Time to get caught up on posting about the books I've read so far this year.
The first read of 2025 was Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King. Having exhausted the last of the OG Classic Kings that I hadn't yet read, I debated going back and doing a reread (which I quite enjoyed last year with It, and which was very helpful while I was writing LHM) of something, or venturing into some of his newer work. I had some...doubts, shall we say. King's focus the past few years seems to have been on political proselytizing on X and he's become the "Old Man Yells at Cloud" meme. So I didn't go for a new new release, but, rather, a newer one. I thankfully didn't dive head-first into a sophomoric X rant, but I also didn't venture into Classic King territory.
Mr. Mercedes is the first installment of a crime thriller trilogy about retired detective Bill Hodges, his unlikely junior detectives, and the sadistic mass murderer who engages him in a game of virtual cat and mouse. The villain POV in this book is unmistakably King. But if not for that, and his name on the cover, I never would have guessed that Bill's story was penned by the same author. It took me the first half of the book to feel anything like a connection to our protagonist. The novel as a whole reads as a commercial thriller. The book is shorter, sharper, much more tightly focused than his early work. It's certainly a well-executed entry in the genre.
What I missed, however, was the deep, lush, often-meandering sense of character and place that endeared his early work to me at a young age. I just can't help it: I crave that "something special" kind of prose that creates rich, slow-flowering garden landscapes of words. Even if they're terrifying and bloody gardens.
I think if you don't care for King's doorstop novels, this will be much more to your liking. At this time, I don't feel especially compelled to read the rest of the trilogy, and think I'll see about a classic reread instead.
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