From a Buick 8
Stephen King

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 - and that it would be better if John Q. Public never found out about it.
Curt's avid curiosity took the lead, and they investigated as best the 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 eighteen 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.

When I first picked up this book at my local library, I had to wonder if this was going to be some modern re-hashing of Christine. The picture of the sinister looking Buick on the front cover with the grill that looks like sharp teeth was one of the things that gave me this impression. I couldn't have been more wrong. In Christine, the car was really a car. In From a Buick 8, the Buick is not. What is it? No one knows and no one can ever know. All that is known is that it looks like a Buick, but is not one. It's not even a car.

What is known, is that it is a portal to another dimension. Sucking in people from our world and spitting out horrors beyond imagination into this world. Most come through dead, unable to deal with our air and environment. Some come through still alive and have to be put down.

This story is told as a story. The troopers are speaking with Ned and telling the story as the book goes on. The only time it becomes a real time story and not a told story is at the very end when Ned decided to interact with the Buick. Even though his father died when he got hit by a speeding car while pulling over another vehicle and even though none of the troopers said as such, Ned knows that the Buick had a hand in his father's death. And he is probably right.

Don't expect a lot of answers in this book. You will never find out what the Buick really is, what happened to its original driver, what other world it seems to have an attachment to, etc. What you will get from this book is an excellent, well-written, engaging story from the master of horror. I highly recommend this book to anyone, but if you're a King fan to begin with, this book is a must.

My rating: Four out of five snails.