Stephen King – The Ranking
A man commits a terrorist attack by driving his Mercedes into a crowd. He plans his own end by blowing himself up at a pop concert, along with as many children and teenagers as possible. That doesn’t seem far away. Nice, the Christmas market at the Memorial Church in Berlin, Ariana Grande’s gig in Manchester – if he couldn’t get into the concert hall, the killer thinks, he would also be happy with the hall’s atrium.
The events in “Mr. Mercedes”, the start of the “Bill Hodges trilogy” from 2014, were caught up in reality in a terrible way. Was Stephen King also making reference to his novel with his tweet in which he later condemned the assassin’s bloody truck ride in France? Whoever kills innocent people, he wrote, also kills people who could be part of his family. Few of his works are as current as this one. The “Mr. “Mercedes” series film adaptation from 2018 did not dare to reconstruct the concert drama.
“Auto-Eroticism”
Brady Hartsfield is not an Islamist, nor a religious one, but he is annoyed that Al-Qaeda beat him to it with Nine Eleven. He has vague political views and is definitely a racist. What others call destruction, he calls creation. He calls the terror with rolling guns “autoeroticism”.
In his mid-20s, the computer hacker still lives with his mother and harbors murderous fantasies because he cannot bear the supposed stupidity of those around him. He works in an electronics store and as an ice cream man in a tourist van. The bond with the mother is also so destructive because the alcoholic sexually abuses the son.
Hartsfield is the evil caricature of the computer nerd who can only do one thing better than his fellow human beings and therefore plays the role of world policeman. Bill Hodges and we readers are all the more surprised at how “surprisingly good-looking” the terrorist looks in a family photo – so you catch yourself thinking that someone like that doesn’t have to make revenge on his fellow human beings a motive, that he actually does is someone who has been gifted by nature.
The battle of the retired cop against the psychopath is also a battle of the intelligence systems. The pensioner learns to use his computer, tries out the anonymity of emails and chat rooms in order to have a long-distance duel with his opponent. Like a child, Bill gets to know digitality – with the help of the neighbor boy Jerome. “A computer is nothing more than a Victorian bureau full of secret compartments,” he thinks. Jerome says, “Your computer is not just some new kind of television. Every time you turn it on, you open a window into their life.”
Almost like a comedy, suspicion is placed early and repeatedly on “the ice cream man,” but the idea is dismissed as nonsense. The ice cream man as a killer is like the gardener as a killer: a cliché.
“Mr. Mercedes” touches on the situation of our time, the global economic crisis, the American recession, the downfall of chain stores in times of online retail (Hartsfield works in a discount store). Last but not least, Stephen King succeeds in inventing an African-American teenager in the self-deprecating, quick-witted Jerome, the likes of which have not yet been seen from the 70-year-old, and in Freddi Linklater, Hartsfield’s lesbian colleague who assesses her dealings with customers with appropriate cynicism – women Like them, it’s already hard enough in America.
Does that make Hartsfield a victim of his circumstances? King doesn’t go that far. With his rampage, the “Mercedes Killer” punishes the helpless and weak who form lines in front of a job fair in the early hours of the morning.
As if they were just waiting for him to mow them down with the car.