From a Buick 8

by Stephen King

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743417682
• Release Date: December 2003
• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Length: 496 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.8" x 1.0" x 4.2"

Customer Reviews

Weirdness galore

I loved it. The strange starts at the beginning and keeps coming to the end. Love this story.

Just bought for the cover variation.

Book is a good read, but I dont' read spanish, bought this for the art.

A Thriller with a Scientific Approach

Lately I have read each new Stephen King book with apprehension, not knowing what each will bring. My apprehension was unfounded with this intriguing thriller that combines the threads of human lives with the investigation of a mysterious phenomenon. We meet teenage Ned Wilcox at the very beginning of the story. His father was the late Curtis Wilcox, a state highway trooper with Troop D of the Pennsylvania State Patrol. Ned helps around the barracks; cleaning, sweeping, and talking with the troopers. We immediately identify with Ned, seeing his activities at the barracks as one way of connecting with his lost father, killed in the line of duty. Ned becomes so much a part of the troop that the troop lets him in on a secret they have kept for 20 years; a mysterious, chilling secret. One day, a long time ago, a man in an overcoat stopped at a gas station and asked the attendant to fill the car with gas. The man disappeared around the corner of the gas station to where the restrooms are. A long time after filling the car the attendant realized the man had not come back from the restroom, and went looking for him. The man was no where to be found and the attendant called the highway patrol. One of the two troopers responding to the call was rookie Curtis Wilcox. Their investigation of the car was anything but routine. The car's engine had many of the correct components, but they were not connected to each other. The configuration of the engine was such that there was no way the car could ever have run. The state highway patrol decides to impound the car. During the initial investigation of the car, Curtis's partner disappears, further compounding the mystery of the car. Curtis Wilcox becomes obsessed with investigating the mysterious car. Soon strange things begin happening; mysterious brilliant flashing lights that accompany electronic disturbances; things come from the trunk; things left in the car disappear from their cage. There is something very wrong with this car. Stephen King has written many horror novels where the villain is a werewolf, a vampire, a spirit, or even Satan. In this novel we never meet the real villain and we are forced to try to understand the nature of that villain from the artifact that the villain created. The car itself is not evil, but what it does is evil, and perhaps where it comes from we might perceive as evil. The troopers treat the car scientifically, investigating the car as methodically as they can. They form theories and test their theories. They record their observations as would any scientist. They are also careful and cautious with their discovery, because they have found that bad things can happen to the unwary. The story of the investigation of the car is told from multiple viewpoints, in the past and the present; an extended story told to Ned Wilcox about the passion his father had for investigating the car, a passion that Ned was unaware of even as he neared adulthood. The story telling can be a bit

I guess I just don't get it.

I see all the mediocre to poor reviews on this book, and I figure something must be wrong with me. For several years now, I have been enjoying King's work less and less. The plots seemed silly, the writing seemed rushed, and I just couldn't keep reading them. Then I read this book, and I loved it. Everything in it seemed so plausible (people's reactions to the weirdness for example) that I was able to suspend my disbelief in a way I hadn't been able to in many of his past books. It has more of a Lovecraft feel to it, though that's not quite right. Lovecraft and his followers are usually so pessimistic about the universe and our place in it. This book is strangely optimistic in that regard. Well, suffice it to say I disagree with most or all the poor reviews. I say give this book a try, it's a great read.

The Pennsylvania State Police Have Problem

Where did this weird replica of a Buick come from? Was the portal made by the same characters in "Hearts of Atlantis"? If it was, why didn't they have a problem breathing our atmosphere? Will King eventually tie it all together like he did with the entire "The Gunslinger" series? The whole point of the book is, sometimes you have to accept the fact that you aren't going to find an answer.

From a Buick 8

I worked in a large office for an extended period during my somewhat checkered employment career. I don't think I had been there but three weeks when a gentleman suddenly took ill and retired on sick leave. He died a few months later of brain cancer. Another man inherited his desk. He, too, was dead within a year from a tumor in his brain. A third gent was given the desk, and within six months, he also was gone, for the same reason. A number of us attended his funeral, and when we returned to the office, four of us, by agreement common and unspoken, took the desk and unceremoniously shoved it into a storage room where it may still remain. I have been convinced since that time that there are some objects in this world that for whatever reason are salted with a wrongness. Maybe it's a storefront where a business can never successfully take hold, or a piece of jewelry that seems to herald domestic problems, or something else. It's as if they're not meant to be here. But they are. One of these objects is the basis for Stephen King's new novel, FROM A BUICK 8. There have been some nattering nabobs of negativism who were deriding this book as "Christine II" before it ever came out. Nope, this Buick, unlike Christine, does not sell its soul to rock 'n' roll. Sure, you can't read this bad boy without hearing Bob Dylan's "From A Buick 6" floating in the background --- it even makes an appearance in the story. But the vehicle in this book isn't haunted. No. It's worse. This Buick 8 pulls up to some gas pumps at a full-serve gas station in Western Pennsylvania in 1979. While the pump jockey is gassing her up, the driver walks around to the back of the station and...disappears. The local gendarme, two Pennsylvania State Policemen named Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox from Troop D, show up and almost immediately notice that this car isn't...right. For one thing, the sumbitch can't be driven. And...it hums. You can't really hear it, but it's there. Troop D takes custody of it and they watch it. This is one Buick 8 that bears watching. And guarding. Whatever it is, it's not a car. Worse than that, it breathes. It exhales things out into our world and inhales things in to...who knows where. You don't want to know, and you don't want to go there. You won't come back. The car becomes Troop D's family secret, kept in Shed B and quietly but vigilantly guarded. When Wilcox is killed in a senseless accident in the fall of 2001, Ned, his 18 year old son, begins doing odd jobs around the barracks, trying to hold onto his father's memory. Ned discovers the car and the story behind it and he wants to know more. And the car is ready to give him far, far more than he will ever want... The first draft of FROM A BUICK 8 was completed shortly before King's infamous injuries at the hands of a careless motorist in 1999; there are a couple of moments in the book that seem to eerily prefigure what happened to King. The inspiration for FROM A BUICK 8 itself arose from ano