Stephen King has dreamed up considerably more than his fair share of supernaturally powered bogeymen, whether it’s the demonic Randall Flagg in The Stand or the sewer-dwelling clown Pennywise in It. Brady Hartsfield, the antihero of his current trilogy, seemed to have a more prosaic, if decidedly disturbing, background.
King first introduced us to Brady – computer whizz, mummy’s boy and keeper of some very dark childhood secrets – in Mister Mercedes. Desperate for notoriety, he drove a Mercedes-Benz into a crowd of hundreds of job-seekers, killing eight and injuring 15. He wasn’t caught at the time, and drew retired detective Bill Hodges into a cat-and-mouse game.
Hodges’s partner, Holly Gibney, a “bundle of nervous tics and strange associations”, subsequently socked Brady in the skull in order to prevent him from blowing up 2,000 children. He is in a vegetative state throughout Mister Mercedes’ follow-up, Finders Keepers. But staff at the hospital report strange occurrences around him and Hodges is convinced there is more to his old enemy than Brady’s blank stare suggests.
By End of Watch, the trilogy’s conclusion, the hints of weirdness that King has sprinkled through Finders Keepers have blossomed, Brady’s supernatural abilities are in full flow and King has turned a series that started out as a straight hard-boiled detective story into the horror he is better known for. A doctor has been giving Hartsfield experimental drugs – “there was no downside as long as he kept the results to himself until human trials were okayed. The man was a murderous degenerate who was never going to wake up, anyway” – and they’ve been having unexpectedly telekinetic side effects.
Brady, now very much awake, also discovers they will allow him to influence the actions of those around them – turn them into his “very own organic wheelchair[s]” – and from his hospital bed he weaves together the strands of his most sinister plot yet. Through means reminiscent of Gillian Cross’s 1980s children’s book The Prime Minister’s Brain, in which the Demon Headmaster sets out to take over the mind of the prime minister with the use of a hypnotising computer game, Brady engineers a mass suicide. “At first it will be just the ones who were closest to doing it anyway, but they will lead by example and there will be many more. They’ll march off the edge of life like stampeding buffalo going over a cliff.”
But Bill and Holly, and their two-person investigative firm Finders Keepers, are standing in his way. Bill is in a lot of pain and disinclined to hear the diagnosis his doctor is urgently asking him to schedule an appointment for, and Holly is as socially awkward as ever. But when Bill’s old partner Pete tells him about a suspicious murder-suicide linked to the Mercedes massacre six years ago, they get their teeth into the case.
They remember that Brady taunted and scared a woman into suicide over her part in the devastation he caused in Mister Mercedes; they remember the letters he sent to Bill. “‘Retired police have an extremely high suicide rate,’” he wrote. “‘I wouldn’t want you to start thinking about your gun. But you are thinking about it, aren’t you?’”
“‘Brady Hartsfield was a connoisseur of suicide,’” says Pete. “‘He was an architect of suicide,’” says Holly. And the hunt is on, ramping up at a frightening pace to a gory confrontation that pays bloody homage to the creator of one of fiction’s most enduring serial killers, Thomas Harris (to whom the book is dedicated). End of Watch may be a return to more classic King fare, but it’s still Bill and Holly’s decidedly down-to-earth detecting that makes the novel shine. I’d back these two anywhere, and can only hope that, as King recently hinted, he might return to these characters.
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