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.

As the middle classes are washed out by the new economic model, the middle-of-the-road students are disappearing, too. There are now the intense, almost fanatical overachievers and the disengaged, mentally afflicted slackers. This started sometime in 2021 and is accelerating fast.

I’m telling you, folks, they are massively dialing back. Kendi is disgraced, trans activists are catching Ls. This is good.

As many extremely woke people, Stephen King has a very repressed and a very itchy problem with black people. I’ve never in my life encountered such a number of racist insults as I have in his book Mr Mercedes. Of course, it’s a racist character who proffers them but… the lady doth protest too much. How many times do you need a character to use the n-word to make the point that he’s racist? Sixty? Seventy? After a few dozen uses it stops being about the character and starts pointing to the author’s need to say the word he keeps locked deep down inside.

It’s a very nice read, though, aside from the wokeness.

Who’s with me, waiting on pins and needles for the new release in the Cormoran Strike series?

It’s 960 pages!!! How cool is that?

To while away the time, I got into the Mr Mercedes series by Steven King and was nicely surprised to find out that there’s nothing paranormal in the book. Apparently, King abandoned the paranormal stuff, and thank goodness. I’m really enjoying the first book in the series.

Please observe the armed lady and the bunch of unarmed cucks behind her, and never ever be too critical of the US culture. You could always be… whatever these sad bastards are. And you are not, so God bless America.

Klara’s school was doing class photos today, and I purchased her sparkly clip-on ear-rings that she wanted for the occasion. I grew up in a family where putting clear nail polish on my nails at 15 merited me a huge scandal with repeated prophesies that I was going to grow up to be a prostitute. As a result, I welcome any manifestation of my kid’s femininity.

Then she told me that she and her friends had a discussion and decided that to make the earrings really pop, she needed to wear black velvet. The cuteness of a bunch of 7-year-olds discussing black velvet and ear-rings is overwhelming.

Kids are such a joy.

Hyperbole is the American national pastime. Americans like to exist in a state of high drama. They are always one step away from the “loss of our democracy”, the collapse of all institutions of government and society, the climate apocalypse, the total destruction of the economy and the immediate death of all the perennially wounded minorities from fascism, Nazism, authoritarianism and unpleasant pronouns. This trait makes them extremely endearing and profoundly annoying.

In the current tensions between Poland and Ukraine, I’m on Poland’s side. As we all know, I’m loyal to principles and detest partisanship. Poland is standing up to the EU’s high-handedness, and kudos to the Poles for that. And Ukraine, as a johnny come lately of the euro-integration process who’s too busy with its own problems to understand the intricacies of the EU politics, is acting like a bull in a china shop.

I have no doubt that the two countries will figure it out and will be as friendly as ever. And I hope that a wide-eyed admiration of the EU disappears from Ukraine for good. I dedicated a whole chapter of my book, explaining how Spaniards shot themselves not just in the foot but in every extremity when they traded sovereignty for the fantasy of being considered “real Europeanness”. They never asked themselves, I say in the book, why the label of Europeanness was being awarded by somebody else and why it had to be paid for so dearly. It’s best to ask these questions before than after.

“What’s the point of dying to defend your sovereignty from Russia to then go and cede it to somebody else?” I ask in the book.