Finders keepers A novel

LITERARY CELEBRITY SOUNDS like an oxymoron, but it does happen. Selling millions of books isn't enough; readers have to feel a profound personal connection to the writer. J.K. Rowling is definitely in the club. James Patterson, probably not. Or consider this story, one told to me 20 years ago by a member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, the writer-rock band. (Now that might be an oxymoron.) The band stopped for breakfast at a small-town truck stop before the sun was up. This was pre-smartphone, pre-social media, practically pre-Internet. Yet by the time the band members returned to their tour bus, there were several people lined up, clutching copies of "The Stand," eager to meet the band's undisputed rock star, Stephen King. Yeah, that's not creepy at all. But it does illustrate why King has special standing in his new novel, "Finders Keepers," to examine the reader-writer relationship, which is increasingly a two-way street. What does a beloved writer owe his fans? Who's the boss, especially in an era when disenchanted disciples can cyberstalk, tweet their fury at a less-than-cordial encounter or even self-publish fan fiction? King of course has worked this territory before, most notably in "Misery," with a writer essentially enslaved by his No. 1 fan. But whereas Annie Wilkes was nuts, if you'll excuse the clinical term, fans are not necessarily fanatics. The desire to establish a bond with a beloved writer is a form of communion - or so said Martin Amis, who has acknowledged he did precisely that with Saul Bellow. In "Finders Keepers" (the second entry in a planned trilogy that began with "Mr. Mercedes"), book-besotted Morris Bellamy uses the metaphor of a classic love affair to define his roiling emotions about his favorite author: "It was ... just as fate had come between Romeo and Juliet. That comparison seemed both ludicrous and perfectly apt. He was a lover." Alas for the object of Morris's affection, John Rothstein, Morris feels betrayed. Rothstein will strike most readers as Salingeresque. He lives in seclusion in New Hampshire, his most famous book had a distinctive red cover, and it centered on an angry, rebellious young man. There's even mention of a story with an eerily familiar name, "The Perfect Banana Pie." And like Salinger, Rothstein stopped publishing in the 1960s but has continued to write about his most famous character, Jimmy Gold. Over the years, he has filled dozens of black leather Moleskine notebooks, which he then locks in a safe - another Salinger overlap - where he also keeps envelopes of cash. But there are echoes of other writers here, too. Rothstein's famous trilogy, which began with "The Runner" and continued with "The Runner Sees Action" and "The Runner Slows Down," feels like a nod to John Updike's Rabbit books. Bellow and Philip Roth are invoked as Rothstein's literary contemporaries; Roth lurks in the character's very name. Indeed, Roth tilled this soil in "Zuckerman Unbound," in which a would-be writer stalks the author of an enormously successful novel that sounds a lot like "Portnoy's Complaint." I couldn't help remembering the assessment of Zuckerman's literary agent: "First you lock yourself away in order to stir up your imagination, now you lock yourself away because you've stirred up theirs." Roth's Zuckerman may have been slightly paranoid, but King's Rothstein gets his brains blown out on Page 14. Morris and two accomplices take off with the notebooks and at least $24,000. Of these three perpetrators, only one - Morris, the one who pulled the trigger and who cares more about the notebooks than the money - makes it through the night alive. Back in his hometown, identified only as the "filthy little city that residents called the Gem of the Great Lakes," Morris brags about his score to a young bookseller he considers his only friend. The man's horrified reaction catapults Morris into a blackout binge, and he wakes up in jail. The good news is that he's not there for three murders. The bad news is that he has committed a particularly violent rape and faces life in prison. ALL OF THIS, it turns out, is basically back story - King is a natural raconteur, confident of his readers' interest, and so he's unafraid to interrupt the novel's present-day action with these flashbacks. But 35 years after Morris's crime spree, there's another family living in the house where he grew up, another young man susceptible to literature's power. In a town where a lot of people are down on their luck, the Saubers are even more so; the father, Tom, was injured when a maniac drove a Mercedes into a crowd of people at a job fair, killing and maiming many. (Yes, that's the opening scene from "Mr. Mercedes.") Pete and his younger sister, Tina, are painfully aware that their parents' marriage might not survive the fallout. When Pete finds a trunk full of cash and notebooks, he devises a way to use the money to help his family. He also finds himself under the spell of Rothstein's Jimmy Gold - but Pete has an advantage the rest of the world does not: He has read the never-published fourth and fifth books in the series, books that correct the seeming betrayal that so inflamed Morris. After Morris is paroled, he goes to find the trunk he stashed before his arrest, and this is where the main characters of "Mr. Mercedes" finally return: It will fall to the retired cop Bill Hodges and his investigative partners, Holly Gibney and Jerome Robinson, to try to save the Saubers family. It's a classic race-against-time story, one that benefits from King's superb patience and pacing. Then, in a late-appearing subplot that circles back to "Mr. Mercedes," King introduces a supernatural element absent from the first book. To say more about this cliffhanger would be a spoiler, but part of me can't help wishing King had stayed with classic crime fiction. It's as if King's restless imagination is a power that cannot be contained. He played it pretty straight in "Mr. Mercedes," which just won the Edgar Award for best novel of 2014 from the Mystery Writers of America. Now he's toying with the form, batting it back and forth to see if it's still alive. His riskiest move, however, is creating a book - books - within a book. That's tricky for any writer. Inevitably, the reader must accept, without much evidence, that the cited work is a masterpiece. (Or hugely popular, or something that hit the sweet spot of the Zeitgeist.) I wasn't persuaded that Jimmy Gold's catchphrase - one that can't be printed in a family newspaper - became a watch cry for thousands. Then again, if you described "Eat, Pray, Love" or "Fifty Shades of Grey," they wouldn't sound like plausible literary phenomena either. I did believe that Morris and Pete fell under Jimmy's spell, and that's what matters. If their final showdown is a high-stakes confrontation between good and evil - well, good grief, what did you expect? Pete is King's ideal reader, a young man whose life is changed by the discovery of an important writer at a seminal time. If it is naïve or quaint to believe such discoveries are still made, then count me as naïve and quaint. Books can change lives and ignite passions. So, to echo the final line of King's author's note, here's to the constant readers, even the ones who leave notes at coffeehouses where writers are reputed to work, offering up grisly plots for future books. Oh, wait - that coffeehouse thing happened to me. Gulp. King invents a reclusive author, a safe full of notebooks and a deranged reader. LAURA LIPPMAN'S most recent novel, "Hush, Hush," was published in February.

It seems only logical that King's new crime novel, which is linked to the Edgar Award-winning success of 2014's Mr. Mercedes, should reemploy the talents of that thriller's reader, Patton. Here, the actor's deceptively mellow, vaguely Southern delivery helps spin a thrilling yarn that shuffles two tales separated by 35 years. The earlier sections follow Morris Bellamy, a young sociopath so obsessed by the work of long-silent reclusive novelist John Rothstein that he kills him and steals the author's money, along with notebooks containing at least one unpublished novel. The other sections, set in the Midwest in 2010, focus on Pete Stauber, who finds the cash and notes where Morris hid them before his lengthy incarceration for another crime. Both stories converge when Morris is released from prison and arrives in town expecting to find his cache. Though the novel unfolds in third-person narration, King slants each chapter toward its featured player, and Patton adds an appropriate attitude. For example, he reads the chapters focused on Morris with a sort of grim determination laced with anger. The Pete chapters have a halting quality that reflects the teen's suspicious nature and lack of self-confidence. The chapters devoted to Drew Halliday, a crooked book dealer, are given a smarmy air of extreme self-satisfaction. The bottom line is that King has added another superb novel of suspense to his ever-increasing list, and Patton's inventive interpretations make it a must-hear audio. A Scribner hardcover. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.