Thoughts on Mr. Mercedes

A while back I decided to cancel my Audible.com subscription, because my income was decreasing. I had somewhere around eight credits saved up that I had to use before I could cancel, so I picked up a bunch of random audiobooks. One of them was Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King.

I pretty much like anything that Stephen King writes, so it’s no surprise that I liked it. But it was the first time I had ever listened to Stephen King read as an audiobook. (Actually that’s not true, but it was the first time I’d listened to a full-length King novel as an audiobook.)

Mr. Mercedes was very well-read by Will Patton. I greatly prefer it when actors read books instead of when “voiceover artists” read books. They put a lot more feeling behind the words, rather than simply enunciating them clearly.

This book illustrates exactly what I was trying to say in a previous post. Mr. Mercedes had no supernatural elements whatsoever. There’s simply no way it should be classified as “horror,” which is true for quite a lot of Stephen King books. But what is it? Popular fiction? Suspense? Thriller? It certainly wasn’t genre fiction. I suppose I would have to guess “suspense” since it was very … well, suspenseful.

I probably shouldn’t give away anything but it had one of the happiest endings I can ever remember seeing in a Stephen King book.