Review: Holly, Stephen King
I was so obsessed with Holly I read it in 24 hours, including five solid hours on a plane in which I suspect the grandmotherly type beside me was slightly alarmed at my unwavering focus.
Stephen King needs no introduction, but sometimes you need these days to specify the genre in which he is writing.
Private detective Holly Gibney was co-star of what the marketers call King’s Bill Hodges trilogy, Mr Mercedes, Finders Keepers and End of Watch, a major supporting character in the otherwise standalone The Outsider, and moves into the driver’s seat in King’s recent novella If It Bleeds and in this full-length follow-up.
I’d argue her presence in them all and the reuse of the settings and other elements make this a series rather than a trilogy, with the acknowledgment that King is defying these boundaries these days as much as he is defying genre boundaries.
Some in the series are straight murder-mysteries, others bring in a supernatural element. Like Finders Keepers, Holly is what I’d call a straight crime murder-mystery, albeit being rather more of a “whydunit” than a “whodunit”.
Holly Gibney, now head of the late Bill Hodges’ detective agency, begins to investigate the disappearance of a young woman, but discovers links with other unexplained local disappearances, and identifies a common factor: the presence in the background of an elderly couple, both professors at the local university, and apparently well beyond being physically capable of murder.
In trying to discover what’s going on, Gibney and her young compatriots – previous supporting characters in the series, siblings Barbara and Jeremy Robinson – are drawn into a web more sinister than even their wildest speculations could have predicted.
The story explores and further develops the rich character and back-story of Gibney, an obsessive-compulsive with sharp intelligence and investigation skills – but as she lets her crippling inferiority complex take over and second-guesses her intuition, it’s not only the case that’s threatened, but her life.
This development occurs in a narrative also mirroring a society divided along political lines during the Covid outbreak, and culminates in a discussion of good and evil, supernatural and banal, and a reflection on the factors that drive people to keep achieving in dark and difficult jobs once their financial impetus is removed. This begs the obvious speculation that this is a topic on the ageing King’s own mind, but the inference is that he’s not done yet.
It’s clear he’s still having fun. His novels not only retain what they have always had – the easy, unhurried and engaging tone, the enjoyment of the journey, and the willingness to set up characters well, whether they be major or minor (or about to be swiftly dispatched) – but they also seem to be having more fun than ever with language. Notable are the colourful turns of phrase, the acute ear for the many things English speakers from all walks of life do with their mother tongue, the relish for reproducing it in print.
What else strikes me about this book particularly is its naked and confident politics: of Covid and Trump, of the Black Lives Matter movement, of gender issues. These are unmistakably King’s views and just as undeniably those of Holly, who you never feel is being used as a preacher’s mouthpiece. But they also represent a writer who is 76 years old and whose work is not only getting better all the time, but reveal a person continuing to learn and grow new ideas instead of letting his world shrink. No fear of new pronouns for King, I’ll wager.
Do not read this book if the gruesome upsets you. This is not one for cosy crime lovers.
Do read it if you’re already a King tragic, or if you are a crime fiction fan who likes it dark and gulp-able and invigorating – like a fresh, fragrant double espresso.
Aaahhhhh.
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