Ned Wilcox is struggling to deal with the death of his father, a state trooper killed by a drunk driver, when he starts showing up to his father’s old barracks to hang around and do odd jobs while hearing stories about his dad from the other troopers. Eventually, and more than a little reluctantly, they get around to telling the big story, the one about the car shut up out back in Shed B.
The “car” resembles an old Buick Roadmaster, but nothing about it is quite right. It’s got the wrong number of cylinders, the steering wheel is gigantic, the dashboard panels don’t work, and, most curiously, there isn’t any engine. Somehow, this monstrosity showed up at a gas station in town being driven by a man wearing all black. But when the man disappeared without a trace, the state troopers towed the car back to their place, where it remained for decades.
Ned’s father, Curtis, then a rookie officer, became particularly obsessed with trying to solve the mystery of the car, especially after strange things started happening in its vicinity and stranger animals started popping out of its trunk on occasion. The old-timers in the troop take turns filling Ned in on the experiments his father conducted and how meticulous he was about keeping records on the car’s activities.
If you’re intrigued by the set-up, I should warn you that this is not a typical story with a neat resolution. King is mainly interested in using the story of the car as a way to delineate the characters of the various state troopers and tell a sort of hidden story of their little chosen family in the background of the more intriguing narrative about the car. As the officers take their turn filling in Ned, the reader, theoretically anyway, gets an idea for who each trooper is, and how he fits in to the troop.
It’s a high-minded idea, but it’s not one King excels at. The troopers all pretty much just sound like cops, without too much in the way of distinguishing characteristics. More crucially, the actual stories they are telling about the car never seem to go anywhere, and they take forever to do so. Every incident revolving around the car is more or less the same as the others, and the sheer number of them gets extremely repetitive and dull. As the novel wore on and it became increasingly clear that there wasn’t going to be a satisfying explanation for the car, I began to really dread continuing to read on.
Of anyone alive, you would think Stephen King would have a firm grasp on the importance of storytelling. So the misfire of From A Buick 8 is a bit bewildering. Readers don’t want authors to pontificate on how life isn’t always a neat story, we know that already. That’s why we turn to novels in the first place. So give us a plot, dammit, and if you can’t think of a resolution to the book you’re writing, maybe just stick it in a drawer. Or out in the shed.
