Number 73 - Billy Summers - Stephen King

 

No it's not horror.  Get over it.

Yes King is still a horror writer, even if he does branch out.

OK, mini rant nearly over with.  I hate when people complain that King has written something other than a flat out horror novel or that he's not a horror writer any more.

He can write what he wants to.  He doesn't owe any readers anything. As long as he keeps up his regular standards, that's all we should expect.

This is a crime novel  An assassin for hire on his "one last job" that goes horribly wrong. King even mentions very early on how the "one last job" is practically a sub-genre of its own. And his contribution to the sub genre is vintage King.

Billy Summers only kills bad people. he's known for his ability to blend in, get the job done and escape into the shadows. He wants to retire but the offer of $2m is too much to resist so he takes the infamous one last job. 

Once on the job, waiting in his temporary assumed identity, he suspects that something is not quite right on this one. After the hit, things turn bad quickly and he finds himself evading justice and his ex employers and seeking vengeance on a very bad man indeed. 

This is a book of two halves.  The first half leading up to the hit, and the second half is the fallout. He finds himself teamed up with an unexpected companion and the second half is part buddy movie (with a difference) along with the revenge story.

As per usual, King takes his sweet time in telling the story. He builds the characters and their relationships intricately and convincingly.  By the end of the book we know nearly all there is to know about the eponymous Billy. There are emotional highs and lows throughout and we (this reader for definite) really want him to succeed with his shot at redemption.

Despite the genre, this is unmistakably Stephen King, and (as previously mentioned) vintage King at that. The plot unfurls at a leisurely pace and picks up momentum as it goes.  It's a challenge to put the book down for any reason in the last 150 pages.

There's a nice couple of Easter Eggs for the constant readers, with some non-too-subtle references to other King novels.

If you like King's writing, you'll like this. I like him.  I have 70 of his books on my shelves. and this ranks in with the best of them.

Number 97 - Joyland - Stephen King

 

I suddenly realised when I looked at my list for the year that I hadn't read any Stephen King yet in 2021. 

So to make up for that grievous omission, I picked up this one that's been gathering dust for  a couple of years.  

As you can guess from the fact that the publisher is Hard Case Crime, this isn't a horror novel.  There's no terrifying presences stalking the cast.  There is a small amount of supernatural but it's on the side of our narrator.

Devin Jones is a college student whose girlfriend has just ditched him. he's working a summer job at the Joyland of the title.  This is the early 70s and Joyland is a small theme park on the North Carolina coast. He hears about a murder that happened on the ghost train ride a few years earlier. It's rumoured that the ghost of the girl who was murdered appears to staff and occasional visitors to the ride. 

Devin also meets the second love of his life whilst moping about the first. Other characters include the carnie psychic, a dying young boy, some lifelong friends and more carnie staff.

King takes his time with the storytelling.  People who accuse him of bloat in his writing will likely hate this book. I've noticed that most of what people call bloat is his character and world building.  This book is a character piece, a coming of age story with a slight murder mystery thrown in for good measure. By the end of the book he's built this insular world of Joyland so beautifully it's almost a surprise to realise you didn't work there yourself at some point.

The murder mystery isn't particularly mysterious.  The cast is relatively small and the choices are limited. But that's not the point of this book. This is about the characters.  If the chapter where young Mike visits Joyland doesn't fill your heart with a bittersweet joy, you don't have feelings. I was grinning and trying not to cry simultaneously at the evocation of the boy's experience at the park.

This may well be my favourite non-horror King book. Devin is a totally believable and relatable narrator, recounting his youth and how he got over his first true love ending rather cruelly. We feel for him and sympathise with his darkest moments and we're happy as Howie the Hound when he scores his victories.

My next King book will be a horror, but this is proof that King can write pretty much anything he sets his mind to. 

Number 65 - The Outsider - Stephen King

 

Unless I just miscounted on the Wikipedia bibliography page, this is King's 59th novel.  That's good going by any standards.  But some would argue that King is quantity over quality.

I disagree,

While there are a very small handful of King novels I don't rate as highly as others, There are none where there's not been something to enjoy about them.  Even From a Buick 8 - which is my least favourite - opens brilliantly.  

In this one, I think he's close to his top form for most of it.

It opens with the discovery of the horribly mutilated body of a young boy. At least five eye witnesses identify the local well loved junior baseball coach as the person who took him away in a van on the day of his death. One saw him walking away from the site of the murder covered in blood.  His fingerprints are found in the van in the child's blood.  His DNA is at the scene.

However, he has a cast iron alibi.  He was over 100 miles away at the time of the killing and can prove it.

Something strange is going on. The front cover seems to hint at a Stranger Things type alternate dimension body double but that's misleading.  The answer to the mystery is scarier than that.

 This was the most unpredictable thing I've read from King in some time.  The big bad is genuinely creepy and dangerous and I totally failed in my game of "guess who'll still be alive at the end". At least one character death was completely from left field and unexpected.  After that, all bets were off. He admits in the course of the story exactly where the source of the idea came from, but has put his own spin on it.     

 It's written in King's usual easily readable style and builds the characters with the usual efficency. For fans of the Bill Hodges trilogy, there's a guest appearance by one of the Finders Keepers cast.

It's not his best book.  There are a couple of chapters loaded down with exposition which slow the narrative down a touch in the second half of the book. However these are necessary as the monster isn't anything instantly recognisable.

He also spends a lot of time persuading the central charcaters that the big bad is real and supernatural in nature.  Again, this is necessary as I think most readers would have complained if they'd just accepted the more outlandish plot details without question.

 I've raced through this book in under 5 days, which for a 550 page book is fast paced.  It's a tense and frightening addition to King's canon.  It might not challenge Cujo or the Shining for the top spot but it's well up to his usual standards.  The steady reaveal of what was actually going on was brilliantly done.  The opening chapters in particular, with the build up of evidence mounting, only to be smashed to pieces, were masterful.

Easy 8/10 - It contains spoilers for the Hodges trilogy, so probably best to read that first if you haven't already.

 

Number 27 - Sleeping Beauties - Stephen and Owen King

27 books into the year and not a Stephen King so far... That was a situation that needed remedying.

Trying to keep up with Stephen King is a sisyphean task.  He seems to put out at least three a year and half of them are 700 pages plus.  Like this one.712 pages in this rather handsome copy.

This one is co-written with his less famous writer son. The story is fairly high concept.  Mother nature has had enough. Women are falling prey to a sleeping sickness.  If they fall asleep, they become encased in a weird cocoon and don't wake up.  If someone does try to wake them or remove the webbing from their faces, they become psychotically violent, kill whoever is in the immediate vicinity and go back to sleep.

The men are left wondering what the hell is going on and their worst nature is coming to the fore. The cocooned women are waking in a strange new world which they can make better than the world they just left.

A mysterious stranger arrives in the town of Dooling.  The first thing she does is violently kill a pair of meth cooks before allowing the sheriff to take her to the nearby prison.  She can commune with animals, and appears to hold the key to what is happening.

I'd be interested to see what femininsts make of this novel.  It's very very pro-female and men seem to get the blame for all life's problems.

This is the first King novel I've seen with a character list at the start.  As usual with his enormous books, he builds an entire community.  We get to know most people of import in the town and in the prison.The character list is irrelevant though as I never really felt the need to refer back to it at any point.

The pace of the book is good.  The prose is the usual King - very easily readable and keeps you turning the page almost compulsively.  Even in a book this size, I don't see the "bloat" that many people complain King packs his books with.  He makes each character important to the story in some way and doesn't let them just fade out of the story randomly. (see my review of Blood forge which felt bloated at half the length of this book). Even the minor parts are recognisable and distinct characters.

Amusingly, Joe Hill (King's more famous writer son) gets a shout out when one of the convicts is wheeling a trolley of library books around the prison. 

It's not perfect.  A pair of escaped convicts are introduced to the storyline very late on - like page 600 ish.  The brief backstory they're given could easily have been slotted into the narrative in the early chapters -  and then let them reappear at the apposite moment.  This would have been a far more effective way to bring them into the final stages of the plot. It would have led to an "Oh shit, they're back" moment rather than the "Who the hell are these guys?" moment we had instead.

The mysterious stranger's powers seem to fluctuate. She could have helped a  lot more in the final chapters than she does. Her motivation seems less than clear.  Is she really just trying to provoke the male of the species into more and more violence?

And why does one of the characters choose to drive out of town to get help instead of just picking up the phone?

It's a hefty tome but I got through it in a relatively short time. It was never boring in the slightest.  It might not be classic King, but less than classic King is still better than many horror writers out there at the pinnacle of their talent.  Not thinking about Blood forge at all when I make that comment.

I'll give this one a 7/10