"Spend Your Spring Vacation on Duma Key!"

You may visit the official consumer website of the Sunshine State, www.visitFlorida.com, but you won't find the title to this post among the "places to see, things to do" in that wonderful State. That is because Duma Key exists only in the mind of Author Stephen King as revealed in his current bestseller of the same name. And Duma Key was a place conducive to an artist, a lawyer, and a wealthy (mostly) senile spinster, especially because each suffered brain trauma, making them predisposed to mind control from something better kept on ice or at least in a fresh water environment.

My favorite character in the book is not the narrator, but rather one Wireman, former lawyer and survivor of a suicide attempt with a pistol to the ear, whose favorite sayings are sprinkled with Spanish. And he does an excellent job of reviewing the narrator's art gallery contract and suggesting the following changes just as any good contracts lawyer worth his or her salt would do, i.e.

• A more favorable revenue split between the artist and the gallery for proceeds from the sale of the artist's paintings after a certain sales threshold is met.
• Decreasing the artist's right to terminate the contract for convenience from 180 days' prior notice to the gallery to 90 days.
  
• Using a colorful term to describe the contract to begin with, as in "bunny-hug, very little to [expletive deleted] with." (I'm so impressed with this terminology, that but for the expletive deleted, I would have to start using this in my memos to my valued clients. I may use "bunny-hug" anyway! )

Is Duma Key a typical Stephen King horror novel? Certainly not. It is the best thing that he's written since The Dark Tower series. The characters in Duma Key are so real that you will be googling them midway through the book to see if anything comes up. The interaction between the three main characters - the artist, the lawyer, and the wealthy (mostly) senile spinster and how they fight the sinister force on Duma Key - represents a masterful work. King has left his typical horror literary fare way behind.

So, whether you spend your Spring Vacation in Florida, Hawaii, or Western Michigan, or for that matter at work, treat yourself to a great read from Stephen King.

Thanks for blogging with me thus far.