1.
TABLE DES MATIÈRES – TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. STEPHEN KING – 11/22/63
2. STEPHEN KING – J.J. ABRAMS – 22.11.63 – 2016
3. STEPHEN KING – BRENDAN GLEESON - HARRY TREADAWAY –
MR. MERCEDES FIRST SEASON – 2017
4. STEPHEN KING – BRENDAN GLEESON - HARRY TREADAWAY –
JUSTINE LUPE – MR. MERCEDES SECOND SEASON – 2018
5. STEPHEN KING – BRENDAN GLEESON - HARRY TREADAWAY –
JUSTINE LUPE – MR. MERCEDES THIRD SEASON – 2019
6. STEPHEN KING – THE BILL HODGES TRILOGY – VOLUME ONE –
MR. MERCEDES – 2014
7. STEPHEN KING – THE BILL HODGES TRILOGY – VOLUME TWO –
FINDERS KEEPERS – 2015
8. STEPHEN KING – THE BILL HODGES TRILOGY – VOLUME THREE
– END OF WATCH – 2016
9. THE BLACKER, THE BLEAKER
10. STEPHEN KING – THE INSTITUTE – 2019
11. STEPHEN KING – BAG OF BONES – MATT VENNE – MICK
GARRIS – 2011
12. STEPHEN KING – DAVID FRAZEE – PRIME VIDEO –
CHAPELWAITE – 2021
13. STEPHEN KING – ROSE RED – 2002
14. STEPHEN KING – THE SUNDOG – 1990-2018
15. STEPHEN KING – BILLY SUMMERS – 2021
16. RICHARD KING, STEPHEN CHIZMAR – GWENDY’S BUTTON
BOX – CEMETERY DANCE – 2017
17. RICHARD CHIZMAR – GWENDY’S MAGIC FEATHER – 2019

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18. STEPHEN KING, RICHARD CHIZMAR – GWENDY’S FINAL
TASK – 2022
19. STEPHEN KING & RICHARD CHIZMAR – THE GWENDY
TRILOGY – 2017-2022
20. STEPHEN KING – LISEY’S STORY – 2006
21. CLARK – LISEY'S STORY (APPLE TV+ ORIGINAL SERIES
SOUNDTRACK) – 25 JUNE 2021
22. JACQUES COULARDEAU – LE COLLEGE LIBELLULE
23. JACQUES COULARDEAU – BLACK WIDOW LOVER –
AMOUR ET VEUVES NOIRES
Frida KAHLO – Autoportrait dans un univers désolé – Self-Portrait in a Waste Land

3.
While we are w aiting for the voluminous study on Fairy Tale that is supposed to be published in
Romania soon. I present you the following covereage of quite a few recent or less recent books or
audiovisual productions on books by Stephen King. There are a lot of picture but altogether it has about 90
pages or so. And practically 40,000 words.
FREE-FALLING DESCENT INTO EPIPHANY OR
APOCALYPSE STEPHEN KING – A FAIRY TALE
Prof. Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU,
Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne,
FRANCE,
Email: dondaine@orange.fr
(slightly extended) ABSTRACT
Stephen King has published more than seventy books and has had many of them
adapted to the cinema and television, with some original series that have no written fictional
equivalent, except one, Storm of the Century whose TV scenario was published in 1999. He
is known for his horror novels, but his reach is a lot wider than that and he systematically
mixes the various genres of horror, fantasy, suspense, mystery, science fiction, fantastic,
and many others, in his fiction. Here I only consider his latest stand-alone novel written with
no other collaborating author and not part of a series or collection like Gwendy’s Final Task,
also published in 2022 but co-authored with Richard Chizmar.
I will try to show the style that used some patterns to build the architecture of the
story, and in this particular novel, the use of ternary structures at all levels of the story and
style seems to be fundamental. Note this ternary pattern is borrowed from the Bible and
some famous fairy tales collected by the Grimm Brothers, mostly. Yet the ending brings up
a problem since it locks up the two deep and deeper levels with a concrete slab, thus
breaking the ternary topography. Is it meaningful about Stephen King’s fiction, or is it only a
way to suspend the situation in order to produce another novel when they reopen the
passage by breaking up the concrete slab, or when Gogmagog manages to escape the
deeper level and manages to invade our own world?
That’s the mystery about Stephen King. His fiction is so popular and has been so
much exploited on the various screens we live with that we wonder if this multifarious fiction
will survive the author, even with his two sons to promote and prolong his fame, his moral
rights, and his fictional intellectual property when it becomes necessary.
KEYWORDS: horror, fantasy, science fiction, magic, Bible, Revelation, Gogmagog.

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STEPHEN KING – 11/22/63
This is an old project by Stephen King and he finally took the time to realize it, and thanks god he did
take the time because his mature tone and style were needed on such a project. More about this later.
The first thing to be said is that this book is about time travel from the present to the past. He is
aware of the butterfly effect and he knows that going back to the past will disturb things no matter how little
but it will disturb and each disturbance will have consequences on its future, that is to say on our present.
The hero, Jake Epping, was led into that project of going back into the past to change it, what’s more to
prevent the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, by an older man, a cook in a diner, where the
crossing bubble was, who had no notion of what he was doing. Every week on the same day at the same
time he would cross into the past where he was arriving every single time on the same day at the same time.
Then he walked down the main street, went to the butcher’s and bought the meat he needed for his diner at
1958 price to sell it dog cheap in 2011, in fact that had been going on for years. And every week of our time,
in fact on one particular day, at one particular time, every single time the same in 1958 he would buy his
meat from the same butcher, hence buy and then sell the same meat, over and over again week after week.
Then one day that man decided to stay over there till 1963 to see John Fitzgerald Kennedy and try to
prevent his assassination. But he got a severe case of galloping cancer and had to come back to find a
younger substitute that could go again and do it in his place. Actually he will die of an overdose of his “pain”
killer just before that substitute goes.
The substitute had tried two little trips already and was able to see the small changes on the gate
warden, a wino who is there begging for some green backs. He is innocuous, but Jake Epping becomes
suspicious when he sees that the card he is carrying in his fedora had changes colors from one trip to the
next. But at first it is fun to buy the same car three times, to have the same discussion with the greengrocer
three times, etc. In fact Jake Epping notices there are small differences from one time to the next and he
wonders what would happen if he changed small details in what he says or does. And there is the butterfly
fluttering by.
His first motivation was to repair the damage done to the janitor of his school in 2011 by his father
when he was a kid in 1958: this father of his killed his mother, one brother, his sister and maimed him, the
janitor. Jake Epping wants to prevent that and kill the father before it happens. The first time he more or less
waits too much and got into complications. The boy who will be the janitor is saved from maiming, but he
ends up dead in the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968. No luck. So the second time he does it properly, but
this time he stays till November 1963 and actually prevents the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
What a mistake indeed.
That leads to the first remark of importance here. Stephen King follows the model of Back To The
Future films and accept the idea that changing one little thing here or there will instantly change the future of
that event. He disregards the position of Simon Wells who in his version of his great grandfather’s The Time
Machine shows that you cannot change the past: as soon as one fact is avoided, the result happens
nevertheless but in different circumstances just immediately afterwards. You cannot change the past or
rather if you try to change the past it immediately corrects that change. He even disregard the position
advocated in the Terminator saga that if the machines from the future come back into the past to change it,
in fact the future will send two people or cyborgs, one from each side (humans and machines) that will fight
to the death and the good cyborg will win, preventing the bad cyborg from changing the past. The past
cannot be changed in other words.
Stephen King only keeps the same principle in his mind: the future, the present and the past are
happening simultaneously, which means the time line is happening in its totality at any moment, but yet he
accepts the idea that changing the past will change the future. We are far from The Langoliers. You step out
into the past and you can spend as many years as you want there but you will come out two minutes after
your time of departure from the present and the world will be there still, though not necessarily the same. In
other words Stephen King stays on the line of Back To The Future and instead of making it a comedy, he
makes it a dramatic romance or a tragic nightmare. Luckily, each time you go down, or someone goes down
the past is reset to what it was originally and the whole future at the same time, or so you may think, though
you will be wrong because each passage leaves a residue behind and the future is slightly different because
of it, and the passage becomes more and more unstable.

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But there is more, and Jake Epping is a constant witness to that fact. The past, or even time, is not
neutral as for you, the changer of clocks. It resists. As he says the past is obdurate and does not want to be
changed. What’s more it tries to mislead you by harmonizing facts so that you find echoes from one situation
to another. The past or time is trying to make you dizzy and forget your initial intention, just let go and start
relaxing, dreaming and even meditating if not contemplating, but please do nothing. Time is like music and
Stephen King’s calls it the devil’s music and the devil’s music it sure is.
Stephen king is very careful to imagine every situation in his long sojourn in the past: language,
attitudes, prices, films, books, TV programs, illusions and dreams. At times this is so extremely precise that
you just wonder how he could know all that about this 1958-1963 period and of course you remember he
was eleven in 1958 and sixteen in 1963. So he could have a real memory of this period. Some research to
make details accurate but he had it in his hip pocket, if I can say so.
Of course he falls in love and that love affair is dramatic and I am not going to reveal the details of
that. Let’s say that he succeeds in preventing what he wanted to prevent but he comes back alone from his
adventure. Just before crossing the bubble back to 2011 the gate keeper tells him he is dumb as his thumb
and orders him to cross again, see what he has produced on the other side and then please come back and
reset things to right before going out a last time. Jake Epping does not want to believe one word about all
that ranting and raving, but as soon as he crosses he knows things are wrong and then in about one or two
hours he finds out Maine is no longer what it used to be and certainly not what anyone could have dreamt it
to be in the near future.
This present produced by the prevention of the assassination of JFK is a nightmare and the janitor
who is no janitor is in a wheel chair, the only crippled survivor of a helicopter that crashed when the few
American soldiers left Vietnam in a hurried rush in the 1960s. Jake Epping has understood. He then goes
down again, disregards the protest from the gate keeper and stays on the other side a few weeks, writing
down a full account of what he had done and burying it in a safe box in a field for an eventual future curious
person to come across it by accident. And he goes back to a present world that is seemingly the same as the
one he had left behind. The time line has been reset.
Then in 2011, his curiosity kills the cat and he finally goes down south and tries to find the woman he
had loved and finds her and she is eighty years old, and there I will stop: you have to read the book to see
what finally happens when he has come back after finally accepting that the past is sacred and must not be
touched.
That’s where I find this novel a lot more mature than the novels that are dealing with the same or a
similar subject. It is in the first person from beginning to end, which is rare with Stephen King. He comes
back to the question he asked in The Dead Zone: if you knew what Hitler was going to do in 1932, would you

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let him live and bring the apocalypse? He has understood first that history cannot be remade, and second
that history the way it is is balanced in such a way that the outcome is always the best you can imagine in
the long run. If Hitler had been shot dead in 1932, what would have happened? Probably a vast take over of
the whole of Europe by the Communists, and then what? A world Gulag? History is a fragile equilibrium
among millions of parameters that goes towards an end which will be no terminus or termination but the slow
emergence of a better situation, with setbacks like the assassination of JFK or MLK, but in the long run it will
get better. If one disrupts this equilibrium with a voluntary action that forces history or speeds up history, then
the balance is broken and catastrophes come up like Stalin and his gulag, like Hitler and his Holocaust, like
Mao Zedong and his Cultural Revolution, or Mussolini and his Brown Shirts. That is a mature position
because it is trust in history and not a personal individualistic and idealistic position.
The only shortcoming I may think of is that the tone of the book is slower than what we are used to
with Stephen King. That could also be seen as a sign of maturity: takes time to consider all options and all
the butterflies you may crush or disturb.
STEPHEN KING – J.J. ABRAMS –
22.11.63 – 2016
The book was deeply disturbing and disquieting, but this miniseries of eight episodes is deeply
shocking for fragile minds. Altogether most of the important elements of the book are kept but these
elements have been scaled up or down according to the new medium used here: a television series.
Changes from one time (1960-1963) to another (2016) is visually visible and thus does not need any
transition or specification. It is direct, a sharp cut in the visual landscape of one time to the visual landscape
of the other time, with of course at the end the short modern time after Kennedy has been saved from
assassination, and the least we can say is that the world has not improved.
This is the general idea I would put forward here: the butterfly effect might very well be very negative
even though we held at the time and still hold that JF Kennedy was a good president who could have saved
the world from many evils, and first of all the Vietnam war. But all that is absurd thinking since, for one, we
cannot change the past and we can only change the present in the present time, and second, history is a
highly multiple-level contradictory reality that can neither be predicted nor, what’s more, predicted within the
idea that changing one event in the past will make the future of that changed event brighter, more luminous,
better, etc. The dystopic short vision of this changed future is definitely not better: it has become some kind
of a jungle in which surviving has evolved into a highly competitive killing sport. Harry Dunning at the
beginning in his GED class (General Educational Development) reads an essay about how his father killed
one night his mother, his sister, and his brother and strangely enough only broke Harry’s leg. In the small
episode of dystopia at the end he tells Jake Epping that he remembers when he came in the early 60s and
saved his mother, brother, and sister by killing his father, but Harry Dunning says that he misses his father
(though in the initial story he is missing his father, his mother, his sister, his brother) and that makes Jake
Epping understand he made a mistake when changing the past, be it by solving the Dunning family’s
problem or later on by preventing the assassination of JFK. So, he goes back to 1960, thus erasing all the
changes he had caused and comes back as fast as he can after saying hello to Sadie Dunhill who should
have been in Jodie Texas and not in Lisbon Maine. But well, let’s accept some ellipses even if they are kind
of weird, as weird as the fact the two people who survive his adventures in the past are called Dunning and
Dunhill, like a job well done, man, or is it Dunn, North Carolina, which was at the time of his adventure in the
past a KKK Sanctuary as proclaimed on a giant billboard along the highway to Fayetteville). And he comes
back to Lisbon and the diner. His two trips probably covered some four minutes, little enough to go to his
friend the diner’s owner Al Templeton who had died just before he left the first time. And everything is back
to normal. Is it? He goes to Jodie Texas to see Sadie Dunhill whom he had had a relationship with, in his
back-to-the-past first trip, had nearly married, had engulfed into the prevention of Kennedy’s assassination
which was prevented but Sadie had been shot dead by Lee Harvey Oswald before he was shot dead
himself.
She of course only remembers the fast meeting in the second trip back-to-the-past. The rest is
romantic gooey stuff from a third age lady for a young man in his mid-twenties.
If by any chance you managed to change the past the result and effects would be catastrophic.
You’d better not try the game. History cannot be rewritten because changing one event erases all that has

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happened beyond that event and the future sheet is a blank sheet again and anew that will be filled in the
most procrastinating way by big grandmother history.
The story is well-built thanks to some empathetically gruesome situations. A father who victimizes all
the members of his family. Violence in general. Killed a cow in a slaughterhouse with a simple heavy metal
hammer which is neither ecological nor let’s say humane. Toilets for white only and toilets for colored, hence
racist segregation: in America toilets have always been segregational, and think of the situation in schools,
particularly high schools with toilets for girls, toilets for boys, toilets for trans people, toilets for gay males,
toilets for lesbian females, etc., in present time, as if toilets were nothing but a hormonal circus. The
prejudices against divorcees (women of course). Relationships between unmarried consenting adults that
are seen as adultery or fornication, hence as a crime. Prostitution behind closed doors with regular police
raids. But most of these social elements, cultural items, musical pieces and references, the real stuff of real
life in the early 60s are very short vignettes, at times, not even a vignette and not more than a post-stamp.
That gives to the cutting and editing of the series the sole architectural power that makes it run like hell, and
hell it is.

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But has Jake Epping in any way improved the world? Of course not, since he found out it is
impossible to change it except for the worse. But, and this is a super but, has Jake Epping changed? It does
not look like it. He is the same teacher as before teaching literature in the very traditional multiple-choice-
questions style in classes that are not responsive because he is not provocative enough. He is the same
mellow romantic superficial man with other people and does not have any personal relationship of any depth,
except the one with his fake brother Bill in the 1960s, his accomplice for a while who becomes an obstacle
for his “mission,” and he will have him institutionalized to neutralize him and later on he will visit him and
cause his suicide. This chap feels no empathy and no human appeal, the appeal that makes a human being
establish some personal and emotional relationships with other humans, and I am not speaking of hormonal
sports. He hasn’t changed and he doesn’t seem to want to change. That gives a picture of America in 2016
that is desolate, sad, uncreative, shallow and even unambitious. And we all know that in this kingdom of the
blind, the one-eyed can become kings or be elected presidents, and anyone is one-eyed when they only
consider one side of the picture, one side of a coin or a sheet of paper out of twenty or even more other
sides that are rejected into opposition neutralized by the media, social networks, and security agencies of
any sort against migrant people or against any criticism declared and proclaimed to be socialistic or
communistic, not to mention of manipulated by the Russians. And on that last point, the series is crystal-clear
about the way Lee Harvey Oswald went to Russia, was indoctrinated into Marxism there and came back with
the mission to assassinate the president. Russia the all-powerful puppet master. Doesn’t that ring a bell in
our present?
So, this series is good for the speedy action of the roadrunner Jake Epping. It is good for the
nostalgic vision of the 1960s in cars, furniture, fridges, the music, of course, vinyl records and turntables for
them known as gramophones, and . . . etc. It is good too in the simplicity of the story. But it lacks some
human depth and it is short on the historical and even social side of things. And that was not the case with
the book.

9.
Stephen King meets his fate in
three stages, and will he die?
STEPHEN KING – BRENDAN GLEESON -
HARRY TREADAWAY – MR. MERCEDES
FIRST SEASON – 2017
Stephen King as an executive producer is faithful to Stephen King as an author, and yet there are a
few changes, cosmetic changes you will say, made necessary by the change of the medium. In this first
season, Jerome, the young black highschool senior who is going to be the first black student at Harvard, we
are still a few years in the past, is not shown in the close relationship he was having with Mr. Hodges in the
novel. His father is even quite strict about it though for reasons that are as explicit as they are unreadable.
Racism, fear, insinuations of all sorts, etc., with this kind of situation, innuendo is the only language you can

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speak. A few other things are rearranged for a serial form – and killer by the way – which means each
episode has to end with a cliffhanger, and that is not always easy. A series also slows down the rhythm since
it has to start rather slowly and it has to move not too fast so that the cliffhanger comes as a precipitous short
punchline if I can use this word for a video, maybe a punch-scene.
This being said, Brady Hartsfield sure is a monster and he was in the novel, but the visualization of
the monstrousness of the chap makes him so obviously unpleasant and distasteful to everyone that it is
surprising his boss picks him to become a store manager, or his lesbian colleague more or less falls for him
– as a friend of course – and we are also surprised that he may be a good ice-cream man, friendly with all
and particularly children. That makes his deep-rooted psychiatric dysfunctioning all the more sort of artificial
and based on some clichés. Written in the book the circumstances are not as shocking as they become in
pictures. His causing the death of his brother with first an accident (the brother chokes on some apple slices)
that ends well with the Heimlich maneuver, that is not very well performed in the series, and then second
with pushing him down the stairs to the basement of the house, is cruel. His possessiveness towards his
mother, and it is hinted that’s why he killed his younger brother, is, in fact: only his way to make her a slave
in her absolute solitude and to satisfy his perverse desires by titillating and teasing his mother into satisfying
her own perverse desires. That’s a cliché, but it is a true case of pedophilia generally minimized and
forgotten. The pedophile in a family has to be the father, and can’t be the mother, and the child is too young
to be a pedophile, isn’t he? Note the fact we are dealing with a son, not a daughter. It is the Oedipus
complex in the absence of a male rival between the son and the mother, an absence constructed by the
elimination of the younger brother.
The fact that based on such a situation the son becomes a mass serial killer is most surprising. But it
is possible, though the child has to be particularly introverted not to be able to find alternative directions in
school and with kids, boys and girls, his age. There is no empathy at all, and it is the belief, common and
popular, even populist, that all perverts are born like that, just the same way all normal people are born like
that. The basic and most unacceptable belief in American philosophy, psychiatry, and ideology (religious or
not), that all criminals are born like that and thus are different at birth, and thus all those who are different at
birth have to be born criminals. Read my lips as Ronald Reagan would have said. And the first difference is
to be an immigrant. Good morning, Apocalypse!
The series also insists heavily on the ineptitude of the police to capture the situation and to act up to
it in the name of hard evidence, circumstantiality, the first amendment, the Miranda protection of accused or
suspected criminals, the fear the case may stall in court for who knows what kind of mistake in the
punctuation of the investigation. But at the same time that makes Bill Hodges a sort of vigilante, a self-
appointed justice-maker, a social trash collector and incinerator, a cop (or ex-cop, same thing, once a cop
always a cop) and a judge and an executioner and an undertaker, all in one person. And that is another

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caricature that makes him slightly disagreeable, especially since he is all but civil with his neighbors and the
people he meets and deals with.
Apart from that, it is not a detective story since we know from the very start who the berserk mind is.
Then we would have liked a little bit more carefulness about the possibility for Brady Hartsfield to burn his
house with two bodies in it, leaving all his tremendous equipment in the basement, moving out of it via a
tunnel and the police do not catch him so that he can disappear in a second underground cave where he has
the same level of equipment as in the basement of his mother’s house, where he can plan the final attack. It
is true Stephen King seems to love tunnels and underground hiding places but at times it is sort of easy,
even if in a series you do not need to give the specifics of this tunnel and the second underground laboratory
because the audience of a series does not look for logic but they look for tempo, rhythm, cliffhanging
moments, grossness more that terror or horror. But well since it was a series and could last ten episodes, the
director could have been more careful about such logical elements. But the treatment of the subject seems
to be very similar to that in the series The Path or Shameless (the American remake because the British
original is quite different: The Brits are very careful with detail and logic). I must admit, and this is true in the
book too, that it took these police officers a long time to understand that the electronic car keys we have
nowadays work with a signal that can be easily captured if you have the proper equipment. I think James
Bond and Mission Impossible have overused such elements of digital swiftness. I guess after a certain rather
early age, police officers do not get any continued training and education, particularly in the technical fields.
A shame.
STEPHEN KING – BRENDAN GLEESON -
HARRY TREADAWAY – JUSTINE LUPE – MR.
MERCEDES SECOND SEASON – 2018

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The second season is always a challenge for an audience in two ways. First, will it keep the tempo
and the density of the first season? Second, since here we are dealing with a printed trilogy adapted to the
screen, will it follow the storyline of the novel and respect the characters as imagined by Stephen King?
My answer to these two questions is simple. The first question requires a positive answer: yes, the
tempo and the density of the first season are kept. The suspense is strong, and all the dramatic elements are
visually supported by what is shown and we can see on the screen. No problem there.
The second question is relevant only for the experts who try to measure the differences in
inspiration, imagination, and faithfulness of the director of the series as opposed to Stephen King. That is not
my point of view nor my interest. So, I will not even come close to answering the question, positively or
negatively. Right now, and here, I want to consider only the video in its own interest and appeal. And there,
we do have a lot to say.
The series brings forward two differently-abled people, Holly Gibney and Brady Hartsfield. The first
one has not changed since the first season but the second has changed a lot since in most episodes he is a
bedridden comatose unresponsive some will say vegetable, and yet he has been implanted with some brain
board, we assume computerized with artificial intelligence, and he is kept alive with a drug produced in China
that enables the regeneration of the brain in such situations, though it is said with a negative side-effect,
brain tumors. This drug is not certified by the FDA and it is used illegally by Doctor Felix Babineau whose
wife is part of the board of directors of the pharmaceutical company that produces it in China. It is of course
imported illegally. Don’t ask me how, just ask the various security agencies who will tell you who can go
through customs and airport security without being questioned, or searched, or simply scanned. They know
airport security is nothing but a loose strainer that can let through very big “particles.”
Then you have two questions that are bluntly exposed and advocated here, rejected, and endorsed.
The illegal treatment on a patient that arrived comatose and close to death but evading all sorts of controls
because he is a serial mass killer and as such no one is going to stand for his human rights, or are you sure
you can say that? It leads to the second question: do sick people keep their human rights and can they
oppose a treatment even if their refusal endangers their life? The life of the sick person of course, but what
about the life of other people if the sick person is contagious? And here we are confronted with COVID-19.
Can a person actually testing positive refuse to go in quarantine, to be hospitalized and to receive the normal
treatment, and in one or two months one of the vaccines that will be available? A patient who refuses
vaccination endangers his own life. Frankly, who cares if a sick person commits suicide, even though it is not
legal not to prevent it? But since his being contagious endangers the life of other people, can we impose
vaccination on everyone, knowing that someone who is already positive cannot be vaccinated? Too late.

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But this season goes a long way beyond this. We can accept the idea that this comatose person
suddenly revives, and resuscitates, and walks away. But two questions are to be discussed here. How can
this inner resurrection be shown on the screen and then what is the legal status of the killer who has been
regenerated by medicine, surgery, and drugs?
The director chose a simple way to show that inner life that is totally normal but invisible on the
hospital bed. An underground, dark basement in which Brady Hartsfield has all the machines he needs to
control the world, including a small game tablet that enables this underground computerized command-room
to take control of the people that are targeted, hence enables comatose Brady Hartsfield on his hospital bed
to take command of an individual who becomes his killing slave. We are not explained how these tablets get
to people, but we can I guess suspend our logical judgment, or our logical disbelief, a little bit. There you
could say Stephen Kling was a lot more precise. This tablet is the door through which Brady Hartsfield will
enter your mind, and then you will just do what he tells you to do. This dark underground, entirely robotized,
computerized basement is a parallel world, in fact, entirely mental, hence virtual in the brain of the serial
mass killer. This virtual world and the real world get connected from time to time when Brady Hartsfield
decides to look for a gate and finds one in an individual he can take over and then he can achieve his
criminal intention, essentially his vengeance.
The case developed in court is completely crazy. Brady Hartsfield is not going to be assessed as
responsible or not psychologically. He obviously is not mentally handicapped. And he was not when he
committed his mass killings in the first season. Deranged but not irresponsible. He chooses a completely
different approach. “I have been resurrected with surgery, medicine, and drugs. I did not ask for it. It was
imposed on me. That has changed me and has provided me with a sudden conscience that makes me regret
what I have done.” In other words, he is a new man and the crimes were committed by an ancient man who
is not anymore, so the new man cannot be tried for the crimes another man committed, what’s more, another
man who does not exist anymore. And he walks free.
That leads to the last episode. The confrontation of Brady Hartsfield to one of his survivors who was
his best friend in “another life.” Lou Linklatter tries to confront him and to assess whether he is the same man
she knew or if he is another man. She sure is convinced he is the same man she knew, but with examination
and cross-examination in court, as a witness under oath, she will have to be very strong to be crystal clear
and crystal is fragile, as everyone knows. The end is hyper-dramatic, and will Brady Hartsfield ever
disappear? In Bill Hodges neighborhood the famous ice-cream man appears anew in his van and with his
music. Brady Hartsfield is a deranged person who was born, meaning carried into life, by this American
society of ice-cream vans, street hockey, unawareness that we are little by little captured by the nets of the
social networks, and controlled by big pharmaceutical companies, and do not believe the Chinese are in any
way different. In the USA the big pharmaceutical companies, like Pfizer, are in many ways controlling us.
Remember the still active opioid-epidemic, entirely man-made, and in the world, mostly American-made.
What is wrong with humanity when big anonymous and invisible or over-visible (hence entirely
opaque) companies can control society as a whole and individuals, every single one, and the only resistance

14.
we can maybe stage against that is to refuse to do what is necessary when a real crisis appears. Imagine
people refusing to evacuate when a tsunami or a hurricane is coming, or when a forest fire gets out of
control. The flu kills many hundred thousand people every year in the world and what is the proportion of
people who do not get vaccinated in the West? And wait and see what it is going to be in one month when
the first COVID-19 vaccines arrive on the medical market. Rush on one side, and refusal on the other side.
Big chaos. Good Morning, Vietnam, all over again. Robin Williams will land again in our living rooms.
This second season of this series is coming in good time. Our world is agitated and disorientated by
populist demagogues and by a pandemic coming no one knows where from. We, all of us, have a Brady
Hartsfield cogitating and digitizing the world and us in our very backyard, in our basement, in our mental
virtual attic, just inside our skulls.
STEPHEN KING – BRENDAN GLEESON -
HARRY TREADAWAY – JUSTINE LUPE – MR.
MERCEDES THIRD SEASON – 2019
How to bring this series to an end, to closure, within a new development that has little to do with
Brady Hartsfield, and yet is all about violence in the hands of uncertified vigilantes or plain criminals,
deranged or not.
The first side of the closure has to come with the trial of Lou Linklatter who shot Brady Hartsfield right
in the court where he was being tried and was going to be at worst released from a prison term to survive as
a human guinea pig in some university laboratory, thus endorsing the supremacy of big pharmaceutical
companies and their research as well as the omniscient power of academic medical research. He would
never have been free again, but he would have survived in a very comfortable position. And what’s more, he
would probably have found some way to enter some machines, computers, or tablets, to control other people
and make them commit the crimes he would not be able to commit himself.
The outcome of this long trial is both surprising and too humane to be true. The most surprising
element is the fact that the black judge is a real pain in the back for everyone, particularly the accused and
defendant, Lou Linklatter. He imposes medical incarceration for the evaluation of her competence to face
and go through a trial. Then he imposes limits on the prosecution and the defense in his court. He intervenes
at all and any moments in the procedure. And yet this man who is thus asserted all along as a power freak,

15.
deliverers the worst possible sentence of clemency. Clemency since Lou is free after the trial. But the worst
possible solution since for 14 years and three months she will be on probation. Nearly fifteen years during
which she will have to report monthly if not more to an appointed court official about her suspended
sentence. She will never be able to really move and go where she wanted, or even marry or have children
without having to ask for permission first.
The second closure has to be found for Holly who recuperates her aunt’s Mercedes Benz car and
decides to keep it and have it repainted in a flashy yellow color, and to drive it despite the opposition of Bill
Hodges who considers it as a killing weapon, a mass-murder tool. But there she wins. Closure too because
she is able to be an essential witness to Lou Linklatter about the “heritage” of Brady Hartsfield, a legacy that
is both a monstrous balance of crimes, deaths, violence, vicious domination in order to inflict suffering and
death, and at the same time a legacy that is full of the call, the demand, the request, the need for love, the
love he never received, except from Lou Linklatter, and maybe love from Holly Gibney when she impaired
him with a heavy metal bull sculpture just before he detonates himself with a bomb that would kill hundreds
of people. Not love for him, but love for life, love for living human beings who would have been the blind
victims of a deranged mind.
Holly finds some personal place in the friendship of the defense lawyer Roland Finkelstein who
accompanies Lou Linklatter in her court ordeal. She is fascinated and attracted, and yet she is afraid
because of her own mental state. She is attracted to some people and would like to establish some contact
with them but as soon as that contact becomes in any way personal or intimate, she runs away, she rejects
it, she cannot assume she has to jump into this chasm and trust the other person who is going to provide the
net with his love. To establish a relationship with a woman is possible because it is entirely desexualized, but
with a man Holly finds a Great Wall of China springing up between her and him. But closure has to be found
and will be found, probably thanks to the yellow Mercedes Benz she drives.
Closure for Bill Hedges and his daughter, and his next-door neighbor, and his wife probably, and his
tortoise that can live 150 years and will bury all the members of this Hodges family, even probably the future
child of the daughter who is announced as pregnant. Closure with Ida Silver, the English Teacher next door,
is more complicated to reach, but it comes to a dramatic hairpin turn when she is revealed as having been
the English teacher who set the new criminal Morris Bellamy (note the perfectly French name) on the road to
a local writer who had reached global fame, John Rothstein, and that was a perfectly well-intentioned
absolutely bad action because that Morris Bellamy, who was at least disturbed if not deranged, identified
with the main character of Rothstein’s novels, and he became the prey of an older woman who had been
John Rothstein’s lover, Alma Lane, definitely a path not to follow, but Morris Bellamy jumped into that
pedophile sex and decided, under the terroristic and power-freaked instigation from Alma Lane, to burglarize
John Rothstein one night to recuperate unpublished manuscripts the rumor said he kept in his safe. And that
was the beginning of a bloody trail with horrific murders all along the way.

16.
This new crime gets entangled in the family of a survivor of the famous Jobs Fair when Mr.
Mercedes drove the stolen Mercedes Benz into the queueing crowd: the husband crippled by the car; the
wife who is trying to cope; and the son who by pure accident recuperates the unpublished manuscripts and
the stolen money. Strangely enough closure for this young Peter Saubers is limited to the reunion of the son
who had been bargaining with Morris Bellamy, the mother who had been taken hostage by Alma Lane (killed
by Morris Bellamy when he discovers she had killed his girlfriend), and Morris Bellamy, and the father who
had been quite helpless though he finally accepted to help Bill Hodges in his attempt to bring that case to an
end.
No closure though for Jerome Robinson who seems to have dropped out of Harvard because as a
black student he was not exactly welcome in this Ivy League University. Finders Keepers is not exactly what
he could do if he did graduate from Harvard University, which he could do with no real effort, except to forget
white students either hate you though they cannot show it, or treat you as some kind of anti-racist token
(“One of my best friends is black,” only one of course, “Guess who is coming to Dinner”).
The best part of this final season though is the closure it represents for Brady Hartsfield. He is dead
and cannot come back in real life, at least materially for and by himself. But he is haunting several people
and as such could become the instigator of the future evolution of these haunted people towards a criminal
career. Two women are the main targets, Lou Linklatter and Holly Gibney, but also some boys or men and
this time not under the influence of Brady Hartsfield, but under the influence of the thrillers written by a writer.
And this case is of course the fate of many writers in our modern world: their books can become the new
Bible and Quran and Dhammapada of the Millennials and other more recent generations. It is also a theme
Stephen King has used several times in his novels: an author who is haunted by a doppelganger coming
from his past, or an author who is keeping in his mind, in his memory, in his drawers – or even writing –
books under some kind of vision of the real world that he can directly influence if the books are actually
written and practically published and thus distributed in the public. Au author only codifies in his writing what
the world is, and his characters are nothing but the virtual essence of real people. In other words, Castle
Rock is the virtual essence of any city in Maine, or as for that in the USA.
That leads to the responsibility, the accountability of the author in what his works might incite some
people to do, with a secondary subsidiary question concerning teachers: do teachers have the right to
present their students with works that might incite them to become criminals? The second question is
revealed in its absurdity since all of Shakespeare’s plays would have to be banned from schools since they
present a tremendous collection of crimes, including death-oriented clandestine teenage relationships. And
Dickens should be banned too, not to mention many other classics. What bout Wuthering Heights or Conan
Doyle, not to mention Agatha Christie and many other women who at times write mysteries under fake male
names.

17.
A third concluding season that we can’t miss if we want to come back to some balanced vision of the
world, and yet many heavyweights are missing. You will remain hungry and thirsty after this third visit to
Stephen King’s Needful Things Store held by the Devil himself. Have a good cup of laced tea in this big
curiosity store that overflows with Hellbound Heart Pinhead Puzzle Boxes Caja De Lemarchand.
Stephen King meets his fate in
three stages, What about the
books?
STEPHEN KING – THE BILL HODGES
TRILOGY – VOLUME ONE – MR. MERCEDES
– 2014
Don't believe all the book says. There are some mistakes like for instance the illegality of being able
to read all formats from all zones on one DVD reader. Such a machine exists: it is produced by Sony, made
in Malaysia, and distributed to the whole world from Chicago by, among others, I guess Amazon. At least the
one I have came that way and was delivered to me by Amazon.fr. Some other elements from police speak
are not always listed in various sites or glossary on the subject. He seems to be using some shortened forms
that are popular in his own living circles. For example, "to steal the peek." It refers to what is called "passive
keyless entry and start" or PKES and the "signal" used to operate it can be captured from a short distance.
As for the expression "stealing the peek," it does not seem to exist as such. Yet it now does.

18.
But apart from that the book is not a glossary of police speak, nor an urban dictionary of crime
speak. It is a book in the line of several books Stephen King has recently written that have to do with some
kind of criminal, some form of crime, and catching the former or stopping the latter. Here we are dealing with
a serial offender who is turning into a serial mass murderer. That is in no way terrorism and critics like Chuck
Bowen in Slant Magazine, House Next Door are totally wrong when they define the book as a cop-and-
terrorist thriller. Terrorism implies some political aim and in this case, the man is deranged and nothing but a
sociopath and psychopath. The Unabomber was a terrorist since he had a political agenda. But here
Stephen King defines his criminal as a "mad bomber" and that does not make him a terrorist.
It is a thriller that does not use in any way supernatural or fantastic means like for instance in Doctor
Sleep that deals with a band of criminals who are in a way living dead people and some kind of vampires
though they do not drink blood but vital energy. It is in the line of Joyland in which a simple young man is
tracking and bringing out and down a serial killer. Stephen King is thus in line with some of the books he has
written before, though this one is original because it uses an ex-cop, a retired detective as the main
character, though Stephen King adds to this man an underage high school student and a psychologically
deranged middle-aged woman who is somewhere between neurosis, psychosis, and autism, definitely
compulsive obsessive and yet sane enough to be of great help and to manage to get out of the super low
state of mind and extreme dependence she is in at the beginning and reach some independence and
equilibrium at the end.
The main criminal, aka Mr. Mercedes, is a psychopath and sociopath but as the result of an intense
and prolonged trauma that started when his younger brother came into the picture and when their father got
out of it leaving their mother with two sons, no income or nearly none, and the younger son is slightly
retarded. Misery, poverty, and later on the assassination of the younger son after a dumb accident in which
the child chokes on a slice of apple and his mother aggravates the situation by trying to get the slice out of
his larynx with her fingers instead of using the Heimlich maneuver. Stephen King knows everything about
Heimlich and his maneuver since he used it in Christine. Thus, it is a choice leading to drastic elimination.
The assassination is performed on the incoherent child after his being brought back to life by doctors with a
severe mental impairment by his mother and his brother together.
Then there is an allusion to a stepfather who took to using his stepson as a sexual toy torturing him
too with cigarettes and other elements that are not mentioned. The mother took part in the victimization that
implied rape even if it is only alluded to. The child becomes an adult for sure but attached to his mother and
his mother considers him as a sexual partner, a surrogate to a man who would be her husband or lover,
though with strict limits: she is the onanistic tool of the grown man. I would say this long-lasting trauma can
only produce the asocial psychopath we have in the book, though it is a little bit easy on the inside. The
pattern of a stepfather and a mother victimizing the stepson (and son) is a little bit simple. We are spared,

19.
though, the direct gay sexuality which would not have been in any way sane and the result of a choice,
though he is clearly described as a closet-homo who hates women, especially young women and teenage
girls Most of his direct victims are women, at times unwillingly on his part but women nevertheless. The last
crime he plans is a mass murder of essentially teenage girls and chaperoning mothers.
What is particularly catching, appealing in the book is what Chuck Bowen hates. The writing is in a
language that borrows a lot from colloquial discourse and even social dialect. His high school senior Jerome,
a black teenager, uses a lot of linguistic Ebonics in his discourse and this is quite typical of that black young
man whose family members have typical Caucasian, hence American names and he wants to go to Harvard.
He is the victim of quite a lot of racial prejudice in the mild ostracism that has taken the place of open
segregative rejection of previous decades but that is rejection, nevertheless. To compensate for this
rejection, and to assert his blackness, with some white people he is in regular contact, he uses Ebonics. This
is natural and even both sane and healthy. That's some kind of homeopathic medicine to overcome and
tolerate any kind of bigotry, present or only intended around him.
The retired detective, Kermit William Hodges, is also quite typical of people in his situation. He is
alone and he easily slips into some fattening lifestyle that leads him to overweight and a coronary accident at
the end. He has abandoned all sexual activity that implies a partner. In other words, he is a social and
psychological wreck. All the easier for him to jump on the bandwagon of some police work on the side of
official duties, hence, to become an uncle. Since the criminal is making it a personal case against him, he
reacts in the very same way and makes it a personal case against the criminal. Nothing new under the sun.
Circumstances just add some more disinterest from the official police department of the city that sidetracks
him into being his own master in clandestine police work. Circumstances (his heart attack) will enable him
not to perform the last stage of the neutralization of the criminal.
The writing itself is split into short sequences jumping from one character to the other, from the
retired detective to the criminal essentially but not only. This is cinematographic writing of course, which
makes this novel an easily adaptable story for a film. But that is the way all modern writers write today with
TV and cinema in mind. Chuck Bowen has it wrong: most modern novels have that structure of an unfinished
scenario and that cannot be considered as a shortcoming because it corresponds to the viewing habits of a
modern audience who watches TV series and films all the time, stories that are more and more exploded into
some kind of mosaic of short sequences.
This very storyline is catching and appealing. We get into the story and then we are in a way
mesmerized by the storytelling. We can maybe say everything is understandable before it happens, and we
can foresee every event. That is true and false. At every crucial point in the novel, we can see the options
that are available to the author. It is true most of the time what the author chooses is among these options,

20.
but it is only one option in a set of several. The end is predictable and yet, apart from the idea that the
criminal will be stopped, we cannot really predict how, where, when, and by whom before it happens. The
very conclusion of the novel is tremendously moving. We cannot resist thinking of Misery, though the cruelty
against Retired Detective K. William Hodges is a lot less intense than that described in that older novel. The
book altogether is more luminous than older books and is in the line of Joyland as for this luminosity. That is
probably the element that could be regretted: the brutal rude cruelty of the Richard Bachman side of Stephen
King. He seems to have curbed it in his latest novels. Should we regret it?
But he is indeed experimenting with other styles under the collaborative influence of his son Joe Hill,
a novelist of his own. He has thus a real future and heir for the coming decades in the cinema, in fiction, and
in other genres like the musical. Maybe he should concentrate on these new forms and aim at producing
more miniseries or films than books. He maybe has written enough books and should change media. But
such a choice has to be his decision. It is true it is difficult to do better than a good dozen of his older novels,
not to speak of The Dark Tower series, IT, or The Stand that are plain masterpieces. But yet there still are
some territories he can explore for our pleasure.
STEPHEN KING – THE BILL HODGES
TRILOGY – VOLUME TWO – FINDERS
KEEPERS – 2015
“Mr. Mercedes” was a prodigy in Stephen King’s long and voluminous work. But this sequel is a
miracle this time. And there are so many reasons that I can only give you a few.
First, the suspense is perfect. The end is unpredictable, really, at most one among many others. It is
centered on a teenager, a junior in high school who is totally trapped by life. And the big event in his life is
the 2009 depression that makes his father unemployed and his mother unemployed and then employed in a
lower job. Then there is the phenomenal Mercedes terrorist attack at the job fair at the Municipal center. The
son is suffering because his parents are bound to end up in separation and divorce and he hates the idea,
for them, for himself, and for his younger sister. What can HE, HIMSELF, and HIM AGAIN do about it?
That’s the genius of Stephen King. He knows how to center his stories on children, teenagers
particularly, and he seems to be able to capture their psyche, their strange mind and growing personality,

21.
growing in tortured anguish, awe, and angst, permanently victimized by their own self-centered altruistic ego.
They want to do something for other people and yet it is always for their own sake and that’s why it hurts. So,
what happens then? They launch themselves on the most incredible schemes that are supposed to bring
salvation and epiphany, redemption, and regeneration to everyone they may think of, but first of all, and
mostly to themselves. Then they will twist their minds and their psyches and their neurons, mirror or not,
because their schemes are bringing some wounds and pains to those who they love instead of only helping
them along.
Stephen King has always been able to do that, to describe that, to delve, dive, and soak himself in
such contradictory antagonistic and dialectical good bad-doing or bad good-doing. You would use a long M-
word, and that would not be Mercedes if it were some solitary play, but these teenagers or tweenagers
cannot do anything without involving other people in their intentions or in their targets, and good morning
Vietnam, let me introduce you to the catastrophe of the century who kills quite a few people and nearly kills a
few more. The criminal, the psychopath, the sociopath, and whatever else you may think of along that path,
is an ex-convict on parole who is absolutely crazy, I mean a “path” of any type you can think of: sociopath,
psychopath and even, that’s new, just out of the magic hat, culture-path. The poor man, because it has to be
a man, is so fixated on the work of the writer he killed out of vanity and disillusion that he is able to kill half a
dozen people to just have the chance of reading the novels this writer never published. Bad luck all along
since he is frozen feces-less by his own intellectual mother and he gets drunk and he rapes a woman, a
substitute for his mother that he would have liked to rape, that he should in his small logic have raped twenty
times at least as soon as he was something like 12.
Then the heart of the novel is that the money he stole and the notebooks he stole too from that
assassinated writer, he buries them before being caught raping a woman and before being railroaded down
into some penitentiary for life. Then the whole novel is the peregrination of the money, that ends up in some
charitable saving plan, and the notebooks, that end up all burnt up in the final catastrophic and abysmally
apocalyptic scene, though six were saved by the teenager who plays the hero – maybe he is in a way – and
Stephen King seems to forget about these and seems to assume that they have all been destroyed. Maybe
he should check the loose board at the back of the closet of this young teenager.
That kind of suspense novel is perfect, absolutely perfect and Stephen King manages to include
some allusions to some of his short stories and films but forget about it. It is gently vain and funnily gentle.
But the book has a tremendous symbolic value. 185 minus 6 notebooks (if I am not wrong on the
numbers) get burnt up at the end of the book. An “autodafe,” an act of faith my foot, an act of barbarity from
another time, another civilization, another barbarism, another monstrous inquisition in some Mesoamerican
or South American Spanish or Portuguese colony based on burn them all, the male Indians, and keep the
females for your service. And burn them all they did there in the basement of that closed and disaffected and
abandoned Municipal Centre. All except six of them. How can Stephen King even imagine such a crime

22.
against humanity and against human culture? I swear I will hate him forever for this act, but I must admit it is
the perfect climax in the grisly repellent suspense crime story this book contains.
And Stephen King cannot obviously resist putting some “magic” or supernatural energy somewhere,
but I can’t reveal it since it is going to be the starting point of the next volume of this psychopathic series.
Enjoy the novel, especially at night, and in the middle of the night get your courage up in your hands
and feet and walk to the out-house at the back of the yard outside in the pitch-dark night, if you still have an
out-house, and imagine the monsters that are going to catch you while you are tiptoeing along to that small
bungalow of your physiological needs, but please do not wet your pants, underwear or pajamas, or whatever
you are wearing, or the grass if you are wearing no encasement for your family jewels, just an XXX-large T-
shirt you have put on as a nightshirt with some provocative inscription on it, front and back, like Bill Hodges’s
assistant.
Have a good reading session under the full moon of all crimes.
STEPHEN KING – THE BILL HODGES
TRILOGY – VOLUME THREE – END OF
WATCH – 2016
I will dedicate this review to our good old friend Bill Hodges, alias Kermit William Hodges, aka
Kermit, otherwise known as the Det-Ret, who died at the end of his third statutory case and eponymous
volume, and was buried in total privacy by his own father and creator Stephen King when this one was finally
through with exploiting the character in his fictional stories. Let us pray for a minute for this glorious and
courageous character who could not enjoy his fame more than a few months after his victory and yet in great
pain, despite morphine.
Now let’s become what we should always be, busy beavers.
This volume, like the previous two, could be taken all by itself and that’s how I am going to look at it.
We are dealing with a psychic psychopath, Brady Hartsfield, alias Library Al or Z-boy, aka Dr. Babineau or
Dr. Z, also named Zeetheend in virtual reality, and even known as Zappit Zero, in game-hardware. We could
refresh you on the previous crimes, but it is not necessary here and, in the book, there is no summary of the
previous action or actions though the essential elements are given by Stephen King when necessary.
But let’s be clear, at least a little bit more. In the first volume, Brady Hartsfield ran a stolen Mercedes
Benz into a crowd waiting for the opening of a special job fair, very early in the morning in 2009 killing quite a
few and maiming quite a lot more. Later on, Brady Hartsfield tries to blow himself up in a boy-band concert in
the middle of thousands of kids, essentially girls, and parents. He is stopped just in time by Holly Gibney who
seriously concusses his skull and mashes his brain into a total coma for a while and a paraplegic situation
afterward. He thus ends up in a special unit in a hospital in a state that is declared catatonic though we have
a glimpse at the end of the second volume that he is maybe not completely catatonic, at least not on the
mental side of his being.

23.
The second volume concerns a completely different business like a vacation from the Hartsfield
case, while this hard-core criminal is recuperating from his catatonic state. A vacation to recuperate from
mental vacancy.
In this here third volume we go back to Hartsfield and we discover how an over 60-year-old doctor
used this patient as a guinea pig for not yet certified experimental drugs under no control at all. The patient
then re-conquers his mind and develops some particular capabilities, like telekinesis but also the great ability
to use hypnosis to capture the attention of people and take control of their minds and at first direct them to
his obsession, to commit suicide, and even later to host his own mind and thus transport him in a body that is
little by little made a simple pod for the mind of the criminal Brady Hartsfield. This is not a new idea and Anne
Rice used it a lot in her novel “The Body Thief” where Lestat de Lioncourt, her vampire, and another man
who is in no way a vampire have this ability and play around with it. Here Brady Hartsfield uses this ability to
move around when he is paraplegic to go and do things he could not do, to organize his big scheme and set
up the whole technical apparatus he needs to do it, either under the appearance of Library Al, alias Z-Boy, or
under the appearance of Dr. Babineau, alias Dr. Z.
He will thus buy a whole batch of game consoles that are out of the market because of some
bankruptcy, have them reprogrammed into hypnotic machines that will enable him to take control of the
minds of the users and lead them to suicide because his main objective is to make hundreds of people
commit suicide, to start and feed a real suicide epidemic. He is then known as the Suicide Prince, or Prince
Suicide if you prefer, or even the Prince of Suicide. He is a genius in computer science though in his hospital
wheelchair he cannot do much. He will have to take control of a girl with whom he had worked in the first
volume to be able to achieve his aim. She is Frederica Linklatter. For the sake of money, she finds herself
involved in that completely crazy project. She even let her own lesbian friend if not partner go just for the
thousands of dollars that are falling into her basket. Then Brady Hartsfield is able to plan and start his
vengeance against three people essentially, Barbara Robinson, a black girl who is essentially the sister of
Jerome Robinson. Brady Hartsfield had noticed her in his second terrorist attack on the concert. Then he is
targeting Jerome Robinson, a black boy he calls the Det-Ret’s nigger lawnmower, because he used to do
that for Bill Hodges when he was a teenager, and of course Bill Hodges, though he does not so much want
to kill that last one as to make him suffer from the suicide epidemic he is planning.
I am not going to tell the story that leads to the full and final destruction of Brady Hartsfield. I’m going
to make a few remarks at a wider and higher level.
My first remark is that – for once – Stephen King closes the trilogy with a “no survivor” situation, at
least the main pair of characters are exterminated, the criminal Brady Hartsfield and the ex-cop Det-Ret Bill
Hodges. The end is not a new beginning. It is a real end, not like the second coming restart of
the Dark Tower, and if there were to be a new beginning it would have to be of a somewhat totally different
nature. One may out-Caesar Caesar but as long as Caesar and Brutus are still alive, both of them. Then out-
Hodging Hodges becomes impossible once Hodges is out.

24.
My second remark is that more than ever the third volume is a metaphor for America. In the previous
episodes, the situation was saved by a woman Holly Gibney and a young black teenager Barbara Robinson.
In the same way, the second volume was saved by this same Holly Gibney and a young black teenager
Jerome Robinson. In this third volume, taking place six years after the events of the first Bill Hodges and
Holly Gibney are going to be killed by Brady Hartsfield when Jerome Robinson, now a young black man,
arrives with the cavalry and the cavalry is one horrible monstrous snowmobile or snow tank that saves the
day by crushing Brady Hartsfield into some dying pulp led to his own death by such a rolling over and
abandoned in the snowstorm to freeze till the cops may arrive. The famous Christine is revisited in this end.
Jerome Robinson is an obvious personification of Obama. Holly is the personification of Hillary Clinton,
except that the woman came first and will stay last. But is it not the very situation we had in 2008 and then
2016? The Blackman will naturally move on to his own life.
My third remark is that any institution in the USA, including the police, are institutionalized into
impotence, and not only by the Peter Principle. This volume as much as the two previous ones shows how
all institutions are the victims of the ambitions of their members who prefer messing up a case to
jeopardizing their personal goals, though some private initiative is going to force them into doing what they
refused to do at first and they then are very good at making it part of their plans. They are vampires sucking
the pith and marrow of the adventurous individuals who seize the day and change the world. At the same
time if they cannot recuperate those adventurous individuals, then they will push them into oblivion and
inexistence by all means possible. Here the X Files are the matrix of such a bureaucratic administrative
perversion we all have encountered here and there.
My fourth remark is that Stephen King has become obsessed with and by death, “one foot in the
grave and the other on a banana peel.” (347) There is no escape from some obvious elements in life – and
death. “Friends and neighbors, does the sun rise in the east?” (296) “If life hands you lemons, make
lemonade.” (293) “Two survivors of the City Center massacre. . . have committed suicide. . .“ (263) No
getaway from your fate. Even if it is racial/racist and sexist. “She is blackish, a word that seems the same as
useless, and she doesn’t deserve to live.” (115) And that fate is often repaired with patches and elastic
bands. “Deep in his thoughts, he misses the primer-spotted Chevy Malibu for the third time in two days . . .
standing next to it an elderly man in an old Army surplus parka that has been mended with masking tape.”
(108-9) It is all nothing but a backside front countdown. Nine pink fish to capture that are carrying numbers.
Numbers that have to be captured in these pink fish to add up to one hundred and twenty in one hundred
and twenty seconds. The obsession of the diabolical hour of Jesus’ death on the cross, the ninth hour. The
obsession of the twelve disciples, of the twelve months of the year, that all accompany the Lord in his death
on the cross; accompany and reject, to maybe recompose themselves when the danger is passed, except
John at the foot of the cross and the two Mary’s, the last two not being disciples, at least officially, but these
are a kid under 15 and two women. And this book all starts with a survivor of the City Center Massacre,
Martine Stover, being put to sleep by her mother, Mrs. Ellerton, who then commits suicide.
Seen like that in backward retrospective the whole book is like a descent into hell and we can then
think of the seven screens of Brady Hartsfield’s own morbid regressive perspective. (91)
1- His brother Frankie he helped die by pushing him down some staircase.
2- His mother Deborah he helped commit suicide with psychic means.
3- Thing One and Thing Two, his long-lived and still-born inventions.
4- Mrs. Trelawney’s gray Mercedes sedan that killed quite a few at the City Center.

25.
5- The wheelchair in which his body is now locked up as the result of his failed attack against the
Mingo Auditorium.
6- A handsome, smiling young man. . . , the old Det-Ret’s nigger lawn boy.
7- Hodges himself who will lead the attack bringing the death of this pitiful excuse for anything as far
away as possible from what we generally call a man, and yet this chase will lead to closure six months later.
How can you be more gruesome in your regression than that? Just a child turned into a monster by
his family conditions, his jealousy against his little brother, the ambiguous and obscure role of his mother and
this child will grow into a computing genius who will use his capabilities to in the end commit suicide, kill
himself, destroy his sorry excuse for a human being, but along with dragging as many people down behind
and with him as possible. Don’t tell me that does not exist. San Bernardino, Orlando, Paris, Brussels, and so
many other places where one can die and kill dozens at the same time, as if these deaths, including theirs,
were able to compensate for their mentally neutered and physically spayed frustration.
Strangely enough, I found an obvious mistake in the book. Page 234 and page 237 the Chevy
Malibu, the possession of Library Al, is absent from Dr. Babineau’s property when the police arrive, though
Library Al is sleeping and snoring upstairs. This Library Al is attributed later the coming to Dr. Babineau’s,
then going to the hospital and then coming back to Dr. Babineau’s and staying there, and yet his car is
absent, and Dr. Babineau’s has been shot at, by whom? And this Chevy Malibu is the car Brady Hartsfield in
the body of Dr. Babineau uses to get to the hunting camp for the end of his suicide inflicting and suicide
committing mission. This discrepancy is surprising, but I guess when we are dealing with a mental monster,
we may lose some threads, or some threads may get loose.
I will conclude with a double question.
Is Stephen King obsessed and fascinated by his own death, which would be morbid?
Is Stephen King the simple mirror capturing the reflection of what life is in the world? The absolute
domination of inflicted and self-inflicted death everywhere in the world? And when there is no war in a
country you can be sure there will be a San Bernardino in California or an Orlando in Florida to inflict their
load of victims onto our souls and minds.
We could wonder if Stephen King is not recapturing the self-drawing of blood that was ritualistic
among all men in Maya society a long time ago. And this is only one case of self-sacrifice. What about the
systematic human sacrifice that is still going on in our societies under the name of the death penalty?
We can go on wondering, but it is a sad state of affairs in this supposedly civilized world where one
candidate in the US presidential election is advocating torture not to get information since we all know it is
ineffective for that, but to get even with the barbarity of the other side. A never-ending competition at who
was first and who will be last. There is always an ugly duckling in a brood of political fledglings.

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THE BLACKER, THE BLEAKER
STEPHEN KING – THE INSTITUTE –
2019
This is not Stephen King’s best book, because he never had a best-book. They are all different and
all good in different ways and this one is both science fiction, mad scientist, crooked politician, secret global
order, fear and fright of war, and above all children, many children, and by children, I mean most of them
before puberty. And it is absolutely perverse because our world is still in many ways perverse. This being
said, I can easily assert that this book brings us a new facet of Stephen King’s storytelling at least as strong
as The Dead Zone, The Stand, and The Green Line, and you will recognize echoes to Carrie, Christine, and
Firestarter, among many others.
The first part will feel slow maybe and not that eventful for quite a while, just things coming and
people going, and events happening in a small town in South Carolina, all seen from the point of view of an
ex-cop from Sarasota who has just resigned and decided to move on. To New York, he was saying, and I am
afraid he is bound to stay in this tobacco and sweet potato giant garden that South Carolina is, with its soil
slightly reddish. I have never been in Du Pray or South Carolina. I crossed it once. But I was not very far in
Dunn North Carolina for long enough to enjoy that red earth and the fields of sweet potatoes, tobacco and
other crops growing abundantly under the Carolinian climate. But this first part is going to give to the novel its
real depth. So do not skip pages.
The book raises many questions about the present, the world we are living in, the world of “T***p . . .
that big city dumbs**t. . . “ (page 543). Sorry for the stars but the word would be censored on any “decent”
reviewing site. When you are dealing with political science fiction the reviewer, the critic cannot even dream
of using the language of the author of the book under review because of Main Street decency, which is, in
fact, Main Drag hypocrisy. The book intends to make us shiver with fright at the idea that for once in a long
time a US President could decide to press on the red button.
The idea though is that after 1945 the winners of WWII decided secretly to set up a network of
institutes in which they collected children with special mental and psychic capabilities that he calls BDNF or
Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor. The idea is that if in a child you managed to completely neutralize the
mind, this BDNF would be free to grow, for one, and to cause people to do what they do not want to, what

27.
they could not control. The objective is to join all the kids in that network at a same time and day and have
them concentrate their BDNF onto the said character who would kill himself by suicide, rather easy, and
better by a self-imposed accident on the street or wherever he or she would be and it would look like a
plausible accident. The people chosen there are people who want to disrupt the world’s peace. The idea is
that sacrificing a few ten thousand children to prevent wars that would kill several ten million children in one
minute is worth having.
Stephen King sets the origin of this technique and technology in Germany under Hitler, which is
slightly easy, but the winners after the war would have recuperated this procedure and implemented secretly
in at least four corners of the world if not a dozen of such corners to neutralize dangerous people who could
menace the equilibrium of the world after the war. The idea is grotesquely possible in twisted minds like the
various political leaders we have had in the Western world since 1945, since after the defeat and death of
Hitler. And of course, after 70 years of smooth functioning, people become sloppy. It is easy to abduct a
child, kill all his family and have the child disappear without leaving the smallest trail behind. The objective
being to find kids who have a strong BDNF potential, they necessarily recruit kids who are TK (telekinetic) or
TP (telepathic). They are supposed to pick kids who are not too strong in those two departments of TK or
TP, but sloppiness makes them one day recruit one child who is slightly telekinetic but extremely brilliant and
intelligent, which enables him to bypass the security of the computers they are provided with, in the Institute.
Sloppiness, because they do not track what the children are doing with these computers, both because they
are overconfident about themselves (arrogance) and purely lazy or ignorant (incompetence). That would not
have been enough if just next to this one, Luke, they had not brought a second one, Avery, who is highly
telepathic, and he mates up, from the first moment he is in the Institute, with Luke.
The heavy treatment, in fact, torture with shots and other severe punishments or tests, has strange
effects on some kids. Luke turns up telepathic and that enables him to communicate with Avery without
anyone seeing it, and Avery becomes the invisible mind reader Luke needs to communicate with one
charwoman or cleaning lady, and that will open up an escape route for Luke.
You can, of course, wonder if such things do exist, and you would be wrong to doubt it. Children
have been used in many wars and even very recent ones, or even wars going on right now, and not only in
Africa. Colombia, I was told yesterday, was a case on the FARC side. ISIS is another case, and it is still
going on, turning children into perambulating bombs. In France the Resistance during the German
occupation often recruited children definitely underage, at times under fifteen, to fight, or to be liaising
“agents” if not saboteurs. The list is long and the way such movements, clandestine or officials (on the side
of a government), recruit and use children, after mind washing and indoctrination, for their military operations
is multifarious. ISIS recruited children from twelve onward and trained them to commit all sorts of torture and
executions, including providing them with some prisoners for them to practice in real terms and real-time the
handling of a throat-cutting knife.
But, will you say, the objectives of such movements go against universal values as if high school
students in Hong Kong were old enough to break into buildings, to loot them and set them on fire. There is a
whole discourse going on that it is enough to be young in order to be justified to commit any kind of crimes.
Was the age of all Yellow Vests in France checked and were all those under 18 sent back home? Let me
laugh. They are young so they are justified, aren’t they? Thousands of stores were looted and ransacked in

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Paris and other cities, hundreds if not thousands of cars were set aflame, and that happens too for New Year
or some events of the sort, and quite a few of the participants were under 18, and quite a few people who
were apprehended were under 18. No one knows really because they are not supposed to have their identity
published.
So, I am afraid Stephen King is not only dealing with third world countries or Islamic movements, far
from it. He is dealing with a new form of violence that is systematic, organized, anonymous, “spontaneous”
meaning summoned by anonymous calls on social networks, and with only one objective: to disrupt, to
destroy, to loot, to desecrate (and not only Jewish tombs, far from it). So, what can be done in such a
situation? The Yellow Vest movement in France showed clearly that this “spontaneous” mobilization
remained rather important for about four or five weeks and then went on with very average numbers of actual
participants, and declined rather fast after three months, and it is unable to find any footing anymore. If such
movements are not taken over by manipulating extreme movements, on the left or the right, or simply on the
criminal side of our black-market economy, the movements peter out in no time. Otherwise, it lasts slightly
longer.
And that’s the second thing Stephen King shows clearly. When such extreme events occur, reactions
can be very fast to come. In Du Pray, within one hour the whole population was out with weapons to clean
up the commando, and they did, even if five members of the Police force were killed, including the sheriff.
And what’s more there are always some reluctant children in such enslaving situation as the Institute, or any
institution that consider authoritarianism is good (think of slavery in the USA). Resistance starts from inside.
But that takes a lot more time. You do not have a prison upheaval every week, and a prison upheaval is
always defeated. That’s where Stephen King needed something more than plain resistance to constant
bullying and inescapable systematic violence. It only becomes credible because of the special mental and
psychic abilities he summons. Since these special abilities are brought into the picture by the Institute itself, it
is credible that it may backfire. And the fact we are dealing with children and young teens makes it extremely
empathetic, emotional. For once too these kids are clearly identified racially, though it could have been more
detailed. But, yes, there is some clear diversity in gender and in color, including among the staff who are all
veterans of some armed force or police force.
Then the end is, of course, cinematographic, a catastrophe film, one more, with a short section at the
end trying to re-insert the few kids that managed to escape into society without too many questions asked.
All the gorks, those who had lost all their mind and were reduced to pure BDNF brutal force, are killed in the
collapse of the buildings, along with Avery who was obliged to stay because he was the one who was
channeling the power of the gorks in order to lift up the building and destroy it. I regret one thing here. The
survivors who are taken to Du Pray and then dispatched to family relatives, except Luke who has no direct
relatives and stays with Tim and Wendy, two survivors of the Sheriff force in Du Pray and who organized and
implemented the salvaging attack against the Institute, to try and find his life again as an over-intelligent
intellect, these survivors did not have a special commemoration of Avery and the role he played, as if they
tried to put things behind. I find on the other hand the confrontation with the lisping individual who was
always presented from afar as the brain of the Institute enterprise rather artificial and not useful at all. He is
not needed to tell the survivors they have to keep their mouths shut. That only enables Stephen King to

29.
introduce the next generation of mental and psychic manipulation, precognition, the ability to predict the
future. Luke takes great pleasure to destroy the use of probabilities to predict the future, the Bernoulli
distribution as he calls it, but something is missing. The Brenoulli distribution or theory is absurd to predict
the future, even with Big Data, Deep Learning, and Artificial Intelligence, because that would mean the future
would be probabilistically nothing but a copy-cat repetition of the past, and you have to be completely
berserk to believe that history repeats itself. Never does it repeat itself, except in a metaphorical meaning
which means nothing, because real life is not a metaphor. It is real life, that is to say millions of parameters at
stake and at play in an unpredictable situation.
History is a Brownian soup with billions of people all agitated and moving in all directions and
colliding into one another constantly without any possibility to say who they are going to meet on the
underground tomorrow morning. There might be one or two regulars but there will be a lot more irregulars
and these could introduce all sorts of disruptions. But remember the basic idea: Big Date probabilities can
only predict what results from the majority, at times vast majority, of available data collected on the only
basis of what has happened in the past up to today included can take into account without fantasizing.
Actually, T***p was elected because no one believed it was possible, based on decades and decades of
history and thousands of Gallup polls, opinion polls, and other social investigative reports.
But the style of Stephen King is still there, full and complete and he brings up some formulas at times
that are such punchlines that you smile and say thank you. “Great events turn on small hinges.” Twice page
9 and page 280. “What was round ha[s] no point” Page 20. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of
cure.” Page 25. “When you stare into it, it stares back at you.” Page 53. “Treat us right, and we’ll treat you
right. . . Go along to get along.” Page 102. And finally, the one I prefer. “If you wet your pants, you must take
a chance and dance it to France.” Page 125. Then look for more yourself. There are galore of them.
A great experience that may leave you emotionally moved if not disturbed but avoid PTSD (quoted
once in the whole book). We are living in a PTSD time. We are born into it. We live through it and we die in it
but we leave it behind for other survivors because we cannot take anything with us six feet under. And leave,
on a USB key, in a safe deposit box in a bank vault, all you want the other survivors who are not dead when
you die to share after your departure.

30.
STEPHEN KING – BAG OF BONES –
MATT VENNE – MICK GARRIS –
2011
This two-episode TV mini-series is probably one of the best adaptations of Stephen King’s novels
and the novel itself, hence the story, hence the plot are absolutely outrageously phenomenal and beautiful,
though they are hyper dramatic and even tragic.
The story is one rare story, if not the only one, in which the curse of slavery is followed step by step
among a group of white people. It is definitely PTSS but Post Traumatic SLAVERY Stress Syndrome on the
side of the descendants of the white slaveowners. The event at stake takes place in 1939. A bunch, half a
dozen or so, white young men after some fair in their small-town rape the main female singer, a black
woman, drown her daughter and eventually kill the mother. They bury the two bodies and the two black
woman and girl are just declared “disappeared.” The black singer casts a curse on all the descendants of the
young people who took part: all the daughters that will be born and the mothers of these daughters will be
killed by the husband and father of the mother and daughter.
The main character is the descendant of one in the band. His wife gets killed in a road accident in a
big city while her husband who is a best-selling writer is signing his books in a bookstore. She was pregnant
and she was afraid it could be a daughter. She had spent several periods in the small town where the events
took place, in a house on the shore of a lake, Dark Lake, owned by her husband. She had found out about
the 1939 events and curse from one survivor of the band. The leader and instigator of the band is still alive,
and he is trying to get the custody of his granddaughter that his son tried to kill along with his wife and
mother of the child. But in fact, it went wrong and the wife and mother killed the husband and father. The
grandfather wants to get custody of his granddaughter in order to purge the curse himself. But he is old and
has decided to put an end to his life, so he deals with the main character Michael Noonan. “If you accept to
take custody of the girl then I will drop my lawsuit to get the custody of her myself.” Michael Noonan accepts.
And that’s when everything gets nasty. The “sheriff” or “deputy sheriff” kills the mother and wants to
kill the daughter but Michael Noonan stops him – radically. Then he finds out, after the burial of the main
culprit, the last survivor who finally tells him what he had told his wife. So, he knows what he has to do.
Close the curse, but how? Some black magic from his dead wife helps with magnetic letters on the fridge

31.
door and by overriding his computer and giving him a message. He knows he has to use lye, the lye his wife
had prepared, to burn the corpses and bones of the two black mother and daughter. But where are the
corpses buried? He remembers a strange tree in the shape of a woman somewhere not very far away and
sure enough, he gets to the two bodies and he manages to clean up the mess.
Yet the last woman-partner of the main culprit, who helped him put an end to his life, has invaded his
house where the little girl is sleeping, and she is waiting for Michael Noonan to arrive in order for him to carry
out the curse. Of course, a good ending awaits us.
The main question of this novel, and here TV mini-series, is the Post Traumatic SLAVERY Stress
Syndrome of the descendants of slaveowners. This PTSS is irreversible all by itself, and it is a curse on
American society, not only on a few people. How can the millions of slaves tortured to death, beaten to
death, exploited to death or plainly lynched be put to rest and thus save the American society from the curse
it represents among the whites? The same PT-SLAVERY-SS is just as bad on the side of the descendants
of the black slaves, but the mini-series and the book do not explore this side of the story, or history, and how
this historical damage caused to tens of millions of people alive today can be put to rest.
The book and mini-series seem to say that the only way is to make all the culprits pay and to bring all
descendants and their friends put to rest the curse by making amend and repairing the damage their
ancestors caused as slaveowners or beneficiaries of slavery, at the time and since then, since probably
something like 80% of US riches were produced by the work of the slaves and their descendants. The whites
just took advantage of it and their own share is rather minimal.
Of course, the problem and the solutions (in the plural) are a lot more complex, but all whites must
understand that they have to make amend for what the whites in previous centuries did to the slaves and
their descendants, with the salves and their descendants. That should be the first step on a rather Long
March ahead.

32.
STEPHEN KING – DAVID FRAZEE – PRIME
VIDEO – CHAPELWAITE – 2021
This series is adapted from Stephen King’s short story “Jerusalem’s Lot,” the first short story of the
first collection of short stories by Stephen King, Night Shift (1975-1978). That was also the first short story or
novel or story about vampires. It is the root story for the later novel Jerusalem’s Lot (first published as an
illustrated book in 1975) and as a novel under the title Salem’s Lot in 1975 too.
The series is very well done, and the story is full of suspense, though we more or less know what is
going to happen. There might be differences with the short story I have retrieved from my library but that is
not important here.
First vampires are invisible in a mirror. They are immortal because they are undead, which means
they cannot die, except in very precise and special ways like being beheaded, having their heart destroyed
with a stake, or being burned to death. The vampires here are clearly in agreement with the standard version
of them. They feed on human blood. They can turn any human into vampires by making them drink their
blood and then killing them. They will be reborn as immortal undead. They hate sunlight and are nocturnal
animals or humanoid individuals. They love sticking together and they need a number of dedicated servants
to feed them and to look after them in the daytime.
The second element is that the vampire nest is created by one vampire arriving in a human
community, and settling next to it, and feeding on this community. This outside origin of a vampire nest is
typical of modern vampire stories, though there is some link with the first matrix of this story in modern times,
Dracula by Bram Stoker. In America, in the middle of the 19th century, it was rather easy to move around and
to be a vampire because of the rather disorganization in the country and even on the continent.
The third element in this story is the house of the Boone family. The main actor is a third-generation
American Boone. He is a whaler, hence a ship captain, and has had the luck to escape his own father who
wanted to kill him to prevent his becoming a vampire. He was saved by his mother who shot the father when
he was in the process of killing and burying the son. The grandfather, the first vampire in the family, and an
uncle, a brother of Charles Boone’s own father, the second vampire in the family, fake their death and burial
so that they could will the estate and the wood cutting business to their distant nephew who is lured into
coming back and only finds out when he arrives with his three children after the death of his wife, buried at
sea, what it is all about.

33.
He discovers that the house is haunted, in fact, is built in such a way that there are passages
between the walls and rooms with an outside rather distant entry and some entries in some rooms of the
house so that the vampiric Boones can walk around and they probably hope they will be able to feed on their
relatives or turn them into vampires to be able to get the “book” and defeat the master vampire.
During that time, the “father” of the nest has established his quarters in an abandoned mining estate
that belonged to the Boones, and he has turned the chapel there into an entirely lightless building, hence a
decent home for them all in the daytime while their ghouls are protecting the chapel and the settlement. The
settlement is called Jerusalem’s Lot.
Then the series is very, Kingian in many ways because it centers the story on systematic opposition
and hostility in the human community that has developed around the Boone sawmill and who hate the
Boones because of what they call the Boone sickness or plague, in fact, the dizziness and even death that
comes from being used at night as feeding cattle by the vampires. The point is that in the community some
perfectly know it all, but they are hiding the problem. Many other social evils and much hypocrisy are
revealed with a preacher married to the daughter of the previous preacher, still alive, and having thus
inherited of the congregation, is having an affair with one of the women who are feeding the vampires with
the promise of being made eternal someday. She gets a child, at first attributed to the young preacher, and
later to the vampire-master of the mining settlement, which explains why the baby does not have eyes since
he is a child of the dark, of the night. This is a metaphor of course.
The most poignant part is that Captain Boone’s second daughter, Loa, has a handicap due to
scorbutic deformation and has to wear braces on her right leg. She hates it and accuses her father. That
leads her to yield to the vampire promise to be safe and healthy if she accepted to become a vampire, which
she does, not seeing that it is the way used by this master vampire to blackmail Captain Boone into finding a
certain magical book that could bring the permanent night to the place and enable the vampires to become
the master of the place and the humans their cattle. And it works. Then the story is simple.
The general fight between the humans from the human city against the ghouls and the vampires,
after a successful siege of the Boone house that enables the master-vampire to finally recuperate the book
that should enable him to bring the oldest god imaginable, the Worm. Then the vampires and their ghouls go
away and start the procedure. The human attack on the vampire settlement is difficult and eternal night is
setting in as a solar eclipse by the moon. When that happens, the various vampires give their blood to the
ghouls, then strangle them so that they can be reborn as vampires.
To find the ending, you’ll have to watch the series.
The last remark is very sad. Only the father can protect his children and when it is all finished, he is
supposed to go away with the book and become the guardian of it. Note he has been made a vampire by
Loa, and with his own consent. This father goes back to the sea on a small boat. But he leaves Loa behind
to be taken care of by her sister and brother. That is definitely unfinished, and that is also typically Kingian.
Since this series is so far the first season of the series, there will be a second season one day and we are
waiting for it.
VERSION FRANÇAISE
Cette série est adaptée de la nouvelle de Stephen King "Jerusalem's Lot", la première nouvelle du
premier recueil de nouvelles de Stephen King, Night Shift (1975-1978). Il s'agit également de la première
nouvelle, roman ou histoire sur les vampires. Elle est à l'origine du roman ultérieur Jerusalem's Lot (publié
pour la première fois sous la forme d'un livre illustré en 1975, puis d'un roman intitulé Salem's Lot en 1975
également.
La série est très bien faite et l'histoire est pleine de suspense, même si nous savons plus ou moins
ce qui va se passer. Il peut y avoir des différences avec la nouvelle que j'ai récupérée dans ma bibliothèque,
mais ce n'est pas important ici.
Tout d'abord, les vampires sont invisibles dans un miroir. Ils sont immortels parce qu'ils sont morts-
vivants, ce qui signifie qu'ils ne peuvent pas mourir, sauf de manière très précise et spéciale, comme être
décapité, avoir le cœur détruit par un pieu ou être brûlé à mort. Les vampires ici sont clairement en accord

34.
avec la version standard d'eux. Ils se nourrissent de sang humain. Ils peuvent transformer n'importe quel
humain en vampire en lui faisant boire leur sang puis en le tuant. Ils renaîtront en tant que morts-vivants
immortels. Ils détestent la lumière du soleil et sont des animaux nocturnes ou des individus humanoïdes en
rien humains. Ils aiment vivre ensemble en groupe et ont besoin d'un certain nombre de serviteurs dévoués,
des goules, pour les nourrir et s'occuper d'eux pendant la journée.
Le deuxième élément est que le nid de vampires est créé par un vampire qui arrive dans une
communauté humaine, s'installe à côté d'elle et se nourrit de cette communauté. Cette origine extérieure
d'un nid de vampires est typique des histoires de vampires modernes, bien qu'il existe un certain lien avec la
première matrice de cette histoire dans les temps modernes, Dracula de Bram Stoker. En Amérique, au
milieu du 19ème siècle, il était plutôt facile de se déplacer et d'être un vampire en raison de la désorganisation
du pays et même du continent.
Le troisième élément de cette histoire est la maison de la famille Boone. L'acteur principal est un
Boone américain de troisième génération. Il est baleinier, donc capitaine de navire, et a eu la chance
d'échapper à son propre père qui voulait le tuer pour l'empêcher de devenir un vampire. Il a été sauvé par sa
mère qui a abattu le père au fusil de chasse alors qu'il était en train de tuer et d'enterrer le fils. Le grand-
père, premier vampire de la famille, et un oncle, frère du père de Charles Boone, deuxième vampire de la
famille, ont simulé leur mort et leur enterrement pour pouvoir léguer le domaine et la scierie à leur neveu
éloigné, qui est ainsi incité à revenir et il ne découvre ce qu'il en est que lorsqu'il arrive avec ses trois enfants
après la mort de sa femme, ensevelie en mer.
Il découvre que la maison est hantée. En fait elle est construite de telle manière qu'il y a des
passages entre les murs et les pièces avec une entrée extérieure assez lointaine et quelques entrées dans
certaines pièces de la maison, de sorte que les Boones vampiriques peuvent se promener et ils espèrent
probablement pouvoir se nourrir de leurs proches ou les transformer en vampires pour pouvoir obtenir le
"livre" et vaincre le maître vampire.
Pendant ce temps, le "père" du nid a établi ses quartiers dans un domaine minier abandonné qui
appartenait aux Boones et il a transformé la chapelle qui s'y trouvait en un bâtiment entièrement dépourvu
de lumière, ce qui leur permet de dormir décemment pendant la journée, tandis que leurs goules protègent
la chapelle et le village. La colonie s'appelle Jerusalem's Lot.
Ensuite, la série est très, très Kingienne à bien des égards parce qu'elle centre l'histoire sur
l'opposition systématique et l'hostilité de la communauté humaine qui s'est développée autour de la scierie
Boone et qui déteste les Boones à cause de ce qu'ils appellent la maladie ou la peste Boone, en fait le
vertige et même la mort que provoque le fait d'être utilisé la nuit comme bétail d'alimentation par les