In his latest novel, Duma Key (Scribner 2008), Stephen King uses characters with disabilities to spin a tale of horror that is rooted in the body. The story is narrated retrospectively by Edgar Freemantle, a self-made construction tycoon in Minnesota who has recently suffered a job-site injury that fractured his skull and crushed his right hand, requiring amputation.

As Freemantle convalesces in Minnesota, he struggles with loss of memory and of language, and he works toward integrating into his life the chronic pain of an artificial hip and the uncanny sensations of a phantom limb.

Freemantle recalls, “a thousand midnight bells ringing in my head, pain burning and stiffening my right side like a poker, my missing right arm itching, my missing right fingers twitching, no more Oxycontin due for awhile. . . .” King shows how the symptoms of Freemantle’s countrecoup injury affect behavior and how those changes in behavior can negatively affect even his closest relationships. Freemantle’s pain and frustration turn into anger, causing his wife to seek a divorce:

"I was angry all the time. . . .  When I grew stronger, I tried to hit people. Twice I tried to stab [his wife] Pam, and on one of those occasions I succeeded, although only with a plastic knife. She still needed a couple of stitches in her forearm. There were times when I had to be tied down."

While King does not expect his audience to condone or excuse Freemantle’s violence, he expects them to understand it more clearly, to view it (but not Freemantle himself) sympathetically.

When Freemantle leaves Minnesota for a rental property on Florida’s Duma Key—“Salmon Point, No. 13”—he discovers that his “old life” has ended and his “new life” as an aspiring artist with disabilities (one whose work channels a supernatural power) has begun.

When Duma Key turns toward the gothic, King’s representations of Freemantle become problematically conventional. Freemantle’s periods of artistic “unbottling”—a first-time painter, he produces 30 extraordinary paintings in three months—are always announced by intense itching and tingling in his phantom limb.

Moreover, the reader learns that Freemantle’s creative bursts are linked to the supernatural, for in several scenes Freemantle’s painting leads to what might be called miraculous ends. These representations reinforce antiquated assumptions that bodies with differences signify prodigiousness: Freemantle is not a painter with an impairment; he is a painter because of impairment.

A malevolent spirit named Perse uses Freemantle and his art to intrude into the world of the living and wreak havoc. When Freemantle speculates on why Perse has chosen him as a medium, he thinks, “She must have thought that when it came to mischief-making, the potential for a talented one-armed artist was great.” Unfortunately, King is relying on his readers to share Perse’s opinion that a “one-armed artist” would be easy prey precisely because of his disability and presumptively-unavoidable rage.
Finally, Freemantle is able to subdue Perse, yet the climax foreshadows his inability to perform some physical activities that this reviewer-with-an-upperex-amputation suspects many people with disabilities in Freemantle’s situation could perform with ease.

Duma Key does not altogether abandon more-realistic depictions. At his successful opening, Freemantle (labeled an “American Primitive”) is confused by the attention he receives from women at the gallery opening. 

“The women…jeez," Freemantle thinks. "When my eyes met theirs, I caught a softening, a speculation, as if they were wondering how I might hold them with only one arm. That was probably crazy, but—.” Here, King provides a representation of a common anxiety in a mixed interaction: Is the gaze one of unmediated sexual desire or is it one that fetishizes bodily otherness?

Duma Key is a sophisticated King novel and a flat-out page turner, but King paints his people with disabilities with an uneven hand, unable to decide if they should be envied or pitied. Like his spirit Perse, he cannot let them be.