buickeight

One day a man pulls up to a gas pump in a beautiful 1950s era Buick 8. He goes around the corner, towards the restrooms, and never comes back. State police from troop D go down to investigate, but find no clue as to what happened to the driver. He disappeared, abandoning a slightly off kilter looking car. It has everything a car should, but nothing it has is quite right. The steering wheel would look more proper on the helm of a ship, the radio and heat controls dont move, and under the hood the components are so insanely placed together it seems impossible that the car could start, let alone be driven. The officers, Ennis Rafferty and Curt Wilcox, have it towed back to the barracks, where it takes up residence in an old shed. For Ennis, the car will become the reason for his uncanny disappearance, for Curt Wilcox it will become an obsession.

Years later Curts own son, Ned, becomes introduced to the car. His father has recently died in a horrible accident, and hes been welcomed into the Troop D family. First he does odd jobs around the barracks, then he becomes trained as a dispatcher. One day he decides to clean the shed bs windows, and sees the Buick for the first time. He asks SC Sandy Dearborn, his fathers best friend, about it. Sandy realizes its time to tell Ned the tale of the car, so he, and other members of Troop D gather around, and he begins the tale. They tell Ned how it was discovered, how strange things would come out of the truck, how it caused people to disappear. It is an uncanny, unworldly thing, unexplainable even to those who spent the most time with it.

The story is told in a unique way. Sandy Dearborn tells the bulk of it, and in some ways he is the best one to tell the story, because he is simply an observer. The Buicks obsession never caught him like it did some of his fellows, he was just curious enough to be included in some of the hairier aspects of the Buicks weirdness, such as when Curt dissects a thing that was found dead near the car. He is also a very understanding person in that he sees what Ned is going through and is trying to help him. His narrative is often interrupted as we pause, coming back to the present to see Neds reaction to this story. We also switch narrators in order to get a better view of the parts of the story that Sandy wasnt there for. This tactic gives the story a closer, warmer feel than the usual straight line horror plot, but it is not perfect. It is a very passive narration, giving us an almost third hand account of the history. Its almost as if Sandy is telling us the story of telling Ned about the Buick. While there is a sense of intimacy, aided by the carefully drawn characters and friendly, familial feel of the troop, we have a great deal of distance between ourselves, and the action. It kills a lot of the excitement that a horror story usually generates, because it transfers the What happens next? will Sandy get out of it? into a creepy, mild curiosity.

Because if this, the thing that really saves the narration, and hence the book, is the Troop D family. Each member of the Troop is very well drawn, from the slightly flirty, slightly motherly Shirley Pasternak to the gruff strength of Tony Schoondist. They each have their own personality, their own inconsistencies, that, combined with the welcoming family feel that the troop seems to espouse, make for a much warmer, almost idealized setting.

When I first heard of this book, I was extremely skeptical. I read and loved Christine, and did not think it was really possible to write a second inventive book about an evil car. I will admit that I was wrong, I think the books is an interesting strange tale. In some ways, I think the point is less about this strange car than it is an examination of story, how we try and pass on our stories to the young, and how the young choose to accept or reject our experiences.

3 out of 5 spikes
Cindy Lynn Speer, written for Gotta Write Network October 2002