End of Watch by Stephen King (2016)

In this third and last of a detective trilogy which began with Mr. Mercedes and continued with Finders Keepers, Stephen King has added a big dose of the supernatural. The monstrous villain who drove his car into a crowd with intent to kill and maim in Mr. Mercedes now lies in a hospital with supposedly irreparable brain damage. However, perhaps because of experimental drugs that he is secretly given by his doctor, he finds that he can control objects and people with his mind. After practice, he finds he can even insert his consciousness into other people, gradually replacing their own essences with his own. He still wants nothing more than the destruction of others, with his most desired target being the detective Bill Hodges, the man whom he blames for ending his previous murder spree. Soon, with the help of susceptible surrogates and a hypnotic video game with subliminal messages, he starts persuading people who had once escaped his villainy to commit suicide, all while lying in his hospital bed.

Pretty creepy, right? Except I wish that King had kept going with better-than-average detective novels, without adding the supernatural element. After all, psychopaths who spread destruction in the "ordinary" way are horror-inducing enough. Maybe he was catering to his "Faithful Readers" or maybe that's just the way his mind works and he could no longer restrain his natural impulses. Whatever.

King is a good storyteller, and this is a suspenseful and compulsive read. He has a talent for making his characters come alive as real people, even secondary characters whose stories are told in just a few pages. Unfortunately, in this novel the exception to that is one of the central characters, the assistant to Hodges, Holly. Her portrayed persona feels as if it belongs to a much younger woman and she is seemingly a copy of so many current fictional female detectives who are computer savvy but maladjusted and even borderline autistic. I appreciate that King has not made his male detective instantly sexually attractive to every random female, as so many authors in the detective genre do.

This was good entertainment, but I wrote this review directly after completing the book because I know I will forget most of its details after a few days. What I will remember is the premise that a video game can have the capability to hypnotize a viewer and make him susceptible to subliminal suggestion. I suspect that may actually be true. And that's really creepy.