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.
Mr. Mercedes is a 2014 release that opens on a desperate early morning line to a job fair in 2009. People are lining up like it is a concert. The juxtaposition between job fairs and concerts bookends the novel very well. The opening of the book lulled me into a literary ease before King foreshadows something awful at the top of the page. Then, he delivers on that dark promise.
Bill Hodges is a good character. In some ways he’s prototypical of the retired detective character you see in crime fiction novels. In many other ways, King delivers on making him and every other character three-dimensional. The love interest is particularly well-written. In terms of characterization in the small details, it may be some of his best work ever.
“The ages of man: youth, middle age, and you look fucking terrific’ ” Great line and King does a great job turning the hero character into a limited human unable to do it all.
Christine and It are a movie and a miniseries in this world as they are in ours. Maybe King was giving a nod to us to confirm the Bill Hodges universe is akin to ours in terms of a lack of the overt supernatural. I wonder if he can maintain that through the rest of the Bill Hodges books. Dennis Radner and Lee Malvo are mentioned as real life killers who exist in this universe as well.
Remembering the case in patches of time intertwined in rapid succession with the present is carried out brilliantly in the early part of the novel. King uses present tense for the current narrative and past tense for the flashbacks. That seems simple enough, but I think I would mess it up as an author if I attempted it.
Uncle Sugar is used as slang for Uncle Sam in last two King books I’ve read.
“That’s all history is after all — scar tissue.” Great line.
On page 111, “He only nad one cookie” instead of “had.” I puzzled over that way too long before I finally settled on it being a typo.
The setbacks on the plans of the heroes and the foe are incredibly well done. Both sides make great mental leaps and wrong conclusions throughout the novel. King avoided an old habit of his wherein characters in two different places come to the exact same conclusions again and again. In the past, he explained some of this away with psychic connections. I think it undermined his writing more than it helped it. The opposite is true in this novel. The moments of insight are balanced by moments of wandering through bad theories. Both sides of the conflict have power, intelligence, agency, and shortcomings. In this area, it is again, some of King’s best work.
Mr. Mercedes is one of Stephen King’s best written novels. It is consistently good throughout and very well paced. The ending is solid. I’m looking forward to the other Bill Hodges books.
My next post in this series will be Before Revival which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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