No more than a dark pencil line on a blank page. A horizon line, maybe. But also a slot for blackness to pour through...A terrible construction site accident takes Edgar Freemantle's right armand scrambles his memory and his mind, leaving him with little but rageas he begins the ordeal of rehabilitation. A marriage that produced twolovely daughters suddenly ends, and Edgar begins to wish he hadn'tsurvived the injuries that could have killed him. He wants out. Hispsychologist, Dr. Kamen, suggests a "geographic cure," a new lifedistant from the Twin Cities and the building business Edgar grew fromscratch. And Kamen suggests something else."Edgar, does anything make you happy?""I used to sketch.""Take it up again. You need hedges... hedges against the night."Edgar leaves Minnesota for a rented house on Duma Key, a stunninglybeautiful, eerily undeveloped splinter of the Florida coast. The sunsetting into the Gulf of Mexico and the tidal rattling of shells on thebeach call out to him, and Edgar draws. A visit from Ilse, the daughterhe dotes on, starts his movement out of solitude. He meets a kindredspirit in Wireman, a man reluctant to reveal his own wounds, and thenElizabeth Eastlake, a sick old woman whose roots are tangled deep inDuma Key. Now Edgar paints, sometimes feverishly, his exploding talentboth a wonder and a weapon. Many of his paintings have a power thatcannot be controlled. When Elizabeth's past unfolds and the ghosts ofher childhood begin to appear, the damage of which they are capable istruly devastating.The tenacity of love, the perils of creativity,the mysteries of memory and the nature of the supernatural -- StephenKing gives us a novel as fascinating as it is gripping and terrifying.