Mr. Mercedes

 

By Stephen King

Bill Hodges is a retired police detective. But he can't forget about the biggest crime he was unable to solve. A person drove a Mercedes Benz into a crowd of people gathered at a job fair, killing several. The police found the car and its owner but the woman who owned the car was not the person who committed the crime. She was pretty much hounded by the police and eventually killed herself. 

Then Bill gets a letter in the mail from someone claiming to be the killer. Instead of turning the matter over to the police, Bill starts an online correspondence with this person, hoping it will lead him to the one who got away.

This was an OK read. I sort of felt a bit sorry for the killer who had not had a happy life. Just a young person, but a lot of misfortune has left them twisted inside, full of anger at the world. 

There were parts of the story I didn't care for like the gruesome scene where the killer's mom accidentally ingests poison meant for someone else. And the death of Bill's new found love interest. That seemed unnecessarily cruel to me. 

I also felt the story was way too long. Over four hundred pages is too long. I swear writers these days all have word diarrhea. Or else editors have given up trying to rein in authors, especially successful authors like King.

For another opinion, check out this review by Publishers Weekly.

The Mist

By Stephen King

Summertime on the lake and a bad thunderstorm knocks down trees and power lines. Waking up to a changed world is bad enough, but what is that strange mist coming in across the lake? Doesn't look like any normal mist, so white and menacing. Never mind, the wife needs some odds and ends at the grocery, so head into town with the kid to the store. Question is, will you be able to get back home? Because the mist has arrived and it is full of terrors.

A gripping, scary story that illustrates the fragile grasp people may have on sanity and civility in a midst of a terrible crisis.

Duma Key

By Stephen King

Edgar Freemantle was almost killed when a crane crushed his pickup truck. He received brain injuries and lost an arm and nearly lost his leg. He spent months in the hospital and, as a result of his brain injury, has violent rages and memory loss. His wife finds his rages terrifying and she leaves him. He becomes depressed and, on the recommendation of his doctor, opts for a change of scenery, so he rents a house on Duma Key.
Duma Key is a small Florida island. The beachfront home Edgar has rented, which he calls "Big Pink", is owned by a rich old woman who lives farther down the beach. The woman, Elizabeth, has lived her whole life on Duma Key. Frail and becoming senile, Elizabeth has a caretaker, Wireman, a man who is also dealing with a tragic past.
Edgar takes up painting to occupy his time and as therapy. He finds that his paintings have the power to change reality. One of the things he does with his paintings is to heal Wireman of the disability caused by a botched suicide attempt that occurred before Wireman came to Duma Key.
Edgar's talent clues him into the mysteries of Duma Key. He starts to realize that some evil force is at work on the key, a force that has smashed lives in the past and is awake again. It wants Edgar Freemantle and it will reach into the lives of those dearest to Edgar, causing death and destruction.

In Duma Key, King has written a compelling story about evil and one man's struggle to do the right thing, even through events that would crush most people. I really enjoyed reading this story. It may not be high art but Stephen King is a great storyteller.

For a synopsis of the novel, check out Wikipedia.

Review by Alison Flood for The Guardian.

New Words:
Juco: An acronym for junior college.
Docent: A docent is officially defined as a professor or university lecturer, but the term has been expanded to designate the corps of volunteer guides who staff many of the museums and other educational institutions in the world.

Lisey's Story

By Stephen King

Let me start off by saying I am not a big fan of Stephen King. I have read quite a few of his novels: The Shining, Cujo, The Green Mile, The Stand, The Tommyknockers, Desperation, The Dead Zone, It, Dolores Claiborne, Needful Things. I was hoping that this book would be more in the vein of Dolores Claiborne than in that of Desperation. This is because I am not a fan of horror or suspense stories. Well, Lisey's Story combines both, being an insightful look at strong woman, like Dolores Claiborne, but with horror elements too.
Lisey is a woman in her fifties whose successful novelist husband, Scott, died a couple years before. She thinks she is coping with Scott's death OK, but when she finally begins to clean out Scott's office, she has to face her memories of their life together; mainly she has to deal with the craziness that Scott brought with him into their marriage. Craziness runs in both their families, but it runs so strong in Scott's that he refused to ever have children, not wanting to pass on the "bad-gunkies," as he called it. As Lisey is trying to cope with remembering Scott's bad-gunkies, she also has to deal with a catatonic sister and some weirdo who wants to slice and dice her out of pure mean craziness.
The story starts off slow. I didn't really start to get into it until the part where Lisey is attacked by the weirdo. The pace of the story picked up pretty well then. Some of the language was hard to handle, lots of peculiar terms are used like bool, and smucking and SOWISA and puffickly huh-yooge (it took me a while to figure that one out) and they get in the way of the story somewhat, although I think King uses these words because they are so much a part of Lisey's internal dialogue and are part of the language of Lisey's marriage with Scott. Though the novel starts out kind of slow and kind of confusing (I had a hard time remembering what SOWISA was supposed to mean), King is a good story teller and his characters are interesting, charming and worth reading about.

Review from The Guardian:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/oct/28/stephenking.sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.