As his corpus spans decades and the number of his works dozens, it's no insult to say Mr. Mercedes is not quite King’s best—but in ways it is one of his most impressive. It almost goes without saying that to take the tools of the craft King possesses and move those from the genres he’s most familiar with—horror and fantasy—to a detective/crime novel itself warrants some respect. That he does so with a full awareness of the genre, actively working to subvert it in increasingly important, clever, and meaningful ways, warrants even more and makes this one of my favorite books of his.

Since his accident, I have found much of his fiction to have a strained, cardboard-like quality, groping toward grandiosity, but inevitably taking up more space than it’s worth. Not to say I don’t like it—just that, for example, one can see the steady decline in writing quality as the Dark Tower books progress, even as the story becomes more brilliant and full. The sheer quality of the writing here, then, for me glows as some of his best (and possibly most consistent). Bringing a greater focus to detail, rarely falling back on his standard clichés and quaint colloquiums that no real person would use, crafting new and unique personas with their own reasonable quirks, King succeeds here where he sometimes failed, by working his way closer into reality than ever before.

One of the great charms, then, for me in Mr. Mercedes was the way, like Hearts in Atlantis, King seems to be chronicling an age. No other book for me more accurately represents the late 2000s, in passing creating a sort of schema into which the technology and personlessness of this age can be categorized and stored. I don’t know, but something about the fullness of his vision of life in the Midwest during 2008–2010 blew me away, the world so full and complete with everyday detail, that along with his constant meshing of the present with both the Biblical and Homeric past with the constant pop culture elements of music and detective novels, I fell in love.

And, as always, King understands his characters to a degree that many “greater” (more literarily stylized, perhaps) never will. His ability to create the semblance of realness, of character depth and warm resemblance to normal existence, even while stringing a foreign story, never fails to engross me. That the dialogue of each and all of his characters rings true to my ear doesn’t hurt either.

So, why did I shelve Mr. Mercedes as a horror novel? Simply put, there are few things in this world more terrifying than mass murderers—because unlike vampires or Men in Yellow Coats, they actually exist. They are a real horror, and the insight King brings to vicious insanity, characterized by the deftness with which the book handles the interplay between psychosis and violence, impressed me. And what is more, in the end, the shining knight, the character who represents all that is good in the world mirrors, in striking detail, the murdering villain. Good shines so similarly to evil that not even the motivations of the two can separate them—at the critical moment, both act from the same pool of grief and anger and insanity, and there’s a brilliance to that.

The ending, where the threads of the story do become most bare along the twisted and strange road the story races through (437 pages in three days is not my norm), is also one of King’s greatest triumphs as a writer. Subverting our expectations of heroism and detective/crime fiction, using instead an outcast of society to stand against chaos and darkness, King fails to create a completely new world of fiction; he does, however, manage to create a unique, personalized work in a long and pigeonholed genre. That counts for something, I think.

And, if nothing else, the story gripes you with such force…the near crazed experience of wanting to know how things turn out alone is worth reading for. King is a master of what he does, and I am proud to think of him, however sillily and despite our being strangers, as a family friend…for all the years of entertainment he has given all of us.

Entertainment: 10/10 ; 15 out of 15
Story: 8/10 ; 10 out of 12.5
Writing’s Quality/Style: 9/10 ; 9 out of 10
Characters: 10/10 ; 7.5 out of 7.5
Resonance: 8/10 ; 4 out of 5
Readability (5 being hardest): 5/5

Overall: 45.5 out of 50

Mr. Mercedes - Likewise Book Reviews

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