There was a time when I looked forward to reading Stephen King's books, and I got them as soon after publication as I could. Eventually my affection for his work began to fade. The book that pretty much ended it for me was It, which I didn't like at all and which I thought was bloated in the extreme, even for King. I still read a few of them. I liked The Green Mile and read each volume of the serial as it appeared. I enjoyed the nonfiction books on writing. I really liked Joyland. So I thought I'd take a chance on Mr. Mercedes after reading a few favorable reviews and seeing it referred to as King's "hardboiled detective novel" and as being "lean." Okay, maybe it's lean when compared to the uncut version of The Stand, but that's about the only leanness it has. It's over 400 pages long, and the print isn't large. It's not a hardboiled detective novel, either, though King has fun playing with some of the cliches of the genre. You get your fedora jokes and your Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer references. King's having fun with some of the cliches and going in the opposite direction for his own story and characters for a while, but then he pulls out the biggest cliche of them all. I thought, "Surely he's not doing to do that." But he did. If you read the book, you'll see it coming from a mile away. Maybe he did it on purpose.
This is a Stephen King book all the way, with lengthy backstories, tedious details, and drawn out suspense in the climactic section that gets boring before you finally reach the conclusion. There's one thing I found especially annoying. At several points in the book, the omniscient narrator steps in and says, "Little did he know that tomorrow he would regret that remark." Okay, he doesn't say that, but he says things like it way too often. The first time it happened, I found it really jarring, but the next times I was at least expecting it.
Oh, yeah, the plot. The title character is a guy who has a mom problem and who drives a stolen Mercedes into a crowd, killing a lot of people, a couple of whom we've just gotten really long backstories for. Then he starts taunting (by mail at first) a retired cop who's divorced and bored and overweight and reduced to watching TV all the time. The cop gets interested in life again and teams up with a couple of interesting characters to solve the crime. One of them, Holly, is the most entertaining character (for me) in the book, but she does't show up until well over half the 400 pages are gone.
I know that I'm being a curmudgeon. There are many people who loved It. There are many more who will love this book, but for me the magic is gone. Except now and then. Maybe there'll be another one like Joyland.
31 comments:
I liked Stephen King's early work (SALEM'S LOT is a favorite), but I wasted a lot of time slogging through THE GUNSLINGER series. I'd probably share your reaction to MR. MERCEDES, but I intend to skip it.
I haven't gotten this one yet. As with you, he used to be a snatch-and-grab as soon as a new one appeared. I did like IT.
After his near death experience, I thought his work changed. And not for the good. His rushed last few novels of the Dark Tower series were really disappointing.
He's had a few recent books I enjoyed though. Joyland was also one.
He's just not a priority anymore. In fact, I have one, Duma Key, that's been lying around since I bought it. Never even cracked the cover.
Unlike you and George, I gave up on the Gunslinger/Dark Tower books. The third one did me in, and I quit.
I intend to skip it too. It sounded like a pastiche for people who don't know the hardboiled genre and your review does not make it sound appealing.
I did like JOYLAND and I enjoyed the sequel to THE SHINING (DOCTOR SLEEP). And despite the length I really liked 11/22/63.
But no, not IT.
Jeff
I've thought about trying 11/22/63, but I haven't had the never to tackle it.
11/23/63 is a good novel ruined by a very long and boring midsection. Starts good-ends good but could have lost 100 -150 pages. I did like Doctor Sleep-probably his best book in years. I didn't care for Joyland and found the best thing about Mr. Mercedes the cover art.
I have never been able to get into King's long fiction. I've liked his short stories and his non-fiction, but try as I might, his novels leave me cold. Every few years, something gets a great review and I give it a chance, and everytime I've been disappointed. I don't know if it's the insistence on giving southern accents to all the "ignorant" characters (even when they're from Maine!), the inexplicable action (Lisey "forgets" to call the police about a dead cat in the mailbox--how could you forget that?), or the glacial pace and obvious lack of editing (I guess when you're Stephen King, no one is going to tell you you could easily cut 100 pages from a book without harming the story), but whatever it is, it just doesn't work for me and I've more or less given up.
I liked the early stuff, even the long ones, but maybe it was just because nobody else was doing what King was doing. And there was a kind of energy in it that's missing now, at least for me.
I dunno, Bill...aside from how derivative so much of his work has been from Matheson and Bradbury (and thus from Bloch and Sturgeon as well) it always seemed to me that most of what King was doing was already being done better by the likes of Dennis Etchison (and similarly would soon be done better by Joe Lansdale not long after King really got going), albeit Etchison (as an example) in some of his latter '60s/early '70s work was trying so hard to be oblique that one could legitimately wonder if any of the things one was supposing was happening in a given story were happening at all. Not a problem I've ever had with a King story, and such blatancy never hurts popularity. Rather like your experience, Deb, I found I liked some of the short work a lot, but some of it was worse than any of the novel prose I've slogged through (though "The Mist" as a bloated and only slightly repetitious novella is almost as bad as utter shit like "The Cat from Hell" and the first story in "The Gunslinger" sequence as published by F&SF and the next two or so, at which point I gave up on trying to read them altogether). Stories such as "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut", "The Children of the Corn" and to some extent "The Night Flier" as well as much of CARRIE gave me the sense that we have a man of great talent in King, when he chooses to apply it and hack away at all the lazy hack he can otherwise cough up and leave on a page, but he has little incentive to do so, given both the critical response (so often from people who had their introduction to his kind of work in his work, as he somewhat ruefully notes on occasion) and certainly the financial. ON WRITING is certainly his best book I've read, and DANSE MACABRE is a fascinating set of suggestions of how and why he does what he does right and also why and how he does what he does wrong.
THE STAND is not too long for me. When the uncut edition came out I read it again. Granted, I skipped over some of it the second time but it remains my favorite of his books.
Bill, you need to read 11/22/63, if just for the Lee Harvey Oswald/Dallas stuff. Trust me.
Jeff
Todd, for me 'SALEM'S LOT was the vampire book I'd been waiting for. I wasn't familiar with Etchison at the time. I was also quite taken with the stories in NIGHT SHIFT. I very much like ON WRITING (even though King doesn't follow his own rules) and DANSE MACABRE.
Not saying I won't read it, Jeff, but books of that length put me off these days. There was a time when I'd have zipped right through it, but I'm a lot less zippy now.
And ON WRITING best as autobiography.
Thanks. Frankly, I suspect my opinion of MR. MERCEDES, if I was ever to read it, will hew much closer to yours than to Megan Abbott's...but some audiences just love Brian DePalma, and then there are audiences more like me.
Well, as I've written, a lot of DANSE MACABRE was anticipated for me by Les Daniels's LIVING IN FEAR, and I already knew a fair amount about horror by the time I read it, making King's honesty about his influences and desire to see them get some attention from his new audience gratifying and his insistence on such things as the reactionary nature of horror fiction as annoyingly inane as they might not be to someone coming to the book without knowing much about the field.
I read Megan's review, and she has a couple of sly jokes in it that I enjoyed. Obviously she liked the book a good bit more than I did.
Unlike many, I'm still a Stephen King fan. I enjoyed MR. MERCEDES and am looking forward to his upcoming REVIVAL. What helped, I think, was taking a ten-year break from his books, then going back to catch up. (I did the same thing with Dean Koontz, whose writing in fact irritates me but whose books I continue to read.)
I gave up on Koontz long ago, but now and then I'll still read one if someone recommends it. I usually like the book but I'm not encouraged to read more.
I've probably been unfair to Koontz...I gave up on him altogether after reading DEMON SEED, damned near the first thing I read by him, and when I was thinking about trying some of the newer novels, I happened to catch the two-part adaptation of INTENSITY, wherein Molly Parker and John McGinley force some life into an atrocious script and concept as presented...which discouraged me from seeking out the books at all. Still sounded like the same sort of perfervid, divorced from any sort of plausibility (including on the terms demanded by the fantasticated) stuff that DEMON SEED was.
I dumped Koontz years ago. Enjoyable when he was just an SF writer, I just didn't care for his reinvention into a thriller author.
Jackie likes Koontz a lot more than I do but even she has given up reading him in recent years. I've still continued with the Odd Thomas books for some reason I can't explain. I prefer books like WATCHERS, STRANGERS and PHANTOM.
Jeff
I LOVED Joyland.
Randy, I think you'll like DUMA KEY. I did. I had it sitting around for a while too, but once I started turning pages, I settled in.
Like many here, I enjoyed Joyland quite a bit. I had medium interest in Mr. Mercedes until I heard it was a detective novel. Then, I gave it a chance...on AUDIO. Will Patton read this book very, very well. I'll agree that the pacing at the end was a bit slower than expected but I enjoyed it. This was one of those few times while reading a book I was simultaneously analyzing it's structure. I do this rarely, but I saw many of King's natural gifts for storytelling in here and many Kingisms: you either like'em or you don't. But give the audio a try. Will Patton knocked it out of the park.
It must take days to listen to the audio.
It's 14.5 hours, but really helps the re-sodding of the front yard go by like nothing...until your muscles tell you otherwise.
Longest book I ever listened to: the excellent Master of the Senate by Robert Caro at a mere...54 hours. Again, it really, really helps the yard work go by.
Just thinking about yard work makes me want to go lie down.
I've been a King fan ever since I took a (cheap) gamble on a 25-cent copy of 'SALEM'S LOT back in October of 1976, and it's still probably my favorite. And I've enjoyed everything else he's written to one degree or another (though at this point I can't see myself ever re-reading UNDER THE DOME, which I thought was horribly bloated and, in the end, absurd. And I'm not sure about 11/22/63, though I did enjoy it the first time. DOCTOR SLEEP was OK; I haven't started MR. MERCEDES yet. I *really* liked JOYLAND. He really does need a pretty ruthless line editor; I really liked IT, but it could have lost at least 20, maybe 25% of its word count without hurting the story at all. Ditto THE TOMMYKNOCKERS, the last DARK TOWER book and INSOMNIA, among others. SK is an enormously talented man who has a tendency toward great self-indulgence. But unlike some best-sellers (Robert Parker, anyone?), King does at least try to keep pushing his own envelope, whether or not the result ultimately works. For me he's no longer the *immediate-must-read* he once was...but he's still a must-read.
I think if he could rein himself in (or if a ruthless editor could), the books would improve a lot. No question about the talent, and when he does something like JOYLAND, he wins me over again.
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