Twenty-one in '21: Billy Summers

I've read far less in recent years than I would like. To help remedy this, I've set myself the modest target of reading twenty one books in 2021. When I finish one, a thumbnail review here will follow.

7/21: Billy Summers by Stephen King

The blurb: From legendary storyteller and No. 1 bestseller Stephen King, whose 'restless imagination is a power that cannot be contained' (The New York Times Book Review), comes a thrilling new novel about a good guy in a bad job.

Billy Summers is a man in a room with a gun. He's a killer for hire and the best in the business. But he'll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. And now Billy wants out. But first there is one last hit. Billy is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. So what could possibly go wrong?

How about everything.

This spectacular can't-put-it-down novel is part war story, part love letter to small town America and the people who live there, and it features one of the most compelling and surprising duos in King fiction, who set out to avenge the crimes of an extraordinarily evil man. It's about love, luck, fate, and a complex hero with one last shot at redemption.

You won't put this story down, and you won't forget Billy.

The review: one side-effect of buying e-books (which a lack of bookshelf space requires me to do these days) rather than their physical equivalent is that you have no sense of the heft of the book. King is no stranger to writing very long novels, but has turned in a few shorter efforts (Elevation, Joyland and Later being recent examples). And I thought this was going to be another, as it very quickly seemed to be coming to a conclusion, ramping up for a classic King denouement. But then I noticed, courtesy of my Kindle's progress bar, that I was only about 30% of the way through. Clearly there was much more to come.

Fortunately for all concerned, this was not a problem, as Billy Summers barrels along like the very best of King's work - I found it hard to put down, and often lost great chunks of time as I kept telling myself, "Just one more chapter."

I don't have to go into great detail about the plot - the blurb covers that nicely. What I will add is that this book, like so many in the King canon, is also about writing - our hero's cover story is that he is an aspiring novelist whose agent has procured office space for him to work on his book. Office space that just happens to overlook the courthouse steps on which Billy is to shoot a bad man. Since he has time to kill, and to maintain his cover, Billy starts to write, a work of fiction that quickly turn to autobiography. And so we have two stories here - one is the tale of a sniper-for-hire's last job, the other is his backstory. It is hard to say which is most compelling, especially when you learn that Billy's story is of abusive parents, a care home, the army, the Iraq War... and all manner of horrors.

That's an interesting phrase, actually. For whilst horror is the genre that made King the colossal global success that he is, I would say there's a strong case to be made that his best work, certainly in recent years, is not horror per se. This is a straight up-and-down suspensful thriller - there's no genre horror here. Instead, King deals in the many horrors of reality - of bad men that do unspeakable things, of killers, of unjust wars. It will slip under the radar because of its context, but Billy's account of clearing houses in Fallujah is an intense as you might imagine.

Of course, King being King, he can't help himself, in that towards the end of the book action moves to Colorado, and a location that overlooks the site of a hotel that had burnt down, and that was rumoured to be haunted. And there's a painting of some topiary animals, in which the animals appear to move... In some ways this is a nice self-referential touch, and places the book in the wider King universe, but is completely unnecessary and doesn't serve the story at all. And if it's just for Constant Readers like me to have an "a-ha" moment, well, it's too blunt for that. But this is a minor quibble.

What is a slightly bigger quibble, for this reviewer at least, is a leap of faith that King asks the reader to take shortly after the 30% mark that I mentioned earlier. It concerns the coming together of the "compelling and surprising duo" mentioned in the blurb; although King is pretty frank about the unlikelihood of what happens, and uses all the considerable storytelling tricks at his disposal to explain it, the circumstances of the coming together still didn't feel plausible to me. I can't explain more without plot spoilers, but I can say this credibility gap will cost the book a star from my review, and that's a shame because other than that I really enjoyed it, became totally engrossed and, as I've said already, found it hard to put down.

The bottom line: not one but two (maybe even three) stories coalesce in this fine suspenseful thriller, a reminder from the master that real horror lies not in vampires and boogeymen but in the evil that men do.

Since everything online is rated these days: ★★★★★☆