Stephen King "From A Buick 8" Signed Limited First Edition, Leather Bound Tray-cased No. 45 of 750

Personally signed by Stephen King and illustrator Bernie Wrightson.

LOW NUMBER 45 OF ONLY 750 PRODUCED

Cemetery Dance Publications 2002. Baltimore, MD. Stephen King "From a Buick 8" Signed Limited Edition. Very low number 45 of only 750 signed and numbered copies available in this edition. Brand new in red and silver gilt lettered/decorated with matching tray case. Beautiful quality production by Cemetery Dance Publications!

Leather binding with red and silver gilt decoration/printing, with special dustjacket (different than trade edition) in a folding leather-bound clamshell case lined with matching felt and again with silver gilt and red decoration/printing. Color and B&W artwork by Bernie Wrightson, who also did the artwork for The Stand and Cycle of the Werewolf.

• Illustrated by Bernie Wrightson
• Book design by Bill Walker
• Dust Jacket design by Gail Cros
• Page Count: 408
• Pub. Date: 2002
• ISBN: 1-58767-061-5
• Status: Out of Print

Published in three states:

1) Slipcased Gift Edition of only 1,750 copies printed in two colors with two color hot foil stamping and illustrated endpapers 
2)  Signed and Traycased Limited Edition of only 750 copies printed in two colors with two color hot foil stamping, illustrated endpapers, and a satin ribbon page marker 
3) Deluxe signed Lettered Edition of only 52 copies, each protected in a hand-made hinged box 

This listing if for state 2

From A Buick 8

From a Buick 8 is a novel by horror writer Stephen King (ISBN 0-7432-1137-5). Published on September 24, 2002, this is the second novel by Stephen King to feature a supernatural car (the first one being Christine, which like this novel is set in Pennsylvania); King's short story "Trucks" also involved paranormal events involving vehicles. According to the book sleeve: "From a Buick 8 is a novel about our fascination with deadly things, about our insistence on answers when there are none, about terror and courage in the face of the unknowable." The title comes from Bob Dylan's song "From a Buick 6". Award winning independent publisher Cemetery Dance Publications published a signed Limited Edition of the book in 2002.

Stephen King says that he was inspired to write this book on a car trip he took in 1999. During the trip he stopped at a gas station in western Pennsylvania. While looking around he slipped and almost fell into a stream of water. The thought that he might not have been discovered until a much later time, led him to the plot of the story. In the novel King describes a fatal automobile accident, and coincidentally King himself was the victim of a bad accident that almost killed him late in 1999. However, he said that he did not change any of the details in the novel to match his accident.

Major themes

The main theme of the book is that there will always be things in this world that we will never fully understand. The most obvious example of this is the Buick itself. We never learn where it came from, who the mysterious man that dropped it off was, or why it was even sent here in the first place. In the text, Sandy likens it to God - no one will ever know his plans, no one can ever make sense of them. Ned becomes frustrated as he learns the tale, as he wants explanations, and Sandy explains to him and to us in the narrative that there are no answers when it comes to the Buick. Even Curt Wilcox, Ned's Father who was so fascinated with the Buick, comes to give up on trying to pry the answers from it.

Another theme is the passage of legacy from Father to Son. Curt latches onto the Buick in a way that none of the other Troops do. He focuses on it, tries to learn from it. His son Ned feels the same, which is why he makes the attempt to destroy it. When Ned reveals that he believes that the Buick will one day fall apart, Sandy comments that Ned looks truly happy to him for the first time. What the Father started, the Son finished.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations There is talk of a movie adaptation of this book. At the helm is veteran director George A. Romero, who also directed another Stephen King adaptation, The Dark Half. The film has a possible 2007 release. The screenplay was written by Richard Chizmar, founder of Cemetery Dance Publications, and Johnathon Schaech, star of the Tom Hanks film, That Thing You Do.

Reviews

"While the book's relative brevity and simplicity does lend comparison to earlier King, and King has relied on a nasty car before (Christine), the author's stylistic maturity manifests in his sophisticated handling of the round robin of narrators (both first and third-person), the sharp portrayal of police ways and mores and the novel's compelling subthemes (loyalty, generational bondings) and primary theme: that life is filled with Buick 8s, phenomena that blindside us and that we can never understand. This novel isn't major King, but it's nearly flawless and one terrific entertainment."
— Publishers Weekly

King's villain is one rotten car, a Buick Roadmaster penned up behind the state police barracks that seems to have been responsible for the disappearance of several people. King himself had a near-fatal run-in with an auto shortly after finishing the first draft, an eerie coincidence he addresses in an afterword.
— Library Journal

From A Buick 8 is vintage King....[He] knows how to jolt his readers.
— USA Today