Trilogy’s conclusion classic King

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/07/2016 (3678 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Fair warning — stop reading right now if you haven’t read Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes and Finder’s Keepers, because there’s absolutely no way to discuss his superb new thriller End of Watch without spoiling the pleasure of the previous two books in this trilogy.

OK, pausing so those readers going elsewhere don’t inadvertently glance down the page.

So now that we’re left just with fans of retired copper Bill Hodges and his friends Holly and Jerome and Pete and Barbara, let’s cut to the chase: did anyone seriously believe mass killer and all-around-weirdo Brady Hartsfield was in a permanent vegetative state?

Hartsfield was Mr. Mercedes, the troubled, total-loser computer genius with a Bates-level mother thing, who opened the first book by driving a stolen Mercedes into a crowd of unemployed people waiting to get into a job fair.

It ended with Brady getting his brains scrambled by Holly as he was about to blow up an arena full of girls at a boy band concert. Holly is Bill’s private-eye partner, a computer whiz who appears to have Asperger’s, and how they met is one of the more intriguing parts of the first book.

Brady lay in a coma throughout Finder’s Keepers, but there was this niggling doubt about the rumours things in his hospital room sometimes moved without being touched, and maybe, just maybe, suddenly-got-the-willies nurses weren’t imagining fully awake and menacingly intelligent eyes were boring into their gone-all-tingly backs.

It’s not very often Big Steve has given us straight-up human thrillers, evil though his protagonists may be, such as the maniacally-obsessive recluse in Misery, or as achingly tragic as Carrie.

Could it be a combination of Holly’s re-arranging of Brady’s brain, and experimental drugs injected into the comatose killer by a conniving mad doctor, have produced a variation on a Krell brain boost?

Gosh, d’ya think?

The underlying horror in this excellent trilogy — set in a depressed Lake Erie city that’s probably Toledo — has been King’s rage against an America that cruelly creates an unemployed and underemployed underclass and discards decent, ordinary people like so much trash. They were the desperate people lining up for a job fair in the middle of the night, when Mr. Mercedes slaughtered them.

End of Watch grips us right from the start, as Big Steve’s best work tends to do, and never lets go.

Without giving too much away, Brady Hartsfield is into revenge, deciding in his madness he needs to avenge himself on the now-teenagers who would have died at the concert had Holly allowed him just a few more seconds.

So you have a computer genius who’s fixated on suicide, who knows the addictive lure of the Internet, and he’s developing some pretty scary mental powers.

We’ll say no more. End of Watch proves again King is at the top of his game and consistently terrific the older he gets — it truly is a thrilling book. The imperilled good guys are people about whom you will really, really care.

And when it’s done, just try to get “By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea” out of your head.

Free Press legislature/education reporter Nick Martin can get down with a 70-year-old hero raging against the dying of the light.