Books: Holly By Stephen King (2023)

“When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly is reluctant to accept the case. Her partner, Pete, has Covid. Her (very complicated) mother has just died. And Holly is meant to be on leave. But something in Penny Dahl’s desperate voice makes it impossible for Holly to turn her down. Mere blocks from where Bonnie Dahl disappeared live Professors Rodney and Emily Harris. They are the picture of bourgeois respectability: married octogenarians, devoted to each other, and semi-retired lifelong academics. But they are harboring an unholy secret in the basement of their well-kept, book-lined home, one that may be related to Bonnie’s disappearance. And it will prove nearly impossible to discover what they are up to: they are savvy, they are patient, and they are ruthless. Holly must summon all her formidable talents to outthink and outmaneuver the shockingly twisted professors.”

Early in his prolific career, I read an article that took King to task for setting his tales of terror in a very specific period in history or, if I may borrow a Doctor Who phrase, a fixed point in time. The general complaint was that by using pop cultural references, by using current brand names, by saying what year the tales are set, his books become less universal, less likely to stand the test of time. That three hundred years from now (if we survive), people reading his tales will not understand the references he makes. As someone pointed out recently on a Facebook page dedicated to King, they had recently watched the 1976 movie version of King’s first novel, 1974’s Carrie. The poster said the film held up because it plot could take place today, nearly fifty years after the publication and film, that because the book and film avoided pop cultural references, it holds up.

Here with Holly, King sets his tale at a very exact era in recent American history –the COVID years. He also takes on a former president he has been very vocal about in disliking, along with that former president’s acolytes. COVID plays a central part of the story, which is set after the events of the novella If it Bleeds. Holly, who through various tales, has grown from a shy, recluse woman on the autism spectrum, to a brave and ethical women running the private investigation company Finders Keepers, which was started by her late friend, Bill Hodges.

King, also, has never been one to keep quiet his political feelings. They’re there through most of his works, sometime subtle, but of recent years, mostly there on the page (see Gwendy’s Final Task for where that really busted through). So the virus and Donald Trump become secondary background characters in King’s dark and often creepy tale of murder and cannibalism. But for some of his Constant Readers, this open display of political theater has angered them. Some, like maybe King’s early critics, hate the idea that the legendary writer has decided to add his liberal politics to what should be an horror tale that could’ve taken place in 1974 or 2023. That it’s no longer a universal tale, but a story (maybe a historical genre tale?) set in one period of time and place. Who knows if this is good or bad? King does not care –he’s now 75, very rich, and no longer needs to pander to anyone but himself.

Those aspects aside, the book is good, with villains you want to hate. Holly Gibney remains a character you love or hate, though, but she is growing and that’s good. The more the character evolves the more real she becomes. Both Jerome and his sister Barbara become more supporting characters here, though both go through some dramatic personal changes (and writers like to have characters that write, so I can see why King took the Robinson’s in that direction. I mean, both his sons have become writers, and his wife has had novels published, so it only seems logical these characters move this way as well.

Overall, Holly is a good mixing of horror, mystery, historical realness, and procedural private eye work. It may never reach a wider audience than his Constant Readers, but King remains at the top of his game. King has stated he plans a large short story collection planned for 2024, and at least one more adventure featuring Holly. And what of a second sequel to The Talisman? King has said he has ideas, including a long letter sent by co-writer Peter Straub before he passed last year with even more ideas for a third book. But King seems a bit unsure at the moment. Perhaps, it’s because a third book would mean a few years of commitment and lengthy book, as well. The “epic” books are on the way out, as publishers are less and less interested in long books.

But it still would be worth the wait.

Books: End of Watch By Stephen King (2016)

End of Watch by Stephen King brings to conclusion a trilogy of novels that started out as the author’s foray into the mystery/thriller genre with Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers and wraps up with some elements of the first two books, along with King’s patented doses of the supernatural that could remind many of his blockbuster first book, Carrie. 

Picking up about a year or so after the events of Finders Keepers, we find retired detective Bill Hodges, who now with his sidekick Holly runs their unauthorized private investigation agency, is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Given only months to live, he finds himself drawn into a recent spree of suicides. All the dead are connected by a common thread: each of them have in the past been in contact with Brady Hartsfield, the notorious Mr. Mercedes who, six years earlier, plotted to blow up a rock concert venue packed with teenagers. Hodges and Holly thwarted Brady's plans and left the killer in a vegetative state from which he never recovered. However, many of the staff in the hospital where Brady now resides believe that he is recovering at an impossible rate, and that he may be faking his injuries to avoid trial...except that everyone who gets too close to proving this suspicion seems to disappear. After his head injury, Brady found himself gaining new abilities, including the power to move small objects with his mind and the ability to enter the bodies of certain people susceptible to his mental domination. Using these tools, Brady has been crafting a plan to finish his murderous work by creating a hypnotic video game app that heightens the user's susceptibility. Once the users are in Brady's control, he will use the app to dominate their minds and persuade them to commit suicide. The targets are the very teenagers who escaped death when Brady's plan to destroy the concert venue failed. Brady's ultimate goal, however, is to lure Hodges into the game and exact revenge. Brady uses the bodies of both a corrupt neurosurgeon and a hospital librarian (“he’s become a living Russian nesting doll”) as both puppets and red herrings to do his dirty work and to misdirect the police while he makes his final move to destroy Hodges, all the while unaware that Hodges is already racing the clock against his own death.

As noted, End of Watch borrows the telekinesis theme King used so effectively in Carrie, though while that novel used it as a metaphor for suppressed emotional issues, here it becomes more of a pretext to get Brady, whose body has been slowly atrophying over the years of his interment at Kiner Brain Injury Clinic, out of bed and free him from the confines of room 217. King does create a clever science fiction McGuffin which enables Brady to “leap” into the minds and bodies of his victims (“look inside Babineau and there is Dr. Z. Look inside Dr Z and there, pulling all the levers, is Brady Hartsfield”). Once “inside” he becomes like a computer virus, forcing people to do his evil bidding and slowly unleashing his master plan to get revenge on Hodges: he’s manipulates the kids through his mind control, the ones who survived his failed attack at the ‘Round Here Concert, to commit suicide. 

For me, the book is not as strong as the previous two (Hartsfield is not truly an evil character, more like a spoiled, petulant teenager, though the theme of teen suicide is a bit unseemly), and yet continues King’s tendency of late to write stories that feature characters and situations that mirror real life, with pain being one of many recurring subjects. There has also been a definite shift in his style since the van that nearly killed him in 1999. And while always prolific, his output since then (both good and bad) seems to mean something, as if he is seeing the finish line.