While From a Buick 8 is neither as strong nor as compelling as King’s best books, it’s eerie that the central theme so closely paralleled my own thoughts in recent months. On the surface, this book is about a strange car that looks like a Buick, but only if you don’t examine it too closely, because then you’ll see that it is like no other car ever imagined. Abandoned at a western Pennsylvania gas station by its equally weird driver, the Buick is impounded by the State Police and kept out back of the barracks in Shed B, where it occasionally shows signs of life. Sometimes things come out of its trunk, and sometimes people go in.

That’s the plot in a nutshell – your basic horror yarn. But this book is not about a Buick from another dimension, not really. It’s about the senselessness of death. It’s about how we, as human beings, try to impose some sort of pattern and meaning on our lives, when everything really is just chains of random events linked together. There are no easy answers to all these questions what we all ask, but which really come down to one thing: Why? We can’t even hope to understand death, no matter how much science we apply to it, no matter how many frustrated emotions we throw at it, not matter what we do.

So, while FaB8 is not the intricate, suspenseful epic story that characterizes my favorite King books, there is a lot going on here – a lot more than in many of King’s more ordinary horror tales. Perhaps that’s why it feels so unsatisfying at the end – because that’s the point. The reader – like the character of young Ned, who lost his father in a traffic stop gone horrifically wrong – will never get any satisfying answers, and in the end, the reader – like Sandy Dearborn, the cop who has lived with the weird Buick for two decades – will just have to accept that.