Hands up who started their ‘adult reading life’ with a Stephen King book? If I could see with my very eye through your PC monitor, I’m pretty sure that over half of you would have raised your hands diligently! My initiation into King novels, I think, was ‘Four Past Midnight’ – a collection of four stories, which was quickly followed by the doorstop epic ‘The Stand’ when I was about twelve. I didn’t buy them myself of course - booksellers probably wouldn’t have let me do so at that age (hmm, interesting – in the future will there be ratings on books?), so I nicked them off my sister Helen, who at the time had practically every book the man ever wrote.

To this day, our house contains all of his books, somewhere or another. Some copies are brand new hardbacks (I loathe hardbacks, but if it’s an author I love then I just cannot wait for the paperback to get printed), others are battered 1984 editions that would have seen better days if they had acted as a small child’s stool to stand on while he brushed his teeth.

For some reason (probably my then-emerging and now-solid obsession with thrillers and romances), I forgot Stephen King for a while. Before ‘Buick’, which I finished yesterday, the last King novel I read was ‘Bag of Bones’, which I think was published around 1997 (could be wrong). I don’t quite know the reason for this pause, but I aim to fill the gap now, with a recently acquired stack of his latest stuff.

The reason I snapped up ‘Buick’ as soon as it came out was because at Christmas my sister gave me a copy of his only non-fiction work, the fabulous ‘On Writing’, in which King mentions the beginning of this project. ‘On Writing’ is half advice-to-aspiring-authors (hence why I was given it), and half-memoir (thanks to the car accident in 1999 that very nearly killed him), and as such he mentions a project about a Buick that he had started working on right before the accident. But more on that later.

We start the story by being introduced to the state of Pennsylvania, and more precisely, to the Troop D barracks of the Pennsylvania State Police. Their work is generally quiet and the troopers' relationships brotherly. Our first narrator is Sandy Dearborn, the troop sergeant. He begins to tell us about Ned Wilcox, a young local boy of eighteen or so, whose father Curtis was a trooper some years before. Unfortunately, Curtis was killed in a random traffic accident, and since then Ned has been treating the barracks like a sort of home-from-home. He mows the lawns, tends the property and has started to help with the radio dispatch.

One warm July afternoon, Ned comes to Sandy and asks him about Shed B – a building on the barracks land that contains a Buick 8. The vehicle is sometimes covered in a tarpaulin, sometimes not, and is never ever touched or driven. With some reluctance, but with a feeling of inevitability, Sandy and some of the other stalwart troopers begin to tell Ned the tale of the Buick 8.

The Buick 8 was abandoned at a gas station in town in 1979. The petrol attendant had seen a strange-looking man drive up to the pump, get out, and walk around the back to the toilets. The man never returned. As such, the attendant called the state police, and the men of Troop D brought the Buick in. Upon searching it, they discovered many strange and frankly frightening things. There was not a speck of dirt on it – not even on its fat white tyres – despite the fact that it was driven on a muddy, wet day. All the instruments on the dashboard were fake, and the speedometer stood stock-still at 00000. The key was just a stick of metal, with no indentations. The exhaust system seemed to be made of glass. And no matter how hard the troopers tried, tiny stones would not stay lodged in the tyre treads, but get squeezed out. A knife in the tyre wall would wheeze out air temporarily, only to slow its pace and then appear to breathe the air back in and re-seal.

As such, the troopers have the Buick towed into a spare shed on the barracks property, and decide to ignore it. However, the Buick 8 has other plans...

Spectacular lightshows start to happen, whereby flashes of blinding white light build and blaze in Shed B. Previous to these lightshows, a steady hum blankets the barracks, and the radios and televisions start to fuzz and go completely static. Occasionally, the tarpaulin covering the Buick slides off, and the trunk sits open, then closes itself.

One day, a trooper completely disappears, and soon after, something seems to come out of the Buick’s trunk. Upon inspection, the troopers find it is a completely unknown creature, somewhat like a bat, but nothing that has ever existed on Earth. The troopers set up experiments, leaving insects and small animals in the shed overnight, to find that half of them inexplicably disappear. The Buick gradually gives birth to more terrifying things, and the troopers begin to presume that the ‘car’ is alive. It breathes in and out, taking things from our world, and exhaling things from another.

I know I haven’t really reached a climax in the plot description, but I can’t really say too much without ruining it. What I will say, is that it is worth a read in my book (what mirth!), though not necessarily the best work Stephen King has ever produced.

Stephen King is always going to be classed as a horror writer, and probably rightly so, but sometimes I find that some of what he writes smacks more of thriller than it does horror. The first half of ‘Buick’ is a thriller, I would say, and the second half a horror novel. A lot of the first half is set in the past, and is being told in chapters from Sandy’s perspective, or from another trooper’s. Occasionally there is a switch back to the present, where Ned will ask questions about the story being told, or the characters will stop to eat sandwiches! Which is nice, in a way, as it also gives you time to break to go to sleep, or go back to work. But the first half, to me, seems a lot more thrillery with a great deal of suspense. The scenes where the first inspection of the Buick is described, as well as the first lightshow and ‘movements’ of the Buick, kept me feverishly turning the pages. As the incidences obviously escalate further into the book, you’ll find that those that occur in the first half are somewhat mild, and not as gory as the second half, which is *quite* so.

In fact, the thing that is most scary is the similarity between Curtis Wilcox’s traffic accident death/general vehicular nastiness, and Stephen King’s actual road accident. He says himself in the author’s note that he had written the first draft of ‘Buick’ before his accident, and that the irony is not lost on him, but it’s still pretty creepy. In case you don’t know what actually happened to him, he was walking along a road when he was hit by a van and thrown fourteen feet across the road. He had to have six operations to ‘put him back together’ and was extremely lucky to have survived. The whole moving story is detailed in ‘On Writing’, as a post-script, if you’re interested.

‘Buick’ is written in typical Stephen King style. The town is illustrated well, but the characters are even better. I sometimes find in novels that when there are quite a few main characters, I can’t put faces or voices to them all because it’s too much to process. But I never find this with a King novel. You know his characters, and some are usually recycled from earlier novels, with similar phrases and actions. You might recognise a few lines here and there as typical King, but I find it quite comforting to do so – especially after my break in reading his work. And also because he’s such a damn good writer.

The way the story is actually told is quite interesting. As I have said, the chapters tend to alternate between the present and the past (indicated at the top of the page by either saying ‘Now’ or ‘Then’), and sometimes between character perspective. Most of the time – especially in the ‘Then’ – it is Sandy whose eyes we are seeing through. Occasionally though, the story will come from another trooper, or from a third-person ‘God’ narrative. It’s pretty easy to keep up with, but if you’re reading fast, you might want to check the top page of your new chapter to see whether it’s ‘Now’ or ‘Then’, and if it’s Sandy, Eddie (trooper), Shirley (dispatcher) or the Blank All-Knowing One. The transference between chapters is expertly executed as well. As an example, we transfer from ‘Then’ Sandy to ‘Now’ Sandy in the middle of a sentence. The ‘Then’ chapter finishes with the line “And that was how” (with no punctuation, it just stops), and the ‘Now’ chapter starts over the page with “we got into it.” (no capitals). Don’t call me sad, but I found this quite amazing and spent a minute or two just re-reading the end of the chapter and the beginning of the next one a few times over!

Inevitable comparisons to King’s novel about the possessed car ‘Christine’ will be made, but I think they would be incorrect. Though the basic premise is similar (Stephen King writes about a car that does evil), the cars themselves are entirely different. Christine, a Plymouth Fury, is really a living entity whereas the Buick is more of a.. well.. this doesn’t ruin it, but the Buick is more like a gateway or a vortex. They’re different ‘beings’.

So to sum up, I did enjoy this book, though it did get quite gross towards the end (dog lovers may wish to skip over the section in the last quarter to do with Mister Dillon, the barracks dog). It’s not the best Stephen King I have read, but it is still classic Stephen King writing, if you see what I mean. Put it this way – I’m not re-reading it immediately after finishing it (as I have done with previous books I’ve loved), but I most certainly will not be getting rid of it. And I’ll be starting the next in my newly-bought pile of King novels in the next few days.

Sorry but I can’t give any details on price, as my copy was a special book club paperback copy at a reduced price, and I can’t even remember what that was! I’m pretty sure that it is only out in regular bookstores in hardback at the moment (yick), so it’s probably around £10, but I would check with Amazon.

Afterthought: If they still exist and still get made, I doubt Buick will sell many 8 models in the future. I sure as hell wouldn’t like to drive one.