The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
Published in 2021, Billy Summers is dedicated “Thinking of Raymond and Sarah Jane Spruce”.
In the novel Finders Keepers, the second of the Bill Hodges novels, King has a writer character who wrote a series of novels without releasing them. The character within those book-within-a-book novels has a similar backstory to our Billy Summers. I also see elements of the unfinished novel that produced the snippet called “My Little Pony” that appears in the short story collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes. This feels like a story that’s been brewing for a while and he finally figured out how to write it.
“If noir is a genre, then one-last-job is a subgenre.” With this, Stephen King tells us what kind of story he’s presenting for us to enjoy.
This novel doesn’t have a writer character, but it does have an assassin character who pretends to be a writer… then he starts writing for real.
Taking a suspect up the court steps instead of in the side door is significant to this story as it was in The Outsider.
There are hints of the Covid-19 pandemic coming shortly after the time period of this novel. It seemed like King felt he had to place the novel in time to its position with that global event. They are throwaway lines mostly, but it is interesting he felt he needed to include it for readers picking up this book in the midst of a pandemic.
All roads lead to Sidewinder these days. Like in Doctor Sleep, our characters find themselves at the ruins of an old hotel. There aren’t really supernatural elements in this story, but here we get hints that there might be such powers at work in the surrounding universe.
“When things go wrong, they don’t waste time.” Great line.
“Every character in a story must be used twice.” Writing rules drive the plot of this story it seems.
Hemingford Home, Stephen King’s Nebraska town, appears as well. This is the home of Mother Abigail in The Stand and the adult home for one of the kids from It. The town has come into play in other King works as well.
The story has two endings. It is powerful in the way that it both gives hope and then takes it away. I’ve never seen a novel conclude like this and make both endings more powerful as a result.
Being the last book I read of Stephen King’s while catching up to the present in his writing, I struggled with rating it in comparison to everything that came before. Giving it a lot of thought, I think Billy Summers might be in the top ten of King’s best books.
I’m hopeful and look forward to what might come next. My next post in this series will depend on Stephen King’s next release, but check out the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts so far
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