Stephen King · Billy Summers

Author: Stephen King
Title: Billy Summers
Year of publication: 2021
Page count: 528
Rating: ★★★★

Billy Summers is more of a thriller than a crime novel, and it works much better than his previous forays into the genre (which have been more of a miss than a hit, as far as I’m concerned… looking at you, Bill Hodges) because it’s told from the perspective of the criminal: Billy is a former Iraq war sniper turned hitman, doing one final job before retirement. He’s justified his choice of freelance employment to himself by only accepting jobs that will have him target what he considers to be bad guys… but once he’s too far in to back out, it becomes clear that something about this particular hit is hinky.

I’m not going to lie, this novel was incredibly inconsistent. The beginning, as Billy settles down in a small town for many months, ingratiating himself with the locals while he waits for his opportunity, moves at a pretty glacial pace. His cover story is that he’s a novelist with a deadline who needs to hunker down and get to writing, and for lack of a better thing to do to kill time, he decides that he might as well, so he begins writing his memoirs, from childhood through his time as a soldier in Iraq—for himself, to prove that he could, because he doesn’t think that anyone would ever read it. I’m not into war stories, fictional or otherwise, so I wasn’t truly engaged in this novel until he was on the run after doing the deed… and then King brings in a new character by a ludicrous coincidence, and this is where it gets tricky.

This is not the book for you if you are a survivor of sexual assault (in particular of date rape and/or paedophilia); some passages are disturbing and triggering even though he doesn’t go into the graphic detail of the acts themselves. For a while, the addition of Alice and her trauma feel quite unnecessary, but I did come to love her as a character, and she becomes instrumental in the storyline later on (does this make her a plot device to further the male protagonist’s story? …it’s debatable). King handles Alice’s rape and the ensuing trauma the way you’d expect from a man in his 70s, which is… not always great, despite good intentions, and I personally would’ve appreciated more nuance, and less macho revenge. Billy and Alice’s relationship could’ve been one of the most unlikely yet wholesome pairings in all of King’s books, but he kind of went and ruined it with inappropriate feelings.

I wavered anywhere between a two and four star rating depending on where I was in the book, but despite its flaws (and there are a few), I have to give King credit where it’s due: He tends to recycle ideas from himself, especially in recent years, but Billy Summers feels fresh and pretty unique in his oeuvre (well, there is one scene that will perhaps call to mind one from The Outsider, and there are some delightful nods to The Shining). The final show-down may feel anti-climatic to some readers after all the lead-up to it, but I found that I didn’t mind—I felt that the quickness of it made it believable. King had me going for a while after that, and I absolutely loved the ending, so that’s why I decided to go with a rounded-up three and a half stars. Crime and thriller stories are what he appears to be most interested in telling now, and out of all the ones we’ve gotten in the past few years, this is probably the most worthwhile one, despite its shortcomings—it’s got memorable characters you can’t help but root for, despite their very questionable moral compass. Between this and Later, his other release this year, I ultimately prefer this one.

Note: I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.