The state police of Troop D in rural Pennsylvania have kept a secret in Shed B out back of the barracks ever since 1979, when Troopers Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox answered a call from a gas station just down the road and came back with an abandoned Buick Roadmaster. Curt Wilcox knew old cars, and he knew immediately that this one was…wrong, just wrong. A few hours later, when Rafferty … Rafferty vanished, Wilcox and his fellow troopers knew the car was worse than dangerous — and that it would be better if John Q. Public never found out about it.
Curt’s avid curiosity taking the lead, they investigated as best they could, as much as they dared. Over the years the troop absorbed the mystery as part of the background to their work, the Buick 8 sitting out there like a still life painting that breathes — inhaling a little bit of this world, exhaling a little bit of whatever world it came from.
In the fall of 2001, a few months after Curt Wilcox is killed in a gruesome auto accident, his 18-year-old boy Ned starts coming by the barracks, mowing the lawn, washing windows, shoveling snow. Sandy Dearborn, Sergeant Commanding, knows it’s the boy’s way of holding onto his father, and Ned is allowed to become part of the Troop D family. One day he looks in the window of Shed B and discovers the family secret. Like his father, Ned wants answers, and the secret begins to stir, not only in the minds and hearts of the veteran troopers who surround him, but in Shed B as well….
From a Buick 8 is a novel about our fascination with deadly things, about our insistence on answers when there are none, about terror and courage in the face of the unknowable.
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I know I’m in the minority on this one, but I enjoyed this book. The common theme among people who dislike it seems to be that FAB8 is purposely an anti-story. King hammers that home quite a bit with the main protag’s insistence that not every story has an end, that in between the interesting plot points of life, well, life goes on and you shouldn’t expect that it doesn’t.
In some ways, I feel like this was King flipping a little good-natured middle finger to some of his readers who demand every one of his stories contain everything they want or everything they expect. Sometimes a story is just about what happened. Sometimes the answers you want aren’t there. And in a book that deals with a boy learning to cope with the death of his father, I think it was appropriate for this to be a story that doesn’t offer a satisfying answer. Because when you ask that big WHY?! in the face of tragedy, when you’ve lost someone, the answers rarely – if ever – come. The ones that do are never any good. It’s just what happened, that’s all, and you shouldn’t expect more. Okay?
It seems like occasionally King just wants to have a conversation about something, and here he has done just that. So if you want to have a good talk about life and death and how we don’t always get the answers to life’s biggest mysteries, if you want to talk a little about where we find the strength to go on in the wake of tragic loss, then I think FAB8 is as good a story as any of Stephen King’s other novels. But if you’re looking for everything to be tied up in a neat and tidy way, if you think you’re owed answers simply because you sat down to hear what happened, then maybe this one isn’t for you.
This book is amazing and I love it and I would reread the book again
One of his best! Right up there with Misery and Green Mile.
Stephen King has a strange mind!
Couldn’t put it down. If you are a Steven King fan, This is a must read!
Gripping! Engrossing! So much of all the stuff that gets to me. There’s the realistic sad backstory of one of the characters and the love shown in normal friendships that exist in a workplace or a community, just the sweetness of humanity that we don’t think about all the time. And then, and then! All the insane, horrifying things that you can’t believe anyone could think of and put down in words. I have to hide this book on myself so that I can forget enough of it to read it again.
Great book! Highly recommended!
I’m not generally a King fanboy, but have enjoyed many of his stories. However, “From a Buick 8” (a riff on a Dylan tune) combines an unusually restrained yet creative speculative fictional tale with some of the best of King’s human insight narratives and character development. King is strongest when he can take the absolutely ordinary-the people and accents and behaviors of those neighbors around the corner-and drop them undistorted into absolutely impossible and often horrible situations. That soup often has a bitter and strange taste, but for those who develop the liking, there is little quite like it. No vampires, no devils, no telekinesis-this scifi tale is actually one of the more realistic (and eccentric) alien encounter stories I’ve come across that also leaves a tremendous amount unexplained and thus mysterious as is the King norm. My favorite King novel.
I was curious to read a King novel to see ‘what the fuss was about’ – I was not disappointed. Not a genre I love but I thoroughly enjoyed the book.
“From A Buick 8” was one of the first books I read by Mr. King after many years of taking a pass on his work. His novel “Misery” had gone to places I found too intense and terrifying because the only monster in that piece had been human. There were no safety-barriers of the supernatural involved, just madness, obsession and torture.
Yet something about this novel beckoned and I plunged into his world once more and I’m glad it did. The story covers a 25 year period in the lives of a group of state troopers who act as ‘guardians’ over a strange Buick Roadster abandoned at a gas station back in 1979 by a mysterious ‘man in black’ who wandered off and was never seen again.
The vehicle seems to be like any other car… or so you would think at first glance. Then you’d notice little things like how the design seems normal, but there are little touches that don’t quite add up. For one thing there’s no keys to start it up. The dashboard is a bit off too, like someone created a prop for a movie. But the car is not a Hollywood prop, it’s something much more sinister.
People die around this vehicle, and sometimes ‘things’ come out of it when you least expect it. Things that are not of this world and don’t belong among us.
Mr. King weaves a tale told from several points of view by the various troopers in this story who’ve watched over and tried to contain the vehicle’s sinister powers. This a is a true classic, with many unexpected turns and moments of sheer terror Mr. King is so well-known for.
A great read.
If you like Stephen King you should like this book. He comes up with the most imaginative stories. I really enjoyed it.
Interesting book. Hard to put down till the end.
Old-school Steven King, one of his best.
Wish this book had a follow up…
Typical Stephen King.
I love Stephen King, and this book was one of his best!
I started to read a Buick 8 because my dad had one well this was not the one.
A great book that could only come out of the imagination of Stephen King.
The kind of book you can’t put down till the last page.
A great read.
read many many years ago. don’t remember much about it
Really bad