Even though we were at least all in our twenties, I and the cousins were placed at the kitchen table, the kids' table, while my grandparents, mother, uncles, and aunts all sat at the long dining table. This new cousin put down her copy of From a Buick 8 on the kitchen table, beside the side dishes.
"What's that?" I said.
"Stephen King," she said.
I asked if I could hold the book. I didn't flip open any of the pages. I just turned to the back and peered at the dust jacket, where the author's photo was. There was Stephen King, positioned in the corner at a cream-colored wall, bearded, his head cocked upward, his eyes toward the ceiling. Seemed typically creepy. What one would expect from a horror author. Head up, away from camera. Adam's apple exposed.
Twenty-four years have passed. Appropriate because this is a book about the passage of time. The story is told in an alternating style of chapters labeled "Now" and "Then." It begins like this. A boy named Ned is visiting the police station of some Pennsylvania state troopers, talking to the oldheads about the death of his father. You see, his father was a statie, and had recently died in a freak accident. If I remember correctly, his father was standing at the side of the road, writing someone a ticket, when a drunk-driver plowed into him. (In the middle of drafting this book, Stephen King was walking along the side of the road when he was struck by a van that severely injured him and almost killed him. Put that note in your back pocket.)
What the boy Ned can't do is make sense of his father's seemingly senseless death. To comfort him, a couple staties sit with him on the bench outside the station looking onto a storage facility they call Shed B. The staties point out the shed and let Ned know there were plenty absurd occurrences with the object over there. Ned wants to know more. Inside the shed is what, if you were to peer through the shed windows, appears to be a 1953 Buick Roadmaster.
Here's the story of how it got there. One day, a man in a low hat and long overcoat parked the Roadmaster at a gas station. When he got out, the gas station attendant asked the man how much gas he wanted. "Twenty dollars' worth," the man said, in a voice that sounded alien. The attendant pumped the gas while the man went to the bathroom, then the attendant went back inside the station. Thirty minutes passed. The man who had been driving the Roadmaster never returned to the car. The attendant called the troopers. They decided to impound it.
From the very beginning, the state troopers knew there was something special about this car. For one, when they looked under the hood, they noticed that the battery wasn't connected to any kind of wiring. When they checked the car's interior, they saw that the glove compartment was fake. The latch outside the compartment didn't latch anything. And the odometer and other dials behind the steering wheel were all fake. And guess what? If you tried to crack the windshield or key the side of the car, the Roadmaster would magically "heal."
They thought it would be fine to keep this mysterious car in the storage shed, Shed B, and leave it at that, but over time, strange lights would shine from the car inside the shed, and strange flora and fauna would spit up from the car's trunk. The state troopers would periodically have to dispose of these strange beasts and strange plants.
As our narrative in From a Buick 8 continues, Ned continually wants to delve into what the Buick is, what it means, et cetera. The staties don't have an answer. It's something from beyond our realm and doesn't fit a tidy explanation.
During this explanation of the ineffable car, it becomes clear that by analogy the standard narrative that Ned tries to impose on making sense of his father's death doesn't work either. There's no rhyme or reason to why his father died beyond the bear facts. And more broadly, Ned and the staties come to terms with the fact that there's no coherence to a fully lived life, either. That's the conclusion they come to, anyway.
King was struck by a van while working on this novel. His body was twisted up. It took more than a year to recover. King tells us readers in the afterword that ironically he'd drafted the stuff about Ned's father being struck by a vehicle before he was. But the stuff about making sense of what it means to be struck by a vehicle and to either survive or die, that came after King himself was struck by a vehicle and almost died. King has said in interviews that he thought this was going to be his final book, that maybe he was going to give up on writing. He's since written thirty more books and counting.
From a Buick 8 was not received well critically at the time, and it remains a black sheep among King's output, but its poor reputation is unearned. Anyone reading this in the twenty-first century will find this a profound, harrowing even, attempt at grappling with the ways in which it is difficult to make sense of why so many bad things befall us, and how it is we carry on.
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