The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
I think if I had to decide, I’d say Mr. Mercedes is better than the sequel Finders Keepers, but that does not take away from how great a story Finders Keepers really is. Finders Keepers, released in 2015, opens in 1978 to the backdrop of a revenge tale wherein a Misery vibe of an obsessed fan attacking their favorite author spirals into violence. The years will unfold until Bill Hodges and our friends from the first book are drawn into events finally, making their first appearance on page 191 of a 500 page novel. Risky choice, but I thought all the elements of the story were interesting enough to make this gamble pay off.
The ill-fated author character only wrote three books in his signature character’s adventures and then stopped publishing but kept writing in the style of the reclusive J.D. Salinger. More than a few crazed fans probably fantasized about breaking into Salinger’s remote cabin to take possession of his unpublished work. In our fictional author’s case, two more novels exist in notebooks that repair the mistakes made with the character in the final published book in the trilogy. This becomes the treasure that consumes the lives of many of our characters in this novel.
The second scene of the novel opens at the sight of the doomed 2009 job fair that kicked off events in Mr. Mercedes. There are many overlaps between the family of the injured father in this story and the families that filled out the action in the first book. From here, we jump back and forth between the 1970s events and those of our new characters moving forward from the Center City attack of 2009.
“Jails are filled with guys who were relaxed” is a great line.
In modern times, our characters laugh while watching the Big Bang Theory. I really like that show, but many of my friends did not at all.
“Not long after, he made the biggest mistake of his life” is good foreshadowing.
Bill Hodges tells a female character she should smile more because she is prettier when she smiles. It’s treated as a compliment in the book and a revelation to her and other characters. Men telling women they should smile more has fallen out of favor in recent years. Turns out women weren’t thrilled with this male insight for some time now. Bill Hodges and perhaps the writer who created him was or is still unaware of this. A number of men of Hodges and King age don’t always understand why this is a problem. I don’t think King is racist or sexist. I do think he has demonstrated in past years he is unaware of his biases and is not very open to accepting correction on them when people attempt to point them out. On curating a proposed anthology series, he received criticism for only choosing white male authors’ stories including one from his own son. He rejected any notion that this represented bias on his part. In dealing with the lack of female representation in award nominees, he gave a tone-deaf tweeted response that said he didn’t see color or gender when deciding on things like that. After pushback on the idea that not seeing it wasn’t the same as being unbiased, he issued a series of follow-up tweets that tried to clarify his position, but didn’t really address the underlying problem of unconscious bias that contributed to a lack of diversity in these arenas.
Over the last ten years or so of his work, I’ve seen less of these sorts of blunders big and small in his novels. A black female character in Revival called a white male partner honey instead of honey child, as all his black female characters used to say at least once a novel. The magic black man trope hasn’t appeared or been overused in that time period either including in Doctor Sleep wherein such a character had to make a return, but was handled with much more nuance. Female characters broadly over the last ten years in his work have been written better, with more dimension, and more agency than perhaps much earlier in his career.
All this would lead me to conclude that he is making adjustments that are impacting or addressing biases that manifested in his writing in past decades. Perhaps he is more aware of them than I give him credit for, but he’s just not keen to be called out about them in public. I’d say don’t tell women to smile more, or if you have a male character do it, have females around him push back against that more like they would in real life these days.
The mother figured out the source of the mystery money a little too easily from the nature of the clues before her at the time of her revelation. Both her and the sister deciphering it didn’t ring as true as the sister alone based on the clues she had available.
A nearly unthinkable tragedy is inserted in the closing chapters in an instant. It was jarring and would have completely undone the main character of this story. Then, King surprises me again with how he played it. It was just masterful storytelling. It made the peril of the ending stronger and better.
Dad sort of disappears from the wrap-up of the story. His injury was so vital to the plot that it felt like something was missing not having him be in those final moments. Then again, his absence probably added more power to the parts played by the female characters in the resolution.
There is a hint that the villain from book one who is visited a few times in this novel has something supernatural about him. The first two novels have had no supernatural elements to the stories which I really think added a lot of gravity to the action of the tales. With this detail, the third book of the Bill Hodges trilogy of books has the potential to lean strongly into that crime fiction laced with the supernatural that defines a number of stories from Stephen King. Either way, I’m looking forward to reading End of Watch.
Russ Dorr was Stephen King’s researcher on this book and a few others going back. He apparently gave King the title of Finders Keepers when King was stumped for one. This is the name of Bill Hodges business that keeps him busy when crazy crimes don’t pull him into unraveling complicated criminal enterprises or when some woman needs to be reminded to smile. It is such a perfect title for all aspects of the story in this book I can’t imagine this great novel being called anything else.
My next post in this series will be Before The Bazaar of Bad Dreams which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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