Product Description

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 vanished, Wilcox and his fellow troopers knew the car was worse than dangerous.

Curt's avid curiosity took the lead, and 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 what world it came from.

In the fall of 2001, a few months after Curt Wilcox is killed in a gruesome auto accident, his eightee-year-old boy, Ned, starts coming by the barracks. 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 family secret. Like his father, Ned wants answers...

From a Buick 8 is an audiobook 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.Amazon.com Review
Stephen King, an evil car, and a teenage boy coming to terms with the fragility and randomness of life.... Wait, haven't we read this before? Diehard King fans, worry not. Aside from the titular car playing a main role in the story, From a Buick 8 could not be less like King's 1983 masterpiece,Christine. If anything, this story resembles King's serial novel The Green Mile, with reminiscing police characters flashing back on bizarre events that took place decades earlier.

The book's intriguing plot revolves around the troopers of Pennsylvania State Patrol Troop D, who come into possession of what at first appears to be a vintage automobile. Closer inspection and experimentation conducted by the troopers reveal that this car's doors (and trunk) sometimes open to another dimension populated by gross-out creatures straight out of ... well, a Stephen King novel. As the plot progresses, the veteran troopers' tales of these visits from interdimensional nasties, and the occasional "lightquakes" put on by the car, are passed on to the son of a fallen comrade whose fascination with the car bordered on dangerous obsession.

Unlike earlier King works, there is no active threat here; no monster is stalking the heroes of the story, unless you count the characters' own curiosity. In past books, King has terrorized readers with vampires, werewolves, a killer clown, ghosts, and aliens, but this time around, the bogeyman is a more passive, cerebral threat, and one for which they don't make a ready-to-wear Halloween costume--man's fascination with and fear of the unknown. While some readers may find this tale less exciting than the horror master's earlier works, From a Buick 8 is a wonderful example of how much King's plotting skills and literary finesse have matured over his long career. And, most of all, it's a darn creepy book. --Benjamin Reese ... Read more

Customer Reviews (355)

wow..
A year ago i bought all of Kings books and have read about 14 of them so far. From A Buick 8 has got to be the WORST book i have ever read by king. A car that craps out bats and other stuff? weird...i know King has been known to be a little weird, but this is overboard...anyways..the good in the book is what is good in all of Kings books. the Characters. No matter how horrible the plot is he seems to make believable characters and that is what is so great about him as an author. I would reccommend all of Kings books because he is my favorite author, but i didnt like this book

OK, I get it.
The book could have been written in half as many pages and eliminated much retelling of the same story.Not a bad book just more than was really required.

Not his best work.
I am a long time King reader and have enjoyed most of what he has written. I love Pet Sematary, Carrie, The Dead Zone, The Shining, Salem's Lot and his short story collections.

I recently read and enjoyed Duma Key, so I decided to give some of his other, more recent work, a try.

From A Buick 8 is not a good read. It is not a fun read, it is not a fast read. It is not even an entertaining read.

The story starts with promise, as a car that is not really a car, is "inherited" by a Pennsylvania Troopers Station. The car is both a portal to and a manifestation of, another dimension. Strange things happen when the car decides to throw off energy.

However, from that good and interesting start, the book meanders. It is like listening to an old person spend 30 minutes telling you something that could have been summed up in 3.

The narrative is given by several different characters and each goes into mind numbingly tedious detail about everyday happenings. One small event fueled by the car becomes a 3 chapter opus told by several different characters which gives way too much information about something that isn't that interesting to begin with.

The ending feels tacked on and unrealistic.

Like Tommyknockers, this novel suffers from a lack of cohesion and focus. I agree with other reviewers that it would have made an interesting short story.

I usually love what King writes because his characters are so strong. Cell isn't a great book, but you care about the characters, and that keeps the book interesting. The characters in Buick 8 are much less three dimensional. I think even the author recognizes this and so little gruesome facts about several characters, are added on, almost as an afterthought. One trooper has two sentences written about him in the novel, the second of which describes his painful death from esophageal cancer. Why?

There are a whole lot of other novels to choose from when it comes to Stephen King, and I would recommend grabbing just about any other to spend your money on.

Should have been a Short Story
Have to admit I was not surprised to see that this book garnered pretty good reviews from Amazon customers. Seems like when an author gets as popular as Stephen King, he develops legions of fans who pretty much rubber stamp whatever he (or she) does, claiming it's the best thing since sliced bread.
As a new King fan, I am not quite so rabid. I do absolutely love his writing style (strong, strong narrative voice and expert use of similes/metaphors) and his incredible imagination and I would definitely say he is one of the best living novelists out there, but, come on people, "From a Buick 8" just simply falls short.
Now the concept of an antique automobile that can cause lightstorms and serve as a transportation portal between two dimensions is fairly imaginative - sure - but why do we as Constant Readers (King's own term) have to suffer through page after page after page of only moderately interesting commentary and dialogue to get to the climax? I think King made a mistake when deciding to use this as a full-fledged novel...I think it would have been much, much better as a tale in one of his short story collections.Maybe he could have swapped this one with "1408," making the latter a novel (it felt VERY rushed and jagged as a short) and the former the short (he could have condensed "From a Buick 8" to about 20 pages and would have done just fine).
I really missed King's unparalleled narrative voice in this book, which I believe really shines in stories like "Salem's Lot" (an EXCELLENT book) and "Needful Things" (also a VERY GOOD, though slightly too lengthy, novel). One reviewer mentioned that the lack of narrative was necessary because "From a Buick 8" deals with life's larger, mostly unanswerable concepts, but I disagree. Kingian trademarks - plenty of internal dialogue, social commentary, myriad perspectives and clever analogies - are all there, yet his usual style is absent. This book has a much more journalistic, declarative style that's more akin to "The Dark Half" (the worst King book I have yet to read ... couldn't even finish it) than to some of his other stories. I really missed his narrative voice. It's one of the main reasons I seek out his works (when he lets it loose, no one can do it as well as he does).
So, to wrap this up, my suggestion to anyone considering "From a Buick 8" as an introduction to the works of Stephen King, DON'T DO IT! You can come back to this story much later, after you have developed a respect and admiration for the man's true talent; which, in my opinion, is seen much more clearly in the books I mentioned above.

Jonathan's From a Buick 8
For my independent reading I read a book called From a Buick 8 by stephen king. It was a very weird book and I would have to say that it was one of the worst books he has written because normally I like his books a lot. Not only was this one of Stephen Kings worst books it was one of the longest. The story line went by so slowly it took for ever to tell a story that was actually pretty short and not that complicated. The book starts off talking about a boy name ned whose dad was a cop, and his dad lost his life late one night while on duty he got in a wreck and no one know how or why. Throughout the first half of the book it is all about how ned wants to be just like his father and become a cop, and how he is dealing with things now that he doesn't have his father because they were really close. The second part of the book is all about how ned has come across his fathers old squad car in the county barn. And he starts to reminisce of his father so he gets in the car that has not been moved in like a year and when he gets in the car darts forward, he jumps out and gets back in the car does it again. He starts to freak out, and overtime he eventually starts to realize is some how possessed and it is what killed his father. He has a hard time getting people to believe him, but he eventually gets the car to do it in front of someone else and then people start to to believe him. This was a very weird book and I would not recommend it to anyone it was all about like SYFI stuff and I didn't like it. So overall i would say this book sucked which is odd for stephen king, normally his books are good. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Good introduction
The book is a good introduction to the different building types you can visit in Bali.The photos and accompanying illustrations are helpful.The text is basic and gives reasonable summaries of the buildings.The downside is the tendancy for the authors to repeat topics in the sidebars included in each section.While consistent, it does become a bit redundant.I'd also like to have better access to definitions of the balinese terms used throughout the text.They're good to know, but become cumbersome afte a while.The bibliography will be helpful to those looking for additional information on any of the chapters. ... Read more

Product Description
Directory of Mills and Dyers in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. This book is a reprinting of the first section of the Blue Book and is commonly referred to as the Little Blue Book. ... Read more