One can’t help but be in awe of the sheer body of work that Stephen King has accumulated during the forty-odd years he’s been writing novels and short stories. Said body of work has netted him several awards, including the Distinguished Medal for Contributions to American Letters and, more recently, a Bram Stoker award for best novel for Doctor Sleep, his sequel to The Shining (which was amazing, by the way). It has also inspired countless writers through works of imagination and sheer terror that aren’t limited to one particular genre – he’s written horror, dark fantasy, science-fiction, drama, and sometimes a mixture of all in a single potent pot. With Mr. Mercedes, King has added “hard-boiled detective novel” to the list of genres that he’s tried his hand at, and while I wish the novel’s antagonist had a bit more nuance to him, King has succeeded in bringing his unique brand of human, foibles-and-all character drama to the aforementioned style of writing.
The novel begins with an act of terrorism. A group of people lining up outside of a job center are brutally murdered by a man who plows a stolen Mercedes into them while they are waiting to hunt for employment. Some time afterward, retired police detective Bill Hodges, one of the lead detectives on the case before he left the force, receives a gloating note from the killer. It brings him back to life in a way, and leads him to conduct his own investigation without the knowledge of his former partner. Meanwhile, Brady Hartsfield, the killer in the Mercedes (don’t worry – this isn’t a spoiler. He is identified on the front flap of the book jacket and throughout the book), is planning something even more horrific than his act with the car, something that Hodges, with the help of a mismatched, tech-savvy pair, must stop in the proverbial race against time.
Overall, the novel is vintage King, with fully realized, very human characters doing the best they can against a seemingly unstoppable foe in a briskly paced thriller. His background in horror is also on full display here, sinking readers into the dark and disturbed cracks and crevices of Brady Hartsfield’s mind. That being said, if there is one qualm I have about the book, it’s the feeling that Hartsfield’s character suffers from a minor lack of nuance. Hodges, of course, is the retired detective who is more old school than his counterparts, but I felt as though there was more to him and his outlook than a typically gruff, lone-wolf detective.
Hartsfield, on the other hand, is an antagonist who is racist, sexist, homophobic, narcissistic and sociopathic. These kinds of traits in antagonists is, of course, nothing new, and King is far from the first writer to employ these characteristics in a novel’s antagonist. But the more I see them in a novel’s singular or collective bad guys, the more it feels like a cheap fallback in order to make it clear who’s the bad guy and who’s the good guy. Some of the scariest antagonists in literature, like Anton Chigurh in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, had plenty of the latter two characteristics, but were made interesting and compelling through the ways in which those characteristics shaped their outlook and their reasons for pursuing the protagonists. They were, of course, disturbing, yet bone-chilllingly interesting in that the stakes were raised as the protagonist struggles to survive their onslaught.
I, of course, am not trying to suggest that racism, sexism, or homophobia are good qualities to have. They most certainly are not. But I wish that King’s antagonist in Mr. Mercedes, while still a pretty scary guy, had a bit more nuance to him the aforementioned characteristics. In any case, fans of Stephen King will greatly enjoy his latest book, which will whet their appetites before his next novel, Revival, debuts in November.
The Eclectic Post-Dispatch 