Still conjuring dark forces

How good is Stephen King really? In 2003, when he was awarded the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, King made a punchy speech arguing that popular fiction in general deserved much greater critical recognition.

The pompous Yale professor Harold Bloom was infuriated. He denounced the award as a terrible mistake, "another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life". It was too kind even to call King "a writer of penny dreadfuls", Bloom continued. "He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-byparagraph, book-by-book basis." So was Bloom right? Duma Key is approximately the 40th full-length novel King has published. It uses a familiar device in supernatural fiction ? pictures that have ominous import. King himself has used versions of the theme many times before, for example in the powerful novel Rose Madder, in which the heroine enters repeatedly into a supernatural world through a painting. In The Shining, a photograph of past guests at the haunted Overlook Hotel erupts terrifyingly into the present.

More broadly, King has written over and again about the horrors imagined by a writer becoming real ? or always having been real and breaking into horrible life by taking over the writer's imagination.

In Duma Key, Edgar Freemantle is a successful building contractor, worth some $40 million at the age of 50, living in Minnesota, happily married, with two daughters. Then he has a dreadful accident on site. His pick-up truck is crushed by a 12-storey crane and he only just survives. His skull is cracked, his ribs broken, his right hip shattered ? and he loses his right arm.

Edgar's personality changes, too. He becomes uncontrollably angry and from his hospital bed attacks his wife with a plastic knife. She divorces him, he becomes suicidal.

A sympathetic psychologist urges Edgar to try "a geographical" ? "a form of recovery often attempted by latestage alcoholics. They hope that a change of location will give them a fresh start".

He also asks Edgar if anything makes him happy. To his own surprise, Edgar answers that he used to sketch, but has merely doodled for the past 30 years.

Off he goes in a Learjet to "Big Pink", a rented beach house on Duma Key, a sparsely inhabited, nine-mile-long island in Florida, looking straight out into the Gulf of Mexico. (King himself overwinters in a waterfront house in Sarasota.) On his first night in his new home, Edgar draws an evocative picture of the horizon. As he puts his pencil down, the house itself speaks to him: "I've been waiting for you, it said." Duma Key is a long (580 pages), relatively slow-moving story, without the manic energies that drive the formidable novels King wrote while still in the midst of his struggles with alcoholism, such as Misery, The Tommyknockers, and The Dark Half. It is, though, very persuasive about what severe injury and long-term rehabilitation feels like, clearly drawing on King's own experiences after he was knocked down by a careless driver in 1999, suffering a collapsed right lung, multiple fractures of the right leg, scalp lacerations and a broken right hip.

As often in King's fiction, the realistic situation is depicted so convincingly and grippingly that the eventual launch into the unequivocally supernatural seems scarcely necessary. In Duma Key, the plot eventually turns into grand guignol. Edgar finds that his pictures not only seem able to predict the future, they can change outcomes, too. By painting a dying friend looking young and well, Edgar cures him. But when, in a trance, he paints terrifying visions that he himself does not understand, they call up dark forces that have long been haunting the island.

A ship of the dead, the Persephone, arrives off Duma Key, bearing evil spirits from the sea, somehow also incarnated in a tiny china figurine, long buried at the bottom of a well and only rendered powerless by being drowned in fresh, not salt, water. Edgar sees to her with bottles of Evian, a process considerably complicated by only having the one arm.

Still, it'll make a top product placement in the movie.

In his National Book Award speech, King emphasised that, however fantastical the situation, he tries to remain true to the way real people would behave in a similar situation. "How stringently the writer holds to the truth inside the lie is one of the ways he can judge how seriously he takes his craft." By that measure, King takes his craft most seriously. If you only grant him his premise, however far-fetched, he'll carry you through to the end. And the emotions his characters feel in that journey ? love and pain, the struggle between fear and courage, ultimate conflicts of loyalties ? are not fantastic at all.

Sentence by sentence inadequate, though? It's true the prose is no more than functional, aiming to become invisible, as you turn the pages faster. King said in his speech: "When readers are deeply entranced by a story, they forget the storyteller completely. The tale is all they care about." Bloom may have a point, but it's King who has the power to entrance.