JOIN USNo ordinary story
There is perfect symmetry to the way Stephen King aligns the opening of End of Watch, the smashing finale of his Mr Mercedes trilogy, with that of its first instalment. King isn’t flashy about it. Maybe he just can’t help writing like a stone-cold pro.
The first book, Mr Mercedes, began in 2009 with a rabid killer stealing the car of the title and plowing into a line of helpless people attending a job fair. The third book also starts on that day, but navigates its suspenseful way toward the present to a terrifyingly resonant end.
When he staged his introductory attack, the self-proclaimed Mr Mercedes was not satisfied with violence and notoriety alone. He went for the full trifecta and picked a cop to torment. He singled out the retired detective (or “Det-Ret.”) Bill Hodges, an inveterate good guy, of course. And Hodges’s first billet-doux from the killer — “they didn’t die but probably WISH they did! How about that, Detective Hodges?” — set forth everything on which the trilogy’s suspense would pivot, from the creep’s delight in maiming rather than killing to the seductive allure of driving others to suicide. The rules of engagement were set.
Finders Keepers, the middle book, had a tangential plotline about a reclusive, Salinger-esque writer and the havoc wrought by a dangerously obsessed fan. But it was most memorable for the detective agency of the title, led by Hodges and featuring an indispensable young backup man, Jerome Robinson, and a quirky brainiac, Holly Gibney. Holly had trouble making eye contact, but she had quite a way with a sock full of ball bearings (“the Happy Slapper”), as she demonstrated at the end of that book. It was Holly who stepped in, when Hodges had a disabling health crisis, and put the monster Mr Mercedes, also known as Brady Hartsfield, into an irreversible coma.
A word about that coma for readers of End of Watch: Ha. King does a full-fledged version here of what he did fleetingly at the end of Carrie: he turns a quick shock into a major horror. There is a prelude set in 2009 on the day of Brady’s Mercedes attack, with 2 EMTs hoping for a stop at McDonald’s.
When they get the call to pick up a horrendously injured woman who will be one of the first murder victims in End of Watch, it’s goodbye buffalo tongue, hello nightmare. Why would this woman, who has lived, apparently contentedly, in a wheelchair for many years, suddenly make a suicide pact with her mother and give up on life?
One of Hodges’s favourite pastimes has become visiting Brady’s hospital room, where the immobilised, vegetative patient cannot react to the abuse Hodges heaps on him. Brady brings out his mean streak because the trio at Finders Keepers already know Brady to be “an architect of suicide” with a history of goading others into it. And he would be a person of interest in this case — but how can he be?
Get serious. You’re reading Stephen King. Whenever the weird can happen here, of course it does.
An immobilised Brady becomes even more malevolent than the one who could drive cars and nearly (in Finders Keepers) blow up a stadium full of teenage fans of a boy band. Being immobilised just makes him that much more resourceful. He was always good with telepathy and computers and those skills get him up and running again, so to speak. But while Brady cooks up ways to threaten a certain horribly vulnerable part of the populace, Hodges deals with a different kind of peril.
It seems wrong to conflate elements of King’s real life with his fiction. But there are times when it’s hard not to, especially when he has spoken so frankly about his own ordeals. He has written repeatedly about characters who have struggled with addiction, just as he did, and whose sobriety is fundamental to who they are. King has also, after a road accident that nearly killed him, written about the frailty of the human body and the fear and suffering he endured.
And when he writes here about pain, he does it with astounding honesty. Hodges begins this book as a guy who’s afraid to go to his doctor to find out why his abdomen hurts so much. He goes through most of the story with a bad diagnosis and a viscerally described, mounting agony that becomes one of the book’s biggest elements of suspense. The clock is ticking for him in a fight that Brady insisted on making personal, and Hodges desperately wants the strength to see it through.
Because End of Watch is a breathless detective story, it’s built around a specific mystery. How exactly is Brady operating from his hospital bed? And why do so many suicide victims own the same outdated computer game console, something like a dismal Game Boy, that contains one especially innocent-looking game involving coloured fish? The thing looks harmless, and so does the cover of End of Watch. But when you realise what this otherwise handsome cover depicts, you may not want to look at it for long.
A word about King’s staying power: This is his best book since the vastly ambitious Under the Dome (2009), and it’s part of a newly incisive, reality-based part of his career. At some point, the phantasmagorical became less central to him than the frightening prospects to be found in the real world. And he uses his ever-powerful intimacy with readers to convey the damage life can wreak.
An author’s note at the end here gives the number of a real suicide hotline, and the novel is full of cautionary tales about vulnerable teenagers pushed past the brink. The book’s descriptions of the victims of Brady’s thrill-maiming also need no extra spookiness to hit home. King’s recent novels appeal to older readers more than his early ones did, but they’ve gotten tougher, not tamer. And even though a couple of this book’s principals wind up smiling by the time they get to the last page, you won’t be. That’s a promise.
End of Watch
Stephen King
Hodder & Stoughton
2016, pp 368, Rs 599