Michael Bywater

Stephen King – return of the great storyteller

A review of Mr Mercedes, by Stephen King. We know to expect the unexpected; but when the unexpected happens, it’s not the unexpected we were expecting

[Getty Images/Shutterstock/iStock/Alamy] 
issue 21 June 2014

Stephen King’s latest novel, Mr Mercedes, is dedicated to James M. Cain and described as ‘a riveting suspense thriller’ — a phrase so closely approaching 100 per cent semantic redundancy (a non-riveting thriller? A thriller entirely free of suspense?) that it tells us precisely nothing. All it does is declare that the reader will keep turning the pages.

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Disagree with half of it, enjoy reading all of it

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