From a Buick 8

From a Buick 8 is a horror novel by American writer Stephen King, published on 24 September 2002. It is the second of his novels to be centred on a car, after Christine, and both are set in western Pennsylvania. The title comes from Bob Dylan's song From a Buick 6.

The premise came from an accident. Driving back to Maine alone after a winter in Florida in March 1999, King stopped at a gas station, went to the bathroom at the back and slipped on ice, falling down a bank and nearly into a swollen stream. That gave him the gas-station incident at the heart of the book, and he worked out the rest of the story on the drive home. He finished a first draft in two months, was struck by a car in June, and stopped work on the novel for two years.

The plot is told from within a police barracks, where the officers keep the car in a shed and accommodate themselves to its effects. Objects emerge from the boot that cannot be classified, the vehicle interferes with the equipment around it, and it appears to be responsible for several deaths, including that of an officer named Wilcox. In the autumn of 2001 the dead officer's son begins working at the barracks and decides he has to know what happened, which is how the record of the events is assembled.