From a Buick 8: A Novel by Stephen King (MOBI)

Description

The #1 New York Times bestseller from Stephen King—a novel about the fascination deadly things have for us and about our insistence on answers when there are none…Since 1979, the state police of Troop D in rural Pennsylvania have kept a secret in the shed out behind the barracks. Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox had answered a strange call just down the road and came back with an abandoned 1953 Buick Roadmaster. Curt Wilcox knew old cars, and this one was…just wrong. As it turned out, the Buick 8 was worse than dangerous—and the members of Troop D decided that it would be better if the public never found out about it. Now, more than twenty years later, Curt’s son Ned starts hanging around the barracks and is allowed into the Troop D family. And one day he discovers the family secret—a mystery that begins to stir once more, not only in the minds and hearts of these veteran troopers, but out in the shed as well, for there’s more power under the hood than anyone can handle….

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Publishers Weekly” Terrific entertainment…Goes down like a shot of moonshine, hot and clean.”From a Buick 8 is stylistically assured, effortlessly suspenseful, with characters as well-rounded as almost any ‘literary’ novel can offer…. Spooky stuff.” About the Author Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, and Doctor Sleep are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I have to say, I was a little surprised to see low reviews for this book. I understand what the reviewers are saying. They think nothing really happens in the story and it’s slow.I thought it was great. “From a Buick 8” is more of a psychological horror story, and a tale about how there are some things we just can’t know. I found every bit of the mystery fascinating. Some parts had me figuratively at the edge of my seat, or literally cringing with fear.Many think this book ties in with “The Dark Tower,” and I agree. The titular Buick, not really a Buick at all but some sort of car monster, is the sort of car the low men from “Hearts in Atlantis” drive. I believe the black-clad driver from the beginning is one of the low men, or can-toi (rat-headed men from “The Dark Tower”). The cars are what they use to round up their “strays,” and possibly what they use to transport them from any number of Earths to Mid-World. Saying any more would get too far into spoiler territory, so I’ll leave it at that.I will admit that this was a bit of a slower read for me than other King books, but I still found it a gripping story recommend it highly.

⭐From a Buick 8 seems to draw polarized reactions from long time Stephen King (SK) readers. It’s a novel that doesn’t adhere to what you would usually expect from SK, because (1) it’s a short novel, comparatively, (2) the story revolves around the retelling of the lore surrounding the mysterious (and hated?) Buick 8 that sits in Shed B at the Pennsylvania State Policy (PSP) bunkers, in contrast to the sequence of events found in SK’s longer novels where the story unfolds gradually until there is a climax in the last 3/4 of the story, (3) is not really a “horror” novel, but more sci-fi’ish like a Richard Matheson story, and (4) doesn’t include rock music song references other than alluding to Bob Dylan’s From a Buick 6 in the title. The story primarily focuses on the relationships between the characters and how they relate to the Buick 8 that was impounded in the late 1970’s when some of the characters were rookies with the PSP. The Buick 8 lands in the PSP’s possession when a mysterious, vampire-like man leaves the car abandoned at a gas station. Once impounded, the Buick 8 puts on the occasional laser-light show with shocking after-effects.The cast is typical of a SK novel in that it’s large, and the novel has a lot of entertaining/amusing moments. SK’s sense of humor is apparent in this novel, as it is with most of his writings. I thought the characters were well developed and that the story held tightly together.

⭐I am a big Stephen King fan and have read most of his books. It is not uncommon for his novels to start off slowly and not really set the hook until a hundred pages or so. With this book I kept waiting for that to happen and by the half way point, where I uncharacteristically bailed, it still hadn’t happened. His prose and characters were excellent as usual but the story arc, at least to the point where I gave up on it, was totally flat. Basically I felt ‘From A Buick 8’ to be a real dud. When half way through this agonizingly slow story I decided to read some of the reviews to get a clue as to when something significant might happen and got the definite impression that it never really does. I rarely quit a book but I just couldn’t take it any more. I guess considering how really good most of his books are and how many there are it shouldn’t be surprising for there to be an occasional clunker, which this was.

⭐”From A Buick 8″ is a decent, but sometimes slow moving, science fiction novel set in Western Pennsylvania. It is mostly highly readable. In some ways it is a typical Stephen King science fiction novel. I like Stephen King novels and there were parts I liked very much.The primary location of this story is set at a police facility. The story shifts back and forth in timeframes and narrators. I like the way it is structured but at times it seems to lag. The character development is good and Stephen King made me like and identify with certain characters.Occasionally I encounter in reading something that seems an incredible coincidence to me. In this case, I had just finished a pretty good novella by John Campbell titled “Who Goes There?”. In that work is found the word “Ichor”. As far as I know, that is an unusual word in contemporary American Literature. Its origins lie in Greek Mythology. Then I read this novel under review. As I was reading it, I felt that there is a vague structural similarity to “Who Goes There?”. Only after perceiving that, I come upon the word “Ichor”. Conincidence? Maybe… If I ever get a chance to correspond with Stephen King, I hope to ask him…As is often the case I purchased both the Kindle and audiobook and listened and read simultaneously. As a production, the audiobook is particularly strong. There are multiple narrators including males for male narration and a female for female narration. I really liked the quality of the audiobook as a product on its own merits. However there were times the story moved slow enough that I speeded up the narration on my device in order to keep up with my natural reading pace when the story moved slowly.In summary, I liked this novel. I put it in the middle of the pack as far as Stephen King novels. In the unlikely event that it matters, my favorite Stephen King novel remains is “11 22 63”. I also like a collection of short stories, “Different Seasons”. Thank You…

⭐The events of Stephen King’s novel, From a Buick 8, are easily summarised. A mysterious alien figure leaves what looks like an old Buick outside a gas station in Western Pennsylvania. The Buick is taken by state troopers and kept in a shed at their headquarters. Over years, the car ejects alien objects and life forms, and sucks in people, animals and objects from our world into an alien one. Eventually, a crack appears in its windscreen suggesting the car’s ultimate decay and destruction. The tale is narrated by the state troopers and their staff, a kind of storytelling club. This form of narration has certain advantages as it alternates between first and third person. The first-person storytelling voices convey immediacy and authenticity, while the orchestrating character’s third-person voice is more flexible and wider-ranging, since it isn’t limited to its own experience. There are, however, some disadvantages, since the multiple characters and voices of the storytelling club are primarily just names with lists of attributes rather than fully rounded. Often, they feel like interchangeable storytelling devices, with limited interaction among them. A further problem is that multiple characters, even if inadequately developed, and the story of the state troopers and their work, don’t quite fit with the story of the supernatural Buick. Sometimes the account of the troopers’ daily work seems more interesting than the story of the car. The two story strands don’t quite mesh.The story of the car itself has limited development. Unlike the title vehicle of King’s Christine, the Buick is static, a fixed object. Its light shows, humming noises, alleged telepathic pull and its various ejected creatures and objects—a bat-thing, a fish, beetles, an alien and so on—form a series with decreasing impact, a repetition of the same trick with superficial variation. The Buick may be the ultimate wormhole, a portal into an alien world, but the glimpse of that world the text finally gives (340-41) is too brief and anticlimactic after a wait of over 300 pages. As so often in stories dependent on a mystery, the tease is greater than the reveal. The reader may feel like someone who went to see an action movie and instead got Waiting for Godot, a cultural reference King practically cites (331).King opposes two types of story within the text. One character, Ned Wilcox, says to another, “Tell me everything. But—this is important—tell me a story, one that has a beginning and a middle and an end where everything is explained” (297). Buick 8 doesn’t give us a story like that. Its account is as fragmented as the narrative voice supposedly is and the demand for completion is defined by another character as “childish insistence” (307). In his Author’s Note after the text, King tells us, “This story became [ . . . ] a meditation on the essentially indecipherable quality of life’s events, and how impossible it is to find a coherent meaning in them” (354). Open-endedness in a story may work well but what precedes the open ending or lack of conclusiveness should be substantial enough to sustain the reader’s interest. The ending of Wells’s Time Machine, where the time traveller’s further adventures in the future are left open to the reader’s imagination, is a good example. Buick 8 may be a brave attempt at a different way of telling a story so that the larger part of the mystery remains unknown. Whether or not that satisfies the reader as much as a more fully explained story, the kind Ned Wilcox would like, is a matter of individual response. Some of us, however, will still be “waiting for the punchline” (211), even though we’re told not to.

⭐Stephen King is one of those writers who, when I pick up his books to read the description I never quite fancy the contents. It always sounds silly, like he’s run out of ideas. That’s just ‘Christine’ again, I said to myself. If I pick it up, however, he always confounds this prejudice.Here, King has taken a silly premise and turned it into an extremely engaging and enjoyable yarn. To be fair, the sci-fi sections don’t hold up so well as the day-in-the-life-of-a-cop sections. *SPOILER* The part where Eddie was taking the violent neo-nazi into custardy was my favourite part of the book, whilst some of the Buick sections strayed a little on the silly side *SPOILER END*.Over all though, the characters are great, the story is great, and I’m glad that King resisted the urge to tie it all up into a neat little bundle. There are no real resolutions or explanations here, and there doesn’t need to be – this is a parable for tinkering with The Unknown.Sometimes there is no need to understand or resolve things.Dan Crawford

⭐I tried…. I really tried. But I couldn’t get on with this book. It was written after Stephen King’s infamous accident, and it shows. It’s written by a man clearly in pain, both physically and mentally, and this seeps onto the page. If it had been written by another author it would be great. But as a Stephen King book it’s mediocre at best.

⭐This is another piece of brilliance written by a true master in the absolute sense .Will be reading all the rest of his books that I haven’t read yet

⭐A vintage ’54 blue Buick Roadmaster. At least that’s what it looks like … But there’s something strange about this.Something other-worldly if that makes sense.Bizarre story. Deep characters… and really well written by Mr. King as per usual.Strange. Weird. Wonderful. This is NOT another “Christine”

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