#ReadingLife: Mr. Mercedes

 

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. 

#ReadingLife: The Stand

 

Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long.

And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again. 

I finished reading The Stand the same day I published the paperback version of Lord Have Mercy. The start and end dates printed on the final page mark The Stand as being a work in progress from February 1975 to December 1988. Given Lord Have Mercy is just a few thousand words shy of its word count, I think the fourteen months it took me to complete it aren't too shabby. 

Every time I mentioned being a King fan, this was the book most recommended to me, and I can see why. I'll be honest and say that it's a book I resisted for a long time, mostly because when it comes to being scared, I'd much rather read about vampires, and ghouls, and killer clowns that rampant diseases. Especially in a post-Covid world, I was leery. But as is typical of all his books, The Stand is a book about many things, and the superflu is not so much an antagonist as a catalyst for exploring the horrors - and joys - of humanity. 

From a craft perspective, I think it's probably his crowning achievement. But he says it isn't his favorite book, nor is it my favorite of his works. The Clown Book still holds the top spot in my heart. In fact, though I could definitely tell that this was his work, peppered with his particular attention to detail, his music tastes, his idiosyncrasies, the book as a whole felt totally different from his other novels. I see it as one of those monolithic, lightning-strike books that feels like it possesses you, and needs to come out, and which leaves your fingertips as though you're channeling someone else's voice. It's his, but it's a version of him. Him wearing a different hat. I feel the same way when I shift between writing my different series: I can't decide whether I'm more authentically myself when writing Dartmoor, or Sons of Rome, or the Drakes, or one-offs like College Town. I think the answer - for me at least - is that different books allow us to explore different back corners of our minds, and, during the creative process, we exorcise different demons, and experiment with different forms of self-expression. 

Funny as it sounds, King handled the characters of The Stand with more gentleness than I've come to expect from him. An authorial voice that was kind and even delicate at points, with Frannie, with Stu, and Glen, and even with Larry. And yet, despite that, it's the overall story that will stick with me, rather than the characters; though I enjoyed their perspectives and felt fondness for many of them, I don't feel the need to scoop any of them up and drop them in my pocket a la Eddie Kaspbrak. I'll never grow bored of the marvel that is the individual reception of books. You never know which book, which scene, which character will strike a chord, and that's the forever magic of stories. 

#ReadingLife: The Tommyknockers

[I]t was good to be with your friends, good to be where you belonged...good to have some safe haven to come to.

After last year's unintentionally timely, and much-needed It reread, I decided I was going to spend 2024 tackling the Stephen King novels I haven't yet read. The man's written a lot of books, so that should keep me happily in doorstop novels well into next year, especially given my lack of reading time.

My first read of the year was The Tommyknockers. 

Despite its whopping 864 pages, this one reads as a much quicker book than It. As opposed to the monolithic study on childhood, and the impossibility of returning to it that is It, The Tommyknockers has a distinctly pulpy feel. That's not a mark against the novel; I love the way pulp novels can bravely throw wild, sometimes silly ideas out there and then catch you with a sideswipe that cuts straight to the bone. There's often a lot of truth in silly, and The Tommyknockers is no exception. It left me very nostalgic for the books of the eighties and nineties which were concerned with storytelling in the truest sense, as opposed to "being edgy," whatever the heck that actually means. 

The horror in this novel is of the big, existential kind, and is undercut by the personal horror of, in Gard's case especially, the struggle with addiction. The "Becoming" is a science-fiction means of amplifying all the ways the people of Haven are terrible; these are ways in which all people, to a certain extent, are terrible in a non-evil, but still oftentimes harmful way. Horror - effective horror - takes real world, small-scale fears, and spins them into something supernatural and fanged. King's great gift when it comes to the genre, and storytelling in general, is rooting that horror deeply and believably in a cast of very flesh-and-blood characters who feel knowable to the audience. 

My favorite lines are always those little nuggets of broader-reaching gold that are so terribly true, and perhaps not the sort of thing general audiences would expect to find in a novel of this sort - but which I'm always counting on from one of my all-time favorite authors. 

All the intelligence and determination in the world cannot create art without a bit of talent, but intelligence and determination can create some great forgeries. 

Last night I started Needful Things, and it's another great big chunky book, so I look forward to falling into its version of Maine for the next couple of months.