book 39 – Mr. Mercedes
I have no idea why I ever thought Stephen King was a good writer. Maybe he WAS good, in his early days, or maybe he was just novel (no pun intended!). Whatever the case, somewhere around The Tommyknockers he just stopped being good and started being lazy. (To be honest, this might actually have started around Firestarter, but I was a HUGE fan at one time and gave him tons of leeway for probably way too long.) His books have a certain mass-produced feel to them, which is not overly surprising considering he’s written over 50 of them. I was especially put off when he started self-indulgently writing books with lead characters who were writers (Misery is the exception, I did enjoy that one).
I have occasionally tried to connect with Stephen King books again, wishfully thinking I might find one that hearkens back to his early works, but I haven’t succeeded yet. This particular book attracted me because it’s a trilogy around a central character, a retired Detective named Bill Hodges and I do like police mysteries as a general rule. But I won’t be reading the next two books.
King’s bad writing and laziness runs rampant in Mr. Mercedes, so much so I just decided to list a few:
- The characters don’t talk like real people, they talk in weird colloquial ways that seem fake. In one case, describing how it would be impossible to forget to lock a car: “step three, close the door and push the button stamped with the padlock icon”. Padlock icon? Really?? Have these people been time-warped into 2009 from the 50’s?
- A 40-something woman who suffers from crippling depression and still lives with her mother, somehow becomes a computer genius after taking an on-line computer course on Skype. She is also come kind of expert on computer security as a result of this course.
- The computer genius trying to determine a password empties a wallet of everything, even credit cards, trying various number and letter combinations on the things she finds, but does not empty photos from a plastic accordion photo holder where, on the back of one of the pictures, is (surprise!) the password she has been searching for.
Normally I wouldn’t reference someone else’s review, but this one really sums up how I feel.
Rating: Skip it. If you feel a need to read Stephen King, read The Shining. Or The Stand.
