My favourite author in the whole world is Stephen King. No-one else comes even close. Maybe John Irvin. It’s about the characters and how they’re built. And no-one can compete with the boy from Maine. Not Dostoevsky, not Dickens and, as far as I know, no-one in Jayne Eyre had their throats ripped out by rabid dogs from hell. Ok, he did a lot of ‘horror’, but he’s also done loads of other stuff. Shawshank Redemption. My stock answer to anyone who questions the man on ‘horror grounds’. I loved the horror. It was such a wonderful way to produce pure ‘evil’.

But the horror gave way to a less supernatural version of evil. So although his more recent body of work may contain a little ‘telepathic suggestion’ or two, or some useful precognition, these are now done slightly more moderately than in, say, Carrie, and more subtle than in It. There are sledgehammers more subtle than It.

And in a way, the evil produced by ‘mere mortals’ is much more scary than by a vampire. Or a killer, eternal clown.

About 10 years ago he wrote a book called ‘Mr Mercedes’. About one of King’s favourite character types. The embodiment of pure evil. Evil for evil’s sake. And the eponymous baddie drove his great big Mercedes, at speed into a crowd queuing up for a concert. Multiple deaths, more horrendous injuries, the stuff of nightmares. Stephen King stuff.

Then a bunch of jihadis ran a truck down a promenade in Nice, killing 80 people. This was followed by vehicular attacks in lots of other countries, from Belgium to Spain and even the UK. The weaponisation of motor vehicles suddenly became ‘the thing to do’. And not just jihadis, there were other great causes for which the cretinous fuckwit believers thought the murder of dozens of random people would be a great benefit to those causes.

And then Liverpool. Monday. Tens of thousands of Scousers and Scouser-sympathisers from all over the world had gathered to celebrate Liverpool’s league victory. A joyous occasion. A massive party. Which one man chose to ‘rain upon’. Proclaimed immediately as ‘white, in his 50s’, so as to stave off any more attacks on refugee centres due to lack of correct information being forthcoming. Drove into a bunch of people. Amazingly none died. But about 75 were injured.

I’m not blaming Stephen King for this. I’m sure there have been such incidents before he wrote the car-killer’s handbook. But wow, it’s scary. And an epitome of that ‘pure evil’.

So to defend myself (and to get rid of some really troublesome, dying old bushes in the garden) I finally fulfilled a lifetime’s ambition and bought a chainsaw. It’s cordless, to save me severing cables, and so ‘eco’. And dangerous. But not as dangerous as the one I really want which is twice as long and has a V8 diesel engine. Baby steps. Get this gentle little thing, then ‘upgrade’ later.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx