Mr. Mercedes

After running down a crowd of job seekers using a stolen car, demented Brady Hartsfeld anonymously contacts retired police detective Bill Hodges, hoping to goad the listless ex-cop into committing suicide. Instead, he spurs Hodges into action, prompting him to launch an off-the-books investigation aimed at taking the Mercedes Killer down. The more Hartsfeld and Hodges push each other’s buttons, the higher the stakes become for them both.

Marketed as a departure for Stephen King – a straight-up mystery/thriller without supernatural elements – Mr. Mercedes will hardly seem novel to the author’s longtime readers. After all, King has struck paydirt outside the horror genre (Shawshank Redemption, anyone?) before. Furthermore, some of his most chilling antagonists are not the otherworldly creatures who commit evil for evil’s sake but flesh-and-blood people – terrible people, but people just the same. Brady Hartsfeld is a welcome continuation of this tradition, and King does well to explore his perspective. What emerges is a portrait of a nihilistic, sociopathic genius with a tragic life and a burning hatred for everyone. King makes him pitiable but no less monstrous. By steering him away from cliché, King leaves us dreading a nemesis that could very well exist instead of yawning at a straw-abomination that can’t.

The bad guy isn’t the only well-defined character here, though. King’s heroes tend to be everyman-types who, through desperate circumstances, become hardened survivors or unlikely chosen ones destined to combat evil. Bill Hodges is a welcome subversion of all of that. Though he starts at a position of nominal heroism as a former police officer, Hodges is old, fat, and full of self-recrimination. Even as he becomes fully engaged in the case, he is beleaguered by physical limitations. This forces him to be a more cerebral hero albeit one who is not afraid to cross some ethical lines.

Unfortunately, the supporting cast isn’t nearly as well-drawn. Jerome, an intellectual black youth who acts as Hodges’ right hand, has a sarcastic, subservient alter ego…who inexplicably talks like Stepin Fetchit. As embarrassing as this characterization is, it still isn’t as painful to read as that of Holly, a cousin of one of Hartsfeld’s victims. King has long been enamored of the Magic Child, only instead of a boy with telepathy or a girl with pyrokinesis, he’s shoehorned the trope into a sheltered, mentally unbalanced middle-aged woman with improbable computer skills. That she takes on such a pivotal role in the plot despite not appearing until the middle of the book makes her all the more insufferable.

Despite these shortcomings, King still knows how to spin a good yarn. Mr. Mercedes moves briskly and keeps the reader invested in Hodges and Hartsfeld’s increasingly diabolical attempts to get under each other’s skin. Though we know who they are right away, watching them make discoveries about each other keeps the pages turning. Only the ending – contrived, circumstantial, and unsatisfyingly anticlimactic – rings a false note.

Mr. Mercedes is far from King’s finest novel, but it is also far from his worst. Though he proves incapable (or perhaps unwilling) of breaking entirely free from well-worn clichés, he still manages to apply his time-honed storytelling to a different kind of story. That makes Mr. Mercedes, if nothing else, a pleasant diversion, worth at least a test drive.

7.75/10