3 minute read
BILLY SUMMERS by Stephen King
of Japanese descent attending college in Paris, and he acutely recognizes the host of identities thrust upon him: “I feared I was no one, in the end,” he thinks early on. He has a girlfriend, Fumiko, who’s Japanese, but as the novel opens she rapidly succumbs to depression, locking herself in her room and ultimately killing herself. The story that follows is less a plotted narrative than a group of set pieces that underscore Henrik’s uncertain sense of both self and place before and after that event. He seems to find himself in dark, liminal places throughout the city: the catacombs, the Metro, a remote pocket of the city a Korean acquaintance insists is a secret enclave of North Korea’s elite. Fumiko’s presence lingers: Henrik mistakes another woman for her, and the medical student dissecting Fumiko’s corpse obsesses over who she was in life. Later, Henrik becomes godfather to a former classmate’s daughter, who’s being pressed to become an actress in B-list Italian horror films; subtly, the girl’s predicament stokes Henrik’s guilt over Fumiko. Kim is an elegant writer who knows how to set a mood, and the early portions of the novel thoughtfully interweave Henrik’s identity crisis and Fumiko’s loss without pat and easy gestures of grief. But Kim is so determined to strip Henrik of conventional emotion that he becomes awkward and static. Later, Henrik says, “I don’t know what I am now. Nothing, I guess.” Kim is a talented observer, but the novel betrays a frustrating lack of forward movement.
An overly careful and restrained tale of a character who’s a constant expat, emotionally and physically.
BILLY SUMMERS
King, Stephen Scribner (528 pp.) $23.99 | Aug. 3, 2021 978-1-982173-61-6
The ever prolific King moves from his trademark horror into the realm of the hard-boiled noir thriller. “He’s not a normal person. He’s a hired assassin, and if he doesn’t think like who and what he is, he’ll never get clear.” So writes King of his title character, whom the Las Vegas mob has brought in to rub out another hired gun who’s been caught and is likely to talk. Billy, who goes by several names, is a complex man, a Marine veteran of the Iraq War who’s seen friends blown to pieces; he’s perhaps numbed by PTSD, but he’s goaloriented. He’s also a reader—Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin figures as a MacGuffin—which sets his employer’s wheels spinning: If a reader, then why not have him pretend he’s a writer while he’s waiting for the perfect moment to make his hit? It wouldn’t be the first writer, real or imagined, King has pressed into service, and if Billy is no Jack Torrance, there’s a lovely, subtle hint of the Overlook Hotel and its spectral occupants at the end of the yarn. It’s no spoiler to say that whereas Billy carries out the hit with grim precision, things go squirrelly, complicated by his rescue of a young woman—Alice—after she’s been roofied and raped. Billy’s revenge on her behalf is less than sweet. As a memoir grows in his laptop, Billy becomes more confident as a writer: “He doesn’t know what anyone else might think, but Billy thinks it’s good,” King writes of one day’s output. “And good that it’s awful, because awful is sometimes the truth. He guesses he really is a writer now, because that’s a writer’s thought.” Billy’s art becomes life as Alice begins to take an increasingly important part in it, crisscrossing the country with him to carry out a final hit on an errant bad guy: “He flopped back on the sofa, kicked once, and fell on the floor. His days of raping children and murdering sons and God knew what else were over.” That story within a story has a nice twist, and Billy’s battered copy of Zola’s book plays a part, too.
