When Roland Deschain’s consciousness took over the bodies of Eddie Dean, Odetta Holmes, and Jack Mort in The Drawing of the Three, that was unique and new. Perhaps the beats here just feel too familiar. When he first mentioned Twitter in “Big Driver,” it was as if he was putting a toe in the social media waters in End of Watch, he’s jumping in head-first. From “Trucks” to Christine to The Tommyknockers to Cell to “Ur,” King has long found terror in tech, and it was a terror that usually kept current with the times. King’s career-long fear of technology gets updated to the social media age, and that’s pretty exciting, too. And to be fair, the element of “other” in End of Watch isn’t technically supernatural he goes to great lengths to make the “wild talents” scientific, as in Firestarter. Books that would be stronger without a supernatural element are legion in King’s vast canon: see Cujo, Dolores Claiborne, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, even Blaze – sometimes it feels as if King believes his story (or his audience) can’t function fully outside the supernatural realm. Or maybe – and this is going to sound like a skipping record – it’s about something added. Now we come to End of Watch, the final book in the trilogy, and while it’s a good book that satisfies all the requirements it needs to to finish this series, there’s something missing. Finders Keepers proved him out, and even though he didn’t win an Edgar for it, it was the better novel, one of King’s minor masterpieces. Mercedes, and the result was something thrilling: Stephen King warming up writing muscles he’d only touched on using before. He proved he could strut on Harlan Coben’s turf in Mr. It’s about taking the stuff King is familiar with – homicidal cars, mass murderers, psi powers, lunatic fans – and putting in in a whole new type of of fiction. Of course, this is all simplistic: boil down any story to its component parts and you start to see similarities. With the final book in the Hodges trilogy, End of Watch, we’re treated to a look at what the scientists in Firestarter might have gotten up to in the twenty-first century, and how technology and social media might have made their meddling worse. The book it reminds us most of is Misery, but there’s a bit of The Dark Half and Bag of Bones and even “Secret Window, Secret Garden” sprinkled in. Finders Keepers is yet another in a long line of King stories about stories, how they affect people, and how people affect them.

Mercedes, with its unhinged mass murderer and vehicular homicide, pulled from classics like Carrie and Christine, with a touch of “Apt Pupil” thrown in for good measure. What’s interesting about these Bill Hodges crime capers is how they’re all basically riffs on classic Stephen King tropes, but instead of following them down horror corridors, they lead us down alleys of modern noir and crime fiction.

Stephen king end of watch series