If I look at it as the glass being half-full then this is the best of the books King has done with the Bill Hodges character. On the other hand it’s sIf I look at it as the glass being half-full then this is the best of the books King has done with the Bill Hodges character. On the other hand it’s still pretty much a shoulder shrug of a three star read which tells you how little I thought of this trilogy so I’m pretty sure that cup is half-empty after all.
Uncle Stevie tried his hand at doing a straight up crime thriller with Mr. Mercedes, but I found it to be a painful slog of poor plotting, uneven pacing, and a main character who came across as a reckless and irresponsible jackass. Finders Keepers had a pretty decent concept, but again it’s biggest flaw revolved around Hodges himself because he was almost completely irrelevant to the story which again highlighted that King struggles with mystery novels.
Now here in the third book King has thrown in the towel on trying to write a straight-up action thriller/ detective story and gone back to his roots with a villain who has psychic and telekinetic abilities. By introducing spooky powers King doesn’t have to rely on trying to put together a logical chain of events that depend on characters reasonably deducing things or behaving rationally. Instead, he can have them following hunches and feelings, and the supernatural element keeps him from having to twist the plot into pretzels to make it all work. Like a lot of King novels most of the characters also seem to have an uncanny knack for guessing at what's happening elsewhere which seems more acceptable with all the bizarre stuff going on.
As a Stephen King horror story by itself End of Watch would probably rank somewhere in the middle of his works. The problem is that it builds on the far weaker Mr. Mercedes as a foundation. Finders Keepers can be skipped, but it’s telling that you can bypass one-third of the story and still follow the major narrative. So what you end up with is a trilogy that started as a very flawed crime thriller, had a second book with zero impact on the main story, and then goes paranormal in the third act with only some minor hints dropped in the previous book that it’s coming.
The only reason to like these three books being linked together is if King managed to make you love the main character, Bill Hodges, and his two assistants/friends. I didn’t. I mean, I really didn’t. When he wasn’t hiding critical evidence and inspiring a maniac to seek new levels of carnage Hodges came across as this bland, grandfatherly figure. Mostly he exists to ask tech questions of his younger colleagues who seem to look up to him for some reason. I never really buy him as a tough ex-cop, and he sure as hell isn’t a brilliant detective which is shown yet again here when the major breakthrough in this one comes from Hodges asking a very basic question that he failed to do in an earlier interview. Frankly, it’s a bad sign that my first reaction (view spoiler)[ to finding out that the Hodges has terminal cancer was relief that his recklessness and general incompetence wouldn’t be endangering the public any more. At last, his reign of terror has ended! Also, in three books Hodges is never once the guy who actually stops the main baddie during the final showdowns. So what purpose did he really serve? (hide spoiler)]
King tries desperately to make the reader care about Hodges and his friends, but I’m left thinking that it would have been better for Uncle Stevie to just do this basic story as one book which could have been easily accomplished. Here's how. (view spoiler)[A cop stops a mass murderer and gives him brain damage in the process. After the cop has retired he hears about weird deaths surrounding the comatose patient and investigates. Hilarity ensues. (hide spoiler)]Finders Keepers also could have been a better stand-alone book without trying to cram it into this narrative.
One other note of complaint: I doubt that King accepts product placement fees for his books, but I was really starting to wonder if MacDonald’s hadn’t paid him off when the first several pages feature an adult EMT completely losing his shit over the prospect of going through the drive-thru. This guy, who a few pages later will be portrayed as a clear headed hero in a crisis, has this gem of a line when he sees the yellow arcs of a MacDonald’s sign: ”The Golden Tits of America!”
Classy. I guess I wouldn't turn down CPR from the guy if I had a heart attack, but I can only hope he's not too busy making boob jokes and doesn't have a hunk of half-chewed Egg McMuffin in his mouth if he gives me mouth-to-mouth.
Overall, I found all three books underwhelming. It really should have been one or two good Stephen King novels vs. two-thirds of a very flawed crime trilogy that Uncle Stevie tried to salvage by going weird in the last one....more
The good news is that it isn’t as bad as Mr. Mercedes, and that there’s actually a halfway decent plot lurking in here. The bad news is that this makeThe good news is that it isn’t as bad as Mr. Mercedes, and that there’s actually a halfway decent plot lurking in here. The bad news is that this makes it more clear than ever that Stephen King does horror a helluva lot better than he does crime thrillers.
The story starts out with an acclaimed author named John Rothstein who pulled a J.D. Salinger and hasn’t published anything in decades. Morris Bellamy is a huge fan of Rothstein’s most famous creation, a disaffected rebel without a cause named Jimmy Gold, but he thinks that Rothstein ruined the character in the final book of a trilogy by having him become just another suburbanite working in advertising. Since this is occurring in the ‘70s, Morris can’t go on Goodreads to complain about it so instead he breaks into Rothstein’s house and murders him. He also takes over 160 notebooks filled with all the writing that Rothstein has done since quitting public life as well as over $20,000. Before Morris can read the notebooks, which include new material about his favorite character, he gets waylaid on another charge and sent to prison. For 35 years Morris dreams of getting out and reading the notebooks that he had hidden before being arrested.
In 2009 a teenage boy named Peter Saubers and his family move into Morris’ old house. The Saubers have fallen on hard times after his father lost his real estate job in the market crash of ‘08 and then had the bad luck to get run over and badly injured while standing in line at a job fair. Pete stumbles across the notebooks and the cash, and he uses the money to help his family through their financial crisis. He also reads the notebooks which turn him into a nut for literature and another fan of Jimmy Gold. Several years pass, and Morris is released from prison which puts him on a collision course with Pete. That’s when retired police detective Bill Hodges gets involved along with his trusty assistants, Holly and Jerome.
One thing that Stephen King knows how to do very well (Other than spoiling major character deaths on Game of Thrones via Twitter. Thanks again, Uncle Stevie…) is writing about books. He’s often examined them from both sides in his work: as the act of writing/creating and from the standpoint of being a fan of reading. King knows there something magical in both aspects, but in his world there’s also black magic.
King has created what’s probably his own worst nightmare with Morris Bellamy, the fan who feels an ownership of a character and becomes violently angry when he feels like the author is mistreating him. There are shades of Annie Wilkes in this although the key difference is that Annie understood that her favorite character was a creation and wanted to control what happened to her while Morris sees Jimmy Gold as a real person that Rothstein has been a poor guardian of. This contrasts with Pete, the reader who is content to fall under the spell of an author and admire well-written things, and who feels guilty that he’s had to hide this literary treasure from the world in order to help his family.
The book is at it’s best when it’s about these two as polar opposites because it isn’t just about the conflict and tension of who possesses the notebooks, it’s King writing about the love of reading. I did question the coincidence of Morris and Pete both growing up in the same house years apart and both being the kind of guys who will absolutely fall in love with a literary character like Jimmy Gold, but that’s a minor quibble.
The real issues come when King tries to take this story and make it part of his on-going trilogy featuring Bill Hodges. I found Mr. Mercedes to be a mess, and Hodges was a big part of that as a hodge-podge (Pun intended.) of poorly conceived motivations and plot twists that made the character seem irresponsible and reckless. (Something that King even acknowledges in this one when Hodges reflects on his backstory and admits that he nearly got a bunch of people killed “by going Lone Ranger”.) He doesn’t do anything that egregious here, but the problem is that he is completely unnecessary.
Hodges doesn’t even appear in the story until almost halfway through the book, and when he does the main plot comes to a screeching halt as King has to explain exactly who he and his friends are as well as the backstory of Mr. Mercedes. Then his only real contribution comes at the very end and could have easily been done by a new character. The main reason that Hodges is in this book at all seems to be to set up the third book, and there’s even an element at the end that feels like the bonus post-credits scene in a Marvel movie.
In fact, the appearance of Hodges underlines that King, for all his vast storytelling talents, just really doesn’t have a handle on the kind of plotting and pacing required for a tense crime thriller. I’ve joked before that King has two speeds: dead slow and all-hell-breaks-loose. He very often can make that work, but it’s telling that a lot of his books take place over extended periods of time from weeks to months to years. King is at his best doing a slow burn, and there’s no question that he knows how to do suspense and a sense of dread in his usual kind of stories, However, he just has no natural feel for making that work in crime fiction.
For example, this plot is structured around two characters, Morris and Pete, and the readers know their whole story and can see where the trains are going to collide. However, once he brings Hodges and his friends into the story, he tries to turn it into a mystery with them trying to solve the riddle of what Pete has been doing. As the action ramps up at the end, a big chunk of the story is Hodges trying to figure out what we already read so there’s absolutely no tension to it. A good thriller often has the hero trying to figure out something the reader knows, but there should be some kind of climatic pay off. Like some bit of info held back, the revelation of which should provide a satisfying A-HA! kind of breakthrough that is critical to driving the plot forward. (The pivotal clue in Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon is a great example of making this work.) But here we’ve just got Hodges putting together what we already know and trailing uselessly in the wake of the real action.
King also sometimes has trouble with plotting when he can’t say that some supernatural force is helping push things along. There’s a great illustration of that here when Morris is trying to clean up a particularly nasty mess he’s made at one point, and he has every reason to remove a certain item. He even thinks that he should take it with him, but then he leaves it only because of a powerful hunch. Sure enough, he later has an opportunity to use that object to his advantage through events he could not have predicted, but the mere fact that it’s in the room shows that King decided to disregard the logic of the crime genre which dictate that you should always get rid of the evidence just to use it as a plot point later. Then to add insult to injury that object almost immediately become irrelevant after this twist which highlights how it wasn’t really necessary to begin with. So King introduced an element that he knew didn’t make a lot of sense, didn’t bother to come up with a convincing reason that it could have been logically kept in play, and then immediately dropped the whole thing so it was pointless anyhow.
King himself has even gone on record in a recent interview about how he’s had a hard time with these books and doesn’t understand how mystery writers do it regularly. While I like that he gave something new a try, I also think that he’s just not suited to doing this genre, and that he’s usually at his best when he has some kind of fantastic element to lean on. (view spoiler)[The end of this one certainly make it appear that King himself has realized this and is throwing in the towel on this whole crime thriller thing to bring Brady Hartsfield back as a telekinetic villain. If that’s the case, if the first and third books are going to be centered on Hodges vs. Brady then this second book is going to seem even more like an interlude that really had nothing to do with the main story of the trilogy. Which would again beg the question of what Bill Hodges is doing in this book at all. (hide spoiler)]
Warning! Some Stephen King fans (Of which I am one.) may be angered by this review and feel the need to tell me one or more of the following:
1) I missWarning! Some Stephen King fans (Of which I am one.) may be angered by this review and feel the need to tell me one or more of the following:
1) I missed the point. 2) I haven’t written a best selling book and therefore have no right to be critical of someone who has. 3) I should quit being so nitpicky and just relax for gosh’s sake! 4) It’s called FICTION, not REALITY. Idiot! 5) I should burn in hell for all eternity for daring to impugn the honor of their favoritest author ever and this super awesome book!
So to save us all a lot of aggravation, be aware that I’m going to be calling out Uncle Stevie for the what I consider to be the failings of this one. If you can’t handle reading someone being critical of an author or book you like and feel the need to make a comment in the spirit of what I’ve outlined above, I urge you to instead go find a review that liked the book instead of enlightening me as to how mortally offended you are that my opinion doesn’t match yours.
And now back to your regularly scheduled book review of Mr. Mercedes….
In the midst of the economic meltdown going on in 2009 a bunch of desperate people looking for work are spending the night lined up outside the doors of a job fair so that they can be the first ones in when it opens. In the wee hours a maniac wearing a clown mask and driving a Mercedes suddenly plows into the crowd killing 8 people and injuring many more.
A year later retired cop Bill Hodges is spending his days watching crappy afternoon TV shows as he occasionally looks down the barrel of a revolver. Hodges was the primary detective on the mass murder at the job fair, and his failure to catch the driver is one of his biggest regrets. After he receives a taunting letter from Mr. Mercedes he decides to pursue the killer himself rather than informing the police. Hodges is soon locked in a deadly battle of wits with the Mercedes killer who is a brilliant but troubled young man named Brady Hartsfield.
This is a departure from King’s typical supernatural stories because it’s strictly a crime thriller of the type you’d expect more from somebody like a John Sandford than the Master of Horror. (It also made me wonder why he didn’t do something more like this for his Hard Case Crime offerings.) There’s even an indication made that this was not taking place in the extensive King multiverse when someone makes a comment about how the clown mask worn by Mr. Mercedes reminds him of a TV movie featuring a killer clown lurking in sewers which goes against the usual flow when even his newer books like 11/22/63 acknowledge It as being part of the same world.
In the early stages I was excited about the prospect of King doing something off his usual beaten track, but there were a couple of major problems and a lot of minor details that left me more irritated than entertained.
First and foremost is the issue that runs through the whole book in that Hodges knows he’s dealing with someone willing and capable of engaging in wholesale slaughter yet never seems to consider what twisting the tail of a rabid dog could do. Plus, if a thriller is going to set up some kind of mano e mano contest between it’s hero and villain then it needs to figure out some way to provide believable reasons as to why the fight has to remain between the two of them.
Even though King goes to considerable efforts to try and rationalize why Hodges feels like he has to go after Mr. Mercedes without involving the cops, the results have varying degrees of success. When things start going sideways, and it’s made very plain what kind of danger Brady poses not only to Hodges but to other innocent people, to have Hodges continue to feel justified in not telling everything he knows to the cop makes him seem reckless and oblivious to the consequences even as King pays some lip service to the guilt that the retired cop is feeling.
This could have worked better if he had played up the angle that Hodges had become an obsessive Ahab chasing his personal white whale, but King tries to keep his main character as a likeable white knight. That gets increasingly hard to buy into over the course of the book. It’s made clear by the supporting characters that assist him and willingly lie and break the law to help him without a second thought that we’re supposed to be rooting for Hodges, and that King wants us to think of him as a genuinely good person. By the time that the plot has been twisted into a pretzel with the effort to try and keep the fight between Brady and Hodges without making Hodges look criminally negligent, it’s increasingly hard to not be completely frustrated with him. This is especially bad at a climactic moment of the book.
That’s all I can say without spoilers, but take the failure of Hodges actions and motivations, add in a plot hole, a glaring mistake by King and the biggest cliché in crime thrillers and it adds up to a book that feels like a wasted opportunity.
You can read more about these, but I’ll be giving up the ending in the (view spoiler)[.
The Insta-Love between Hodges and Janey is just beyond ridiculous. A good looking forty-something woman is going to fall head over heels for an overweight 65 year old guy who had some indirect involvement in causing her sister’s suicide? This seemed so unbelievable that I couldn’t believe King had incorporated the tired old trope of the main character having to hook up with a hot woman in a crime thriller. This gets turned on it’s head when Janey gets killed, but that’s when you realize that the romance was only there to try and provide another justification for Hodges to keep his fight with Brady personal.
It’s the explosion that kills Janey that also makes Hodges’ actions indefensible for the rest of the book and blunt King’s effort to explain why it works out that way. Not spilling his guts to the cops immediately killed Hodges as a sympathetic character for me as well as straining credibility. I can’t believe that a guy is so bent on revenge for the murder of the true love he met a few days earlier that he’s willing to not tell every thing he knows about a mass murderer who just graduated to bombing and poses an immediate danger to an untold amount of people.
When Hodges does decide to call in the cavalry, King introduces an immense arms bust that has all the cops so distracted that Hodges decides there’s no point in finally revealing what he knows. I’m calling a huge stinky pile of bullshit on that. I don’t care how splashy an arrest was just made, if Hodges called his old partner and confesses that he’s been in contact with Mr. Mercedes, that the killer blew up his car and that Hodges knows his name, I’m pretty sure the cops could peel some people loose to look for a high-profile mass murderer who just detonated a bomb on a city street that killed someone the previous day.
It’s also inexplicable that Hodges wastes a huge amount of time trying to get in touch with one guy he bullshitted earlier after losing his number to a dead cell phone. King tries to turn this into tension by having Hodges stymied in his efforts to get through the arena automated phone system, but that completely ignores that HE HAS ANOTHER GODDAMN PHONE IN HIS HAND THAT HE IS USING! CALL 911 AND SAY THAT MR MERCEDES IS IN A CROWD WITH A BOMB AND THEY WILL GET IN TOUCH WITH ARENA SECURITY FOR SHIT’S SAKE!
Then King tries to play it that only Hodges, Jerome and Holly can go in after Brady because they’re worried that he’ll set off the bomb so maybe you could argue that’s why he didn’t call 911. If that’s the case, why was Hodges so frantically trying to reach arena security? Were they going to be able to do something the cops couldn’t?
There’s also a pretty big plot hole that made me wonder if King or an editor gave this more than one reread. Janey introduces Hodges to her family as a friend who worked for the area security company rather than the ex-cop who investigated the Mercedes killings and inadvertently helped cause her sister’s death. King even has Hodges telling them cop stories reframed as being from his security days. Yet after Janey’s death, none of them seem surprised to find out that he was a cop, and it‘s never mentioned again. That white lie should have blown up Hodges’ claims to the police that Janey’s death wasn’t connected to Mr. Mercedes.
The mild punishment that Hodges receives at the end of the book really seem to gloss over the idea that maybe if he would have turned over the letter and not tried to goad Brady into a mistake that maybe Janey wouldn't have been killed, and he might not have even attempted the arena bombing.
There’s another bit that’s not as glaring as these other problems, but it made me slightly nuts. The concert is supposed to be in an arena that holds 4000 people, and King writes this as if it’s an enormous concert filled with pre-teen girls. Yet, my local arena that hosts the kind of rock and pop acts of the same type mentioned in the book holds over 19,000 people and it’s considered on the smallish side. So it seems incongruous to have this fictional boy band breaking out a giant stage show for 4000 people, and everyone acting like it was the biggest concert since those damn dirty hippies stank up Woodstock. I don’t think One Direction would get out of bed to play a venue that size.
One other complaint. While I liked the character of Holly, I also found her to be extremely similar to the new breed who uses their various social disorders to fight crime like Monk, Lisbeth Salander or Sonya Cross on FX’s The Bridge. (hide spoiler)]
While I went into this one with high hopes and thought King crafted a creepy and plausible villain for an era where mass murder seems to be the new normal, I couldn’t believe that a supposedly respected former police man would behave like this. The effort to try to force the plot to make up for the gap between what a responsible person would do versus what Hodges does eventually made the whole thing a story that had me rolling my eyes or ready to yell in frustration.
Loading...
