Killer on the Road

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King (2014): The uberprolific Stephen King tries his hand at a non-supernatural mystery thriller this time out. It's pretty good. It's also reminiscent of some of Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder mysteries in its cast of characters, but not in an overpoweringly odd way.

In an unnamed Ohio city which could be either Cleveland or Cincinatti (or even Columbus), 62-year-old retired police detective Bill Hodges increasingly finds himself contemplating suicide. But then a spree killer he didn't catch before his retirement six months earlier sends him a letter taunting him. And we're off.

The killer has new plans in mind; Hodges finds himself both reinvigorated and haunted by the belief that he and his partner screwed up during their investigation of the person the press has dubbed 'The Mercedes Killer.'

Hodges is very much a quintessential King protagonist, one of those flawed, grey knights going up against the Darkness. King supplements him with a couple of interesting partners in investigation and a few better-than-normal plot twists. King also gets in a lengthy scene that seems like an update of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, complete with an overt reference to that novel of the Great Depression.

The novel's greatest achievement is its antagonist, the Mercedes Killer. He's tech-savvy and fairly clever. But he's also fallible, over-confident, and occasionally just plain lucky. He's certainly a more believeable killer than all the legions of hyperintelligent aesthetes spawned by Hannibal Lecter. And the novel evokes a certain level of pity for him. It's a much better portrait of a killer than we got in We Have to Talk About Kevin, for instance, but as it's Stephen King and not a literary writer, I doubt the mainstream press will shower praise upon him for psychological verisimilitude.

There are a few minor missteps. I'm pretty sure I could live the rest of my life without reading another sex scene written by Stephen King (your results may vary). But the novel rings true in enough cases -- whether in its depiction of how a well-meant police investigation can go wrong because of the smallest of understandable but incorrect assumptions, or in its mirrored portrait of not one but two intensely screwed up families and the mentally damaged children that have resulted -- to make it a tense, worthwhile summer read. Recommended.

Invasions and Degradations

It Came from Outer Space: adapted by Harry Essex from a short story by Ray Bradbury; directed by Jack Arnold; starring Richard Carlson (John Putnam), Barbara Rush (Ellen Fields), Charles Drake (Sheriff) and Russell Johnson (George) (1953): Surprisingly thoughtful and methodically paced 1950's alien-invasion movie from the great Jack Arnold, with an assist from Ray Bradbury, who actually wrote much of the screenplay.

The Arizona landscapes make a perfect backdrop for a story of paranoia and infiltration that doesn't go where one might expect it to, given its Cold War origins. That's the Professor from Gilligan's Island (Russell Johnson) as a power lineman. If any screen aliens are the parents of Kodos and Kang from The Simpsons, it's these aliens. Recommended.

The Raven: written by Hannah Shakespeare and Ben Livingston; directed by James McTeigue; starring John Cusack (Edgar Allan Poe), Luke Evans (Detective Fields), Alice Eve (Emily Hamilton) and Brendan Gleeson (Captain Hamilton) (2012): Often jarringly anachronistic dialogue is the only major problem with this solid period thriller (it's set in Baltimore in the late 1840's). John Cusack makes an interesting Edgar Allan Poe, doomed (as history and the opening scene tell us) to die under mysterious circumstances within days of the movie's beginning.

But first he has to help a police detective stop a serial killer who's modelling his killings on Poe's short stories. Things look great, and the direction is moody and effective from V for Vendetta 's McTeigue. But boy, the dialogue stinks at points, and there are also several points at which the writers seem to lack a basic knowledge of Poe's body of work (when asked if he'd ever written about sailors, Poe says no, apparently forgetting The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", and about half-a-dozen other stories. Well, he is drunk and opium-besotted much of the time).

Luke Evans is also effective as a hyper-rational detective right out of a Poe -- C. Auguste Dupin, to be exact, the fictional ancestor of Sherlock Holmes. Oh, and there's no Oran-Outan in the movie, dammit, though Poe does have a pet raccoon whose fate is left unresolved at the end of the film. They've also got Jules Verne (who homaged Poe in From the Earth to the Moon with the space-faring Baltimore Gun Club) starting his writing career about 20 years early. Either that or the serial killer is also a time traveller. Recommended.