“Welcome to my bamboo pain cave”
Duma Key is not a short book. I say this because I usually avoid not-short books. I’m one of those high retention slow readers that is good at slogging through technical material and not so great at reading for pleasure. Big books intimidate me.
If I saw Duma Key on the shelf at a book store I probably wouldn’t have even picked it up knowing that if I did and I read a bit and enjoyed it and bought it that later, seeing this giant book on the night stand, I would crumble under the weight of insurmountable inertia. On the Kindle, however, I was able to read a chapter or so, get hooked, then buy it without ever realizing how girthy it actually is.
Dear Kindle: thank you.
This is one of Stephen King’s best novels, and given his absurdly large body of work, that’s saying something. It is, at its heart, a compelling transformation story of a man severely wounded in a construction accident and his slow road to recovery. But to stop there would be like saying Watership Down is a story about rabbits. I’m not going to spoil anything but I will say that fans of classic King horror will not go wanting. I even made my mom read it and she loved it! She finished it in less than a week.
I wish I could read that fast.