Wireman looks after the elderly Elizabeth Eastlake, the owner of Big Pink.

Later, conscious of his aesthetic powers, he uses them to heal his friend and neighbor on the Key, Wireman, another man with a damaged past. The psychic theme kicks in early, with the artist’s realization that he has put a photographic likeness of his daughter’s fiancé into a painting, without ever having seen him. The local art critic pronounces him “a true American primitive.” The gallery owner assures him that it’s a compliment. To Edgar’s surprise, everyone is knocked out by the pictures he produces. There he settles into a house he refers to as Big Pink, establishes a friendship with his neighbors and beholds a natural splendor that cannot fail to inspire a recuperating patient with a new hobby. He takes a psychologist’s advice and does “a geographical,” relocating to a solitary strip amid the “charm-bracelet of keys lying off the west coast of Florida,” where he begins to paint.

Sinister sounds, possibly vampiric, are audible beneath the foundations of the house around which the story is set, while the narrator blunders into generating malevolent forces beyond his control.Įdgar Freemantle is a former construction boss who has moved to Florida after losing his right arm in an on-site accident. The plot of “Duma Key,” ghastly in itself but certain to bring horrified pleasure to King’s enormous readership, could have been sketched on the reverse side of Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Gray,” a grisly examination of the magic of art. If Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley count as authors of so-called literary fiction, then King has been engaged in building bridges since that evening. When Stephen King accepted the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003, he drew attention to the cultural divide “between the so-called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction.” The award of the medal “to a guy like me” inspired the hope that “in the future things don’t have to be the way they’ve always been.

Duma key paintings