When Stephen King wrote Misery in 1987, making the hero a writer was an unusual departure for him. Recently, however, centring his novels on creative types has become a habit. In Cell, the protagonist is a comic-book artist. Lisey’s Story involves a dead author whose widow struggles to protect his legacy. And Duma Key’s narrator, Edgar Freemantle, is a painter whose work gives him paranormal powers – to know everything about people hundreds of miles away, to predict events, even to heal or kill someone.

Edgar was a successful building contractor in Minnesota, until a collision with a crane left him minus an arm and suffering from memory, sight, speech and anger problems. His wife Pam divorced him, and returning to work was impractical. So his shrink recommended relocation as therapy, and he chose the eponymous island, one of the Florida Keys.

Installed in a rented seaside house he calls Big Pink, he lives alone and has only two neighbours. Wireman, who becomes his buddy and mentor, is a macho former lawyer, also severely injured, who now works as a carer and caretaker. Elizabeth Eastlake, the eccentric elderly heiress he looks after, is showing early signs of Alzheimer’s and is still haunted by the enigmatic death of two sisters back in the 1920s. It is Elizabeth, you gradually realise, who is the author of the “How to Draw a Picture” chapters that punctuate the main narrative.

Edgar starts off painting sunsets, but soon discovers that art gives him amazing abilities. He can describe his younger daughter Ilse’s new boyfriend without having met him, confidently assert Pam is having an affair, and save a former colleague’s life by predicting his suicide bid – all by daubing away in a kind of prophetic trance. When a child killer dominates the news in Florida, he ensures his death by copying a photo of him but leaving the body blank. King drops in a mention of the phenomenon of “amputee psychics”, and his hero’s special talents are directly linked to his disability: only when his stump itches can he can produce clairvoyant or telekinetic paintings.

Admired for its visionary or surrealist qualities, his prolific artistic output attracts a local gallery’s attention. Every painting is sold when it’s exhibited. Yet while art can bring fame, wealth and paranormal gifts on Duma Key, it can also be a curse. As Elizabeth is aware when she warns him to store his work away from the island, the same sinister force there that empowers him is also made angry by his paintings and the knowledge they bring.

King creates three distinct milieux: Minnesota, a commonsensical northern land where those closest to the hero all live; the Florida Keys now, an ambiguously magical domain whose inhabitants are all damaged; and the privileged but blighted bygone world of the Eastlakes 80 years earlier. All three are realised with striking imaginative energy, and Elizabeth’s history – just a back-story emerging in fragments, but nevertheless remarkably detailed – could easily be a novel in itself in other hands.

Nods to his influences (Mary Shelley, Poe, Hitchcock) and to recent television fantasy dramas influenced by King (The X Files, Lost) suggest that his aim here is a composite flesh-creeper, layering different forms of the uncanny. There’s his narrator’s Poe-like house of dread, jutting over the ocean so that the tide-shifted shells beneath it sound like bones; the southern gothic of the Eastlakes’ saga; paintings that can either serve or destroy the painter, a device reminiscent of fairy tales or Oscar Wilde; and a final section that features a ghost ship, zombies in chains, an evil spirit and a wilderness where weird, lethal creatures lurk or hover.

But, oddly, Duma Key is rarely frightening. Almost three-quarters of it has passed before Edgar starts seeing spectres, and the first real jolt to the reader comes even later. The concluding journey into the bewitched, miasmic south of the island is typically inventive, but comes across as an afterthought designed to keep happy those who buy King for horror. His writing is far more engaged in the passages about painting, reflecting his preoccupations since 1999 when (in an episode clearly recycled in Edgar’s accident) he was nearly killed by a car. Obsessed with art’s powers and penalties, he here follows Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow in exploring its link to suffering. He has become a fascinatingly paradoxical figure, still seen as ultra-commercial but, in fact, increasingly highbrow and self-conscious.

DUMA KEY by Stephen King
Hodder £18.99 pp583

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