My thoughts on Stephen King's FINDERS KEEPERS.

In his first novel of the Bill Hodges trilogy, MR. MERCEDES, Stephen King dedicated the book to James M. Cain, in the second novel of the series, titled, FINDERS KEEPERS, the dedication went to John D. MacDonald, two great authors of crime and mystery fiction; and though King clearly admires both men’s work, he is not in their league. But as I stated in my review of MR. MERCEDES, I think King does a fine job channeling Alfred Hitchcock in these books, which are a change of pace for him, and not always to the liking of many of his diehard fans who eat up his horror epics.

In FINDERS KEEPERS, the constant reader is given way more information than the characters in the story, but King uses it well to create suspense, as the unsuspecting charge ahead into harm’s way, not knowing what lies in wait for them, but we do. That there is evil lying in wait for the unwary seems to be the subject of the novel. But the true theme of FINDERS KEEPERS is the love of books, or more to the point, the love of a good story and a great character, and how they can get hold of a reader and never let go. In the opening pages, set in 1978, we meet John Rothstein, once one of the most prominent writers of post WWII America, a kind of a cross between John Updike and J.D. Salinger, who walked away from the public spotlight and became a recluse, depriving his multitude of fans any more novels featuring Jimmy Gold, a young man in search of himself in mid century America. But one of those fans, a youth named Morris Bellamy, invades Rothstein’s home, steals the many moleskin notebooks Rothstein has been using for years to hand write the further adventures of his hero, and then kills the author before leaving. In a twist of plot, Bellamy commits rape while in a drunken black out, and goes to prison for life before he can read the notebooks he has carefully buried behind his mother’s house. There they lay for decades, until 2010, when they are discovered by Pete Saubers, a kid whose family has fallen on hard times, and not just from the Great Recession, but also from the fact that Pete’s father was badly injured by Brady Hartsfield when he plowed into that crowd of job seekers at the beginning of MR. MERCEDES; the cash Pete finds in the buried trunk comes in handy after he comes up with an anonymous way to help his financially and emotionally beleaguered parents, but after a few years, the money runs out, and young Pete must find a way to turn the stolen notebooks into a windfall. Meanwhile, Morris Bellamy is paroled, and he comes out of prison meaner and crazier than ever, and the one thing he has thought about every day of his sentence is what he would do when he got out and dug up the buried treasure that only he knows about.

It is obvious from that brief synopsis, that there is a lot of plot, and a lot of twists, more than a few of them improbable, as many reviewers pointed out, so too some of the character motivations, but so what, King works very hard to create a great setup, where young Pete and mean old Morris are put on a collision course, one I could not wait to see play out. This is where King fell down on the job in my view, as the middle part of the book loses some of its momentum; and the plotting is downright clunky at times. The main problem is that the trio of Bill, Holly, and Jerome, who were central to the first book, but in FINDERS KEEPERS, have to be shoe horned into the story mid way, and as much as I liked them the first time around, they often felt like walk-ons in the story of Pete and Morris, which is a shame, because I really liked these characters, more so because their relationship is such an unlikely one. Lots of King’s fans have expressed their dislike of Bill Hodges for reasons I cannot understand, I think it’s great to have a hero who had been around more than a few blocks more than a few times, and is the wiser for it.

Pete Saubers and Morris Bellamy are two faces of the same coin; Pete is the reader who learns to love a story and a character for what it is, and what it means to them, and to find the pleasure and joy of discovering literature that speaks to something deep inside, while Morris is the toxic fan whose love becomes obsession, who wants to possess the creations of others, make them flesh and blood real, but only for themselves, only for an audience of one. And yes, I get it that King is visiting familiar ground again, as it is obvious that Morris Bellamy and Annie Wilkes would find much in common, but only after Annie had washed his cockadoodie dirty mouth out first.

In the end, I will say that FINDERS KEEPERS, along with the other Bill Hodges books, are certainly not in the class of THE STAND or THE SHINING, or even up to the level of 11-22=63, but after finishing this latest book, I do not feel that vague sense of disappointment I felt after finishing DOCTOR SLEEP or REVIVAL. And if his crime fiction does not produce characters enduring as Travis Magee, Philip Marlowe, or even Mildred Pierce, he can still spin an entertaining yarn, and on level, FINDERS KEEPERS is a winner.


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