King of the Road Life’s indecipherables drive author in ‘From a Buck 8i’

FROM A BUICK 8, by Stephen King, Scribner, New York, 2002, hardcover, 356 pages, $28.

When is a 1954 Buick Roadmaster not a classic automobile?

When it drives out of the mind of Stephen King. Then it motors with a darker, more sinister purpose.

It might seem natural that the villain of King’s latest work is a car. But the Bangor author had finished the first draft of “From a Buick 8” before his life-threatening road accident in the summer of 1999.

As he writes in the novel’s author’s note, “The coincidence of having written a book filled with grisly vehicular mishaps shortly before suffering my own has not been lost on me, but I’ve tried not to make too much of it. Certainly I don’t think there was anything premonitory about the similarities between what happens to Curtis Wilcox in ‘Buick 8’ and what happened to me in real life. … I changed nothing in the course of my story to reflect what happened to me; most of what I wanted was there in the completed draft. The imagination is a powerful tool.”

“From a Buick 8,” which hits the shelves Tuesday, tells the story of the stormy relationship between Troop D of the Pennsylvania State Police, located in the rural western area of that state, and the aforementioned Buick, which has resided for more than 20 years in a shed between the troop’s barracks.

The Buick (although that’s not what it really is) was first towed to the barracks after its driver disappeared. Over the next couple of decades, the troopers learn what to do, and more importantly what not to do, around the car.

Enter Ned Wilcox. He’s the teen-age son of Curtis Wilcox, a trooper struck and killed by a drunken driver during a traffic stop the previous year. Ned helps out around the barracks, to be close to those whom his father was close to. He’s also looking for answers, first about his father’s death, and then about the Buick, which had become his father’s obsession.

Sandy Dearborn, the troop’s sergeant and the book’s primary narrator, doesn’t have any answers for Ned: “I thought of telling him I didn’t know about reasons, only about chains – how they form themselves, link by link, out of nothing; how they knit themselves into the world. Sometimes you can grab a chain and use it to pull yourself out of a dark place. Mostly, though, I think you get wrapped up in them. Just caught, if you’re lucky. F- strangled, if you’re not.”

Dearborn, aided by his fellow troopers, sits down one night to tell Ned the story of the Buick. It’s a tale of appearances and disappearances, a search for answers that never come.

Ned’s dad, the most fervent Roadmaster scholar, eventually reached that conclusion, as Dearborn related: “Realizing what Curt had come face to face with for the first time since the Buick showed up, and maybe for the first time in his life: that he was almost certainly never going to know what he wanted to know. What he’d told himself he needed to know. His ambition had been to discover and uncover, but so what? … There comes a time when most folks see the big picture and realize they’re puckered up not to kiss smiling fate on the mouth but because life just slipped them a pill, and it tastes bitter.”

Told through a series of flashbacks, “From a Buick 8” illustrates how the miraculous can often be overshadowed by the mundane. While the novel gives a continual sense of foreboding, it can be a little frustrating. Readers may find themselves echoing Ned’s thoughts as voiced by Dearborn: “But – this is important – tell me a story, one that has a beginning and a middle and an end where everything is explained. Because I deserve that. Don’t shake the rattle of your ambiguity in my face. I deny its place. I repudiate its claim. I want a story.”

But King’s world has never been one of hard-and-fast conclusions. The boogeyman can be banished, but he’s never totally gone. Of “From a Buick 8,” King wrote, “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 those events.”

“From a Buick 8” shows King at his most reflective and philosophical. As always, the thrills and chills are there, but they mostly lurk just out of sight. King entertains, but more importantly, he makes the reader think about those things rarely pondered in life.