The books of Stephen King are so distinctive and so steeped in the voice we all know and love they’re almost a genre in themselves, not just in the language but the character styles, locales (usually small towns) and ways of life he depicts.
Billy Summers is another excursion away from the horror genre that made his name – you might have read it described as a noir thriller. It may be, but it’s first and foremost a King jam through and through.
The titular character is a former Afghan war sharpshooter who now makes his living back in America as a professional assassin – has there ever been a character archetype so essentially Hollywood (and quite un-Kingesque)?
Summers isn’t exactly suffering from PTSD after his tour, but when he takes a job that sees him waiting in the office of a small town skyscraper posing as a writer working on a novel, he passes the time by writing his own life story and seems to be reaching some kind of cathartic peace with it.
While dealing with his shady employers, an even shadier local fixer and pretending to be friendly to his new small town neighbours, he writes about his upbringing in a dilapidated foster home near a vast car junkyard, signing up, shipping out and the action and death he saw with his friends while he was there.
For a long time you figure the theme King is going for is the power of writing to bring peace with the past and even offer redemption. But when the opportunity for Billy to fulfil his contract finally appears and he goes on the run to let the heat die down, the whole subplot of his life story kind of peters out when he meets and takes in a young abused woman with nowhere else to go.
Like few of his other works, Billy Summers feels like King can’t seem to decide what the story’s actually about and stick to it – it shifts gears and themes (many of them left dangling) so much if feels more like an anthology.
But King himself has long championed plot over theme, so that obviously doesn’t matter to him and maybe it won’t to you either. if you come just for his distinctive way of putting things, he’s as dependable as ever.
Reviewed by Drew Turney
Bestselling author Stephen King
0 Comments