Mr. Mercedes

I haven't read all of Stephen King's novels--that would take some doing--but I've read his last few, and I think he's reached a new state of excellence. He hasn't really changed that much; it's not like he's writing Anna Karenina knock-offs, but his writing has taken on a wisdom that perhaps only old age can supply (he's 67, not that much older than me, but you know what I mean).

Mr. Mercedes is a terror-filled book, but it is not horror, in the sense that there's nothing supernatural about it. It's a murder story, but the murderer is flesh and blood but about as scary an individual as I've come across recently. The detective is a bit out of the box, one the inklings that King has matured as a writer.

The book starts with the crime. A group of people lined up to enter a job fair are mowed down by a guy in a Mercedes. Detective Bill Hodges is the investigating officer, and he was never able to solve it before his retirement. Now he's eating too much, sitting in a recliner, watching bad afternoon TV with his father's service revolver beside his side, suicide in the back of his mind. But then he gets a taunting letter from the killer, which rejuvenates him.

I should say at this point that any real policeman, retired or not, would immediately turn over the letter to the police, but Hodges does not. This wreaks of what Roger Ebert referred to as the "idiot plot," but Hodges is no idiot, and King bends over backwards to justify Hodges keeping everything he does, including recruiting civilians to help him, out of the police's hands. If he turned over the letter, or any other evidence, the book would be over, so we sort of have to either give him a pass or toss the book aside.

King is also kind to his hero, who is fat and balding and in his sixties, by giving him a sexual romance. This doesn't work as well, and if I were writing something like this I'd probably cut it all out. It's somewhat essential to the plot, but not as corny as King makes it.

Kind alternates chapters between Hodges and the killer, Brady Hartsfield, a first-class psychopath. He's racist, megalomaniac, and gets handjobs from his mother. He's also given two occupations that already most of us find unsettling--those guys who drive VWs to come fix your computer, and an ice cream truck man. He's also a computer expert, and in this day and age these kinds of killers can really give you the willies, realizing they know how to discover all your secrets. Given that King is not the kind of writer to steer us wrong, we await his comeuppance, and the ending, when Hodges and his friends stop Hartsfield from blowing up a concert hall full of teenage girls, is really well done.

King, as usual, litter his book with pop culture references and even meta moments. His characters are almost aware that they are fictional characters, such as when Hodges notes: "Maybe he could be Philip Marlowe after all. He imagines himself in a ratty two-room office that gives on the third-floor hallway of a cheap office building. Hiring a va-voom receptionist with a name like Lola or Velma. A tough-talking blonde, course. He'd wear a trenchcoat and a brown fedora on rainy days, the heat pulled down to one eye." Hodges does end up with a fedora, and it's an essential prop in the story.

His meta moments refer to his own books, which is cheeky but fun: "'You ever see that TV movie about the clown in the sewer?' Hodges shook his head. Later--only weeks before is retirement--he bought a DVD copy of the film, and Pete was right. The mask-face was very close to the face of Pennywise, the clown in the movie."

King is also very skillful at strategically dropping in moments of foreshadowing, the kind that is not subtle, but downright spoilers, such as saying that something someone says is the last words they will say on Earth, and bam!--they are killed in the next paragraph. Or he will plant a line chapters ahead of time, seeding the back of our minds: "Then Hodges says something that will haunt him for the rest of his life."

When I searched for this quote, I used the word "haunt," and I was kind of surprised to see how many times King uses it. I guess in a way this is a supernatural novel, because there is a lot of haunting, and ghosts, though they be imagined, are real to those who experience them.