multiverses, and whose unexpected removal would have unforeseen and perhaps catastrophic consequences? 

And so Sandy and a couple of the other troopers have to thwart Ned's ill-conceived plan; unfortunately by the time they get to Ned he is already sitting in the Buick's driver's seat with an open can of gasoline. Moreover all this excitement has "woken" the Buick and it starts to become active. And so not only does Sandy have to rescue Ned from his own self-destructive actions, he also has to do so before the portal fully opens and they all get sucked over to an airless alien planet where they will die.

You'll recall from the review of Cell in 2012 and a couple of other posts that Stephen King used to be my main man book-wise, but that Cell was only the second book of his (re-reads aside) I'd read in about 15 years. Well you can make that three in over 25 years now as I haven't read one since Cell (you would after all have heard about it here if I had). For a writer as prolific over such a long period as King it's inevitable that various connections to other books present themselves - here's a few:

• Most obviously, before starting the book at least, the fact of the central plot device being a car, moreover a car to which there's more than meets the eye, is highly reminiscent of Christine, one of the clunkier novels from King's classic 1975-1990 period. 
• Once you actually start reading, though, From A Buick 8 is clearly more in the slightly science-fiction genre occupied by The Tommyknockers, another book where critical opinion is, at best, divided. That book has weird tentacly aliens and also a portal between planets via which a small boy gets teleported to an alien planet only to be rescued at the end of the book. The other thing the two books have in common is a relentless darkness and nihilism - weird shit happens, there's no satisfying explanation, we probably wouldn't understand anyway, the best we can hope for is just to endure as best we can and hope that the bad things eventually run down like an old battery. In the case of The Tommyknockers the obvious cod-psychology explanation for the tone is that it was written in the depths of one of King's periods of drug addiction, with From A Buick 8 it was published after King's recovery from being run down by a van in rural Maine in 1999, a collision that nearly killed him. Aside from the general tone, the death of Curtis Wilcox at the hands of an inattentive driver is a pretty close fictional rendering of what happened to King.
• Those thoughts lead tangentially to a non-King book, Roadside Picnic; the Buick here is a bit like the artefacts that are strewn across The Zones there: utterly opaque to our attempts to understand them, mysterious in function and occasionally randomly deadly to humans.
• Back to King - the brief episode where the troopers have to subdue the half-tree/half-squid alien creature, and in particular the bit where we are briefly offered a glimpse out of its multiple eyes at its hideous human murderers coming at it with a selection of blunt implements, is reminiscent both of the brief switch to Craig Toomy's viewpoint (more like Craig Loony, amirite) in The Langoliers, and also of the creepy short story I Am The Doorway from 1978's excellent Night Shift collection. 
• Finally, Ned's inability to accept the inexplicable and arbitrary nature of what the Buick does and his desire to probe into the mystery himself, is similar to what happened to the narrator's son in another excellent King short story, The Jaunt, from 1985's Skeleton Crew collection. I won't spoil it for you, but it does not end particularly well for anyone, least of all the boy.

A bit like Cell, this is probably a fairly minor work in King's gargantuan oeuvre, but it's good fun nonetheless. There is just a sense of the various occurrences of weird freaky shit getting vomited up out of the car's trunk getting a bit repetitive in the book's mid-section, and the switch from the car being - seemingly at least - a dumb conduit for stuff to a sentient entity capable of malign actions like bolting doors to prevent Sandy getting to Ned at the book's climax felt like it slightly undermined the book's logic just to serve a convenient narrative purpose (i.e. adding some tension and peril). Like pretty much anything King's ever written it is relentlessly gripping, though, and I raced through its 400+ pages in only a handful of days, helped by going on a camping trip which provided more reading time than usual.