(Bloomberg) — By the time the actual monsters show up in Stephen King's "Duma Key," the demons inside the hero's head have already scared us witless.

"Duma Key" continues the author's recent melding of the horror novel with the cosy domestic tale. What makes it particularly upsetting is that while King's last book, "Lisey's Story," was about the persistence of love in marriage, "Duma Key" is about its abrupt death.

Edgar Freemantle has risen in the construction trade by his own wits and persistence.

When a crane crashes into his SUV at a building site, severing his right arm and fracturing his skull, Edgar seems to lose his old personality, too.

He is overcome by fits of rage he can barely remember — but which are so frightening that his wife leaves him.

Wanting to get away from everything familiar, Edgar moves to a small Florida island and, on the advice of his therapist, takes up his old hobby of sketching.

He produces a few drawings, but they quickly give way to a barrage of boldly coloured oil paintings in which the most mundane objects are rearranged and juxtaposed to surreal, disturbing effect.

Edgar paints as if in the grip of possession (and King has given the urge a nice, grisly harbinger: When it's time to paint, Edgar's phantom limb itches).

You could say that "Duma Key" is about how Edgar gets his life back.

The skeleton-grin irony is that what he gets back is not quite his life.

Edgar comes to realise that his paintings are partly his story and partly the story of Elizabeth Eastlake, the island's elderly doyenne, who is losing her fight against Alzheimer's disease.

Stephen King is an old-fashioned storyteller, determined to provide his readers with long, luxuriant reads, and he seems to believe there's an ethical side to being an entertainer.

I don't want to oversell "Duma Key," but I don't think it's going too far to say that it's more concerned with the morality of writing than any novel since Ian McEwan's prize-winning "Atonement".

This is a book in which the very act of creation has the power to separate the artist from his life and his family, the power to eviscerate everything he's ever known.

Creation here is neither therapeutic nor does it take place in Yeats's "foul rag and bone shop of the heart" (a concept that always had some shabby, despairing comfort to it).

King understands creation as ferocity that has the potential to be unbridled, all- encompassing, devastating.

"Duma Key" is a riposte to the sentiment, sometimes used as a defence against censorship, that art can't hurt you. King knows better.

"Duma Key" does not have the potency of "From a Buick 8" or "Cell," those two alleged genre novels that are really the most profound response to Sept. 11 that fiction has yet given us. But it offers another kind of terror: not the horror of losing love and domesticity that haunted "Lisey's Story" but the horror of watching yourself bring about their destruction.

Charles Taylor is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.