ISBN: 0743520963
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 4
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Summary: Okay Stephen King but Great Audio Experience
As a novel, From a Buick 8 is just okay. The story centers on a mysterious car that a police troop discover and begin to investigate what it is and where it came from. The story has great build-up. King slowly but surely builds the mystery and tension in this story. The problem is that it is never paid off. The climax feels light and didn't answer all questions. At the end, I felt cheated.
Still, King is such a good storyteller that the story is very entertaining from start-to-finish with great, well-drawn characters.
While the book is okay, the audio experience is wonderful. The novel is told from many perspectives--a la Rashomon. And the narrators do a great job--highlighting different voices and different perspectives. Some of the readers are great character actors you may know such as Bruce Davison (X-Men, X-Men 2, Kingdom Hospital), Becky Ann Baker (A Simple Plan, Storm of the Century), James Rebhorn (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Meet the Parents), and Stephen Tobolowsky (Groundhog Day, Sneakers).
Summary: A good Novel.
This novel has a simple plot,easy to follow.And the best part is that it is short.I have found it difficult to write this review on my own for one simple reason,it gets to slow paced at certain parts of this book,thereby making me lose interest.I have however,forgotten alot of this book,because I read it so long ago.So I needed to use my research to aid in this review...Nigel...
Here is the plot:The novel is a series of recollections by the members of Troop D, a police barracks in western Pennsylvania. After Curt Wilcox, a well-liked member of Troop D is killed by a drunk driver, his son Ned begins to visit Troop D. The cops quickly take a liking to him, and soon begin telling him about the "Buick 8" of the title.
The Buick 8 resembles a vintage 1954 Buick Roadmaster, and was left at a gas station by a mysterious man, who disappeared soon after leaving the car to be refueled. The "car" is later held by the Troop D police of rural Pennsylvania in one of their sheds. The car, they discover, is not a car at all. It appears to be a Buick, but the steering wheel doesn't move, the dashboard instruments are painted on, and the car heals itself when scratched or dented.
Sandy Dearborn is the main narrator of the book, and tells the story to Ned, discussing various things that have happened with the car, and his father's fascination with it. The car will frequently give off what they dub "light quakes," or large flashes of light over an extended period of time, and will occasionally "give birth" to strange creatures that aren't anything like what they've seen in their world. Two people have disappeared in the vicinity of the car - a fellow trooper called Ennis and a lowlife named Brian Lippy they picked up for drunk driving and being under the influence of angel dust.
After hearing the story of the Buick and how it has been kept secret for Troop D for so long, Ned becomes convinced that the car was somehow related to the death of his father. After all, the gas station attendant who first reported the Buick sitting in front of the station was the same man who, years later, would kill his father. Ned is determined to destroy the Buick, but before he can Sandy Dearborn realizes that the Buick, in fact, wants to take Ned into the world it controls as a sacrifice of sorts.
Sandy returns to the shed to find Ned sitting in it, and just as he pulls Ned out the Buick transforms into a portal, trying to draw both Ned and Sandy inside of it. The other troopers arrive, and manage to pull Ned and Sandy free, but not before Sandy glimpses into the open portal of the Buick's trunk and sees remnants of both Ennis and Brian Lippy on the other side.
The book closes with Ned joining the police force after dropping out of college, and he pulls Sandy over to Shed B, where the Buick is stored. The Buick's window is cracked, and Ned believes that the Buick will one day fall apart, having expended the last of its energy in that final show.
...enjoy...Nigel.
Summary: A Vanity Book but a Fun Read
In a note after the book (don't worry, this is not a spoiler), King informs his readers that he had an experience very similar to the one in which the Buick 8 comes on the scene. On the rest of his drive, he thought up the plot of the book. As a result, unlike the rest of King's books, this does not take place in Maine (or even his secondary setting for his non-Dark Tower stories, the mountains of Colorado). King appears to have written this book on a lark, and therefore his characters don't ring as true as his other books.
But King still knows how to tell a good yarn, and he still knows how to write about fear and people's reaction to the supernatural. King tells the story about a thing that looks like a vintage Buick but pretty clearly is not. It has different number if portholes on each side, it has an engine that doesn't run, and the cops that find it sense that there is something even more wrong with it. And boy do they turn out to be right.
The cops tow the Buick back to their police station, leave it in a shed, and alternately are fascinated by it, forget about it, and are petrified by it.
The surrounding story, about the coming of age of a cop's son who lost his father in the line of duty and whether the cops can help him get over his loss and teach him an important lesson about life is not worthy of King. It is heavy-handed, but King is always heavy-handed. Unforgivably, however, it is boring, and the boy never sparks much interest.
The story of the car, however, is thrilling and scary. And therefore, I strongly recommend reading this book.
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