TWO FACTORS have dominated Stephen King's later life - his burning desire to be taken seriously as a novelist and a rage against the careless driver who nearly killed him. His long convalescence has inevitably marked King's fiction, giving it a more personal note. At the same time he revels in reviews comparing his work to Charles Dickens.

Duma Key follows Lisey's Story, which at times came scarily close to autobiography. No surprise then that his protagonist here is a rich man badly injured in an accident who moves to Florida (where King now has a home) to remake his life.

Edgar Freemantle, a building tycoon, takes up painting with his remaining arm. His pictures are very good - or so he is told by Wireman, another wounded soul with a tragic history, who cares for the mysterious old lady in the big house along the beach. A local gallery takes an interest, and Freemantle becomes a celebrity, getting “his head back together” to the delight of his doctor, his two daughters and his estranged wife.

He puts it down to living in an idyllic location in a house once used by Salvador Dalí. But Duma Key is more than just an inspiration: it holds dark secrets and malign forces. Freemantle discovers that, not unlike the psychic artist Isaac Mendez in the TV series Heroes, his paintings can influence reality. He can remove a bullet from his friend's brain, or kill a child murderer in jail.

Then he finds out that the old lady was a child prodigy artist and when she warns him that Duma Key is a “dangerous place for daughters”, the darkness gathers further.

In many ways this is classic King, a thriller with aggressively credible characters. Being King, however, it descends in the end into horror. That is a mistake. King is master of the popular thriller but if only he could have let the evil remain intangible and melded the psychological with the supernatural, it could have been so much more.

Duma Key by Stephen King
Hodder, £18.99

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