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Billy Summers: Stephen King steps away from horror

Horror is a strange genre, to me at least. I cannot fathom what is enjoyable about making oneself feel scared.

A female friend has posited that women enjoy horror because it’s not as real to them; in a patriarchal society, they’re not the ones expected to go out into the dark and find out what’s making that scratching sound on the roof. Then again, just walking alone on a city street holds extensively more danger for women than men. Perhaps they’re just more inured to threat. Personally, I think it may have something to do with how active an imagination you have. The more active, the more likely horror will freak you out, torture scenes particularly. Which is why I left the room about 20 minutes into The Shining, and have never read Stephen King. Until his latest novel, Billy Summers, arrived in the post courtesy of Jonathan Ball Publishers.

Thankfully, Billy Summers is not a horror, although it does have suspense, of course, and may be termed a thriller, although of the milder sort. It has the pace of the Bourne Identity series but not as psychologically bleak as Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

King knows his craft for sure, how to keep you engaged by offering just enough detail to fill in the landscape and supporting characters, but not too much so it starts getting poetic and distracting you from the ever-forward-moving story. Although he does fill in the back story in a way that seems to make King himself a meta character, although that’s just an illusion.

To explain: Billy Summers is an assassin of the sniper variety, a skill he learnt as a Marine in the Iraq war. Despite murder being his job, he’s a good guy, and this is his last job. Of course he’s never agreed to shoot a good guy. Everyone he’s offed has been a despot or corrupt or a killer themselves. It’s rather clichéd. But here’s where King leans into the obvious: in order to do this last job and get out of the racket, Billy Summers has to pretend to be a writer, it’s his cover. And so, as we get drip fed what Billy’s writing, we get Billy’s autobiography, and a novel within the novel which serves as a motivational device in its own right down the line after Billy, being a good guy, puts himself in danger by rescuing a damsel in distress, at which point it becomes somewhat of a road movie.

There is one part where the paranormal slinks in and it seems things might just turn a lot darker than expected, but then it is dropped, as if King was just acting on some kind of reflex and couldn’t help himself, then thought better of it but never bothered to go back and write it out.

Billy Summers is an enjoyable read and a good way for a scaredy cat like me to suss what the fuss has been about since Carrie was first published in 1973. Also, it is fantastic for teenagers who are ready to move on from the likes of Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider series.