Nearby, stylish Palm Avenue beckons with its high-end art galleries-though the Scoto Gallery where Freemantle shows his work is a King invention-and Main Street’s boutiques and restaurants. Your self-guided tour will take you from reading on Sarasota's beaches to reading in the Selby Library, where Freemantle gives a lecture in the story. And for Duma Key fans who have recently devoured the book, there’s nothing more thrilling than spending a day tracking down some of these sites and checking them out for yourself.

But many of the colorful, tropical sites and settings he mentions in the book are actual shops, restaurants and galleries located in Sarasota and on the nearby keys. The seduction-for both Freemantle and reader-thus begins.ĭuma Key is not real King, a part-time Sarasota County resident who has owned a house in the region for the past several years, fictionalized the island to suit the story’s purposes. The reader has already had time to contemplate how frozen an existence that contractor Freemantle had led in his former life of Minnesota, where he had a life-changing accident on one of his construction sites. ” Instead, these observations about the small spits of land lying directly west of Sarasota arrive a good 30 pages into the book. This is not how the narrator, Edgar Freemantle, begins Stephen King’s “Duma Key. I only knew one reached it by crossing a WPA-era drawbridge from Casey Key.” The beach is guarded by a waist-high band of sea oats… I knew nothing about the history of Duma Key.

Most of it’s uninhabited, a tangle of banyans, palms and Australian pines with an uneven, dune-rumpled beach running along the Gulf edge. The next step takes you to Duma Key, nine miles long and half a mile wide at its widest, between Casey Key and Don Pedro Island. If you had your seven-league boots on, you could step from Longboat to Lido, from Lido to Siesta, from Siesta to Casey. “There’s a charm-bracelet of keys lying off the west coast of Florida. Stephen King fans, read on: Here's how you can experience his latest novel, 'Duma Key,' in real life on Florida's Gulf Coast.

Duma key