Stephen King's "Duma Key": Where It All Began...
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"I started to imagine a little dead girl standing on that road--twin dead girls, with their hands linked. The image came from nowhere... it came around dusk, which is a spooky time of day anywhere, but particularly on the coast of Florida." --Stephen King
The quote above is from a video message from Stephen King talking about an image that had been lurking in his head for years... one that eventually found a home in his new novel, Duma Key (available January 22). In an exclusive essay for Amazon.com, King's longtime editor Chuck Verrill offers a side-by-side comparison of "Memory," a King story that appeared in the summer 2006 issue of Tin House, and the first chapter of Duma Key, the book it eventually grew into.
--BTP
In the spring of 2006 Stephen King told me he was working on a Florida story that was beginning to grow on him. "I'm thinking of calling it Duma Key," he offered. I liked the sound of that--the title was like a drumbeat of dread. "You know how Lisey's Story is a story about marriage?" he said. "Sure," I answered. The novel hadn't yet been published, but I knew its story well: Lisey and Scott Landon--what a marriage that was. Then he dropped the other shoe: "I think Duma Key might be my story of divorce."
Pretty soon I received a slim package from a familiar address in Maine. Inside was a short story titled "Memory"--a story of divorce, all right, but set in Minnesota. By the end of the summer, when Tin House published "Memory," Stephen had completed a draft of Duma Key, and it became clear to me how "Memory" and its narrator, Edgar Freemantle, had moved from Minnesota to Florida, and how a story of divorce had turned into something more complex, more strange, and much more terrifying.
If you read the following two texts side by side--"Memory" as it was published by Tin House and the opening chapter of Duma Key in final form--you'll see a writer at work, and how stories can both contract and expand. Whether Duma Key is an expansion of "Memory" or "Memory" a contraction of Duma Key, I can't really say. Can you?
--Chuck Verrill
gotham on June 09, 2008 at 08:56 AM
any answers