Book Review: "Mr. Mercedes" by Stephen King (2014)

I'm not the biggest Stephen King fan (not an SK hater either, mind you), but I heard him talking about this book on NPR one morning last fall, around the time of the TV mini-series debut, and decided to check it out. What I liked was the idea that the book is a crime story and has nothing to do with the supernatural, something I'm not a huge fan of in fiction.

In an age in which there seems to be some kind of mass killing every other week in the actual news, one can't help but be sort of mesmerized into buying a book -- by perhaps the world's greatest living genre fiction writer -- in which a man drives a Mercedes into a crowd of job-seekers at a job-fair and gets away with it, only to be hunted by a detective who comes out of retirement to chase him.

In typical Stephen King style, the book takes a wide-angle view on things. It's 500 pages where it probably could have been 200. There are, say eight characters where there probably could have been five, etc. But I suppose that to "love" Stephen King is to love that style of writing. Even I have to admit that I was a good half-way through the book before I picked my head up and realized I was so engrossed.

To me, that's Stephen King at his best: His books might move slowly at times, but they move, and you know damn well you're going to get somewhere at the end. There is going to be a pay-off even if it's a little too neat and happy, as was the ending of Mr. Mercedes. The simple fact is, when you open up a book eagerly, wondering what the main characters are going to get up to next, the author has "got" you. This book had me.

I also appreciated Stephen King writing in the crime fiction mode, rather than the supernatural; however, you can still feel the presence of the supernatural in Mr. Mercedes. Something about the way certain characters "just get a feeling" about something, which turns out to be right and to solve the problem at hand. What I mean is, I think Stephen King is so much in the habit of bending the rules of nature that even when he writes a book about regular people his habit is to just ignore the rules and probabilities of the real world. I felt as though I could feel King's hand pushing the story toward the ending he wanted, rather than obeying the laws of the world he'd set his characters in. But...this is fiction after all.