Duma Key

Edgar Freemantle, a wealthy contractor, loses his right arm in a construction accident and nearly dies. During recovery he rents a house on Duma Key—an isolated island on Florida's Gulf Coast—and discovers he can paint with his remaining left hand. The paintings are supernaturally accurate, showing things that haven't happened yet, and something on the island is using Edgar's new ability.

A child's tragedy and a presence connected to it—something that has existed on the island for generations, attached to the traumatic event that killed two young sisters. The island's history gradually surfaces through research and visionary paintings, and the entity uses artistic creation as its channel into the world.

The novel is set in Florida rather than New England—unusual for King, who has said he found Duma Key's Gulf Coast isolation genuinely unnerving in a way the Maine landscape, however beloved, no longer surprised him. The flat light, the Spanish moss, and the heat give the book a different atmospheric register than his Maine novels.

Wireman—Jerome Wireman—is Edgar's neighbor on the key, a former attorney who suffered his own catastrophic injury and is now caring for an elderly woman named Elizabeth Eastlake. He becomes Edgar's closest friend and moral anchor. His backstory is as tragic as Edgar's and provides the novel with a second character study as compelling as its supernatural plot.