Unfortunately, by the third novel in the Mr Mercedes series, Stephen King is squarely back to the bloody paranormal.
The only way to make the paranormal work in a novel is to have it serve some interesting purpose. Colleen Hoover managed to do that in Layla, and even I didn’t hate the paranormal aspect of the book. But King, like almost everybody who does the paranormal, uses it out of laziness.
How did the mass killer escape from the secure facility where he’s held in a vegetative state? You could come up with an inventive plot or you can simply say that the killer suddenly develops the powers of mind control and inhabits the brain of whomever he chooses. Ta-da!
The problem is, where anything is possible, nothing is interesting. How did the criminal do this? Magic! And how did he… Also magic! But how… Really cool magic! Ah, OK, then.
The series started strong but then kind of petered out. The first book is good, though.
Clarissa's Blog 
Have you read Flannery O’Connor? Quintessential American writer. Not entirely my cuppa, but very, very good.
The rule for anything supernatural is to build the world where it can happen. This is no problem within any given religious framework (For example, Bridge of Birds or Iron Chamber of Memory). Writing as a modern materialist, however, adding in paranormal tropes with no warning is cheating unless the reader can return to the opening chapters and find threads of that possible world present.
LikeLike
I was all ready to gripe about your paranormal-in-fiction gripe, because my family has legions of credible stories in that vein. It’s not like it doesn’t happen. Why would you want fiction to be scrubbed clean of it?
But no, you’re totally right. The way that stuff shows up in fiction is just “one, two, skip a few, ninety-nine, a hundred” plotting laziness, and never how it looks IRL– where it happens fairly frequently but mostly doesn’t make a difference to events. I have yet to read a book where it looks like the real thing: phone rings, 5yo says “grandma’s dead”, mom picks up the phone, and it’s the relatives calling to say that grandma died. And, you know, adults didn’t overreact, 5yo grew up to be a regular person, not some kind of psychic wonder. It’s real, but it’s mostly trivial like that. Detail not plot.
If that same incident turned up in a novel and not family lore, there is absolutely no way it could just be left on the table. It’d be Chekov’s gun, a foreshadowing of future momentous events, blah blah blah. Why is that? Like why can’t it be like IRL where it’s just another weird thing that happens, and then nothing comes of it? Same as sometimes you accidentally touch chewing gum on the underside of the restaurant table, and sometimes you hit every red light on your way to work, and sometimes when you’ve been thinking of someone you haven’t seen in years, and wondering if you should get in touch, they call you out of the blue.
I would like to read such a book, though.
LikeLiked by 2 people
“never how it looks IRL– where it happens fairly frequently but mostly doesn’t make a difference to events”
Exactly. people think “how does X know these things?” or “that was…. weird” and go on with things.
Fiction is supposed to boil everything down the most important moments, parts of a person’s life but still… it’s weird that the main two approaches to weird things that happen to lots of (most?) people can only be handled in two ways:
1- we’re never ever going to mention this
2 – little Henry showed himself to the be the chosen one at the age of six, when….
LikeLiked by 2 people
Exactly. It either doesn’t exist, or it’s the most important thing in the story.
But that’s not how it works IRL.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Exactly. I agree completely. I have plenty of such things that happened to me. Like that back door at the local trampoline park that plugs me right in to some massive energy source and I have no idea why.
But in the mystery genre, the whole point is that you try to guess who, what or how because there are rules. How did the criminal get out of a locked room without disturbing the lock or opening the window? You expect some cool trick and you try to guess what it is. But then it turns out that the criminal can fly out as a spirit and inhabit anybody’s body at any distance. Oh, well, in that case… Anything is possible, and as a result everything is mega boring. But how easy for an author. In fantasy genre or sci-fi, where there’s world-building, there are still rules. Like the 3 rules of robotics in Azimov. It’s not a complete free-for-all because that’s tedious.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“that back door at the local trampoline park that plugs me right in to some massive energy source and I have no idea why.”
Ancient Indian burial ground 😉
LikeLike