Boek
From A Buick 8
| Auteur | Stephen King |
| Eerste Uitgave | 2002 |
| Uitgave | 2002 |
| Uitgeverij | Scribner |
| Vorm | roman |
| Taal | Engels |
| Bladzijden | 356 bladzijden |
| Gelezen | 2007-05-28 |
| Score | 5/10 |
Inhoud
The state police of Troop D in rural Pennsylvania have kept a secret in Shed B out back of the barracks ever since 1979, when Troopers Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox answered a call from a gas station just down the road and came back with an abandoned Buick Roadmaster. Curt Wilcox knew old cars, and he knew immediately that this one was...wrong, just wrong. A few hours later, when Rafferty vanished, Wilcox and his fellow troopers knew the car was worse than dangerous.
Curt's avid curiosity took the lead, and they investigated as best they could, as much as they dared. Over the years, the troop absorbed the mystery as part of the background to their work, the Buick 8 sitting out there like a still-life painting that breathes - inhaling a little bit of this world, exhaling a little bit of what world it came from.
In the fall of 2001, a few months after Curt Wilcox is killed in a gruesome auto accident, his eightee-year-old boy, Ned, starts coming by the barracks. Sandy Dearborn, Sergeant Commanding, knows it's the boy's way of holding onto his father, and Ned is allowed to become part of the Troop D family. One day he looks in the window of Shed B and discovers family secret. Like his father, Ned wants answers...
From a Buick 8 is a book about our fascination with deadly things, about our insistence on answers when there are none, about terror and courage in the face of the unknowable.
Bespreking
Bigger is not always better
When troopers of Pennsylvania State Patrol Troop D bring in an old abandoned automobile -of which the owner simply disappeared- they are not really sure how to take care of it. Indeed it is not just a vintage car: it has certain unworldly peculiarities never seen on any car. Not only is its design that little bit different from a normal Buick 8, it also has the eerie ability to repair itself. Knowing that the outside world would steal away this rarity once they make it public, the troopers decide to hide it in shed B and keep it as a Troop D secret. It is only when people start to disappear that they realise that Troop D has become the gatekeeper to something that in some creepy way might become a threat to our world.
Any summary of From a Buick 8 will fail at hiding its similarities with the earlier best-seller Christine, also written by Stephen King. Nevertheless the similarity stops when you go beyond the basic idea. Buick 8 puts its focus on the way people try to get to terms with things that are beyond comprehension and as such aims at a more internal fear than Christine did. As we became to expect from King, his characters are well drafted and, not withstanding the inherent clich�s, will captivate many readers. Even the setting and premise of the story is strong enough to hook the reader.
The sad part it that it gets watered down so much that the climax is far from what the first hundred pages promise. Effectively the situation of the troopers and their strange find is spun out so elaborately that the story lacks any form of momentum. Even if you look at the story as a situational sketch it is barely able to deliver. To be honest you do not always need gory details or a lot of action in a horror novel to be good. Certainly I will be the last to claim that a neatly closed ending is a requirement for any good book. It is true, as reader of the fantastic you are supposed to go along with much suspension of disbelieve. From a Buick 8 does not contain a lot of gore nor much action. It has a very open ending and embraces many fantastic viewpoints. Basically none of these are reasons to claim that Buick 8 is a bad book. But keeping all this in mind, you do need to receive a good many thrills out of a genre piece. Alas, these thrills are too sparse in this novel. In effect, From a Buick 8 would have made a wonderful short story, but has turned out to be a monster of a novel. Not always is bigger also better.
My sincerest hope is that this story links nicely into the Dark Tower saga, so that in the end it will all make sense. In this case it will at least give some meaning to the hours I spend reading this book. Maybe even a candidate for a reread, who knows?