He also needs a change of scenery, since everything in Minnesota reminds him of the life no longer available to him. So the therapist advises him to take up a pencil and pad again because Edgar needs 'hedges against the night.' During the painful rehabilitation process, when a 'thousand midnight bells' ring in his head and pain burns and stiffens his right side like a poker, when his wife leaves him and he begins to seriously contemplate killing himself, his therapist asks him if anything makes him happy. In this way the book and his 'other life' begins. In it we follow Edgar Freemantle, our narrator, who 'used to be a big deal in the building and contracting business' until a twelve-story crane slams into his Dodge pickup and crushes it like a can on a Minnesota job site. So it is with Duma Key (609 pages, Scribner, $28), King's latest novel. Stories such as The Stand, The Shining, The Green Mile, and Different Seasons are profoundly moving not because they scare a gasp out of you (and they do), but because they so convincingly create people out of ink and paper who continue to live with you long after the book closes, years later coming up in soft-focus memory like friends you've lost touch with but vividly remember. Like all great horror writers, King is at his best when the speculative takes a backseat to character. Wait half an hour and another one will come grumbling along with the same sort of passengers having the same sort of conversations. As brilliant as they may be, I feel about them as I do a bus.

Can I say the same about the equally prodigious John Updike or Joyce Carol Oates? I'm afraid I can't. And despite all the years I've spent in his skull, privy to his nightmares, King somehow remains compulsively readable. After gobbling up his more than forty novels and two hundred short stories, you'd think the world might have had its fill of Stephen King.

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