Holly Gibney, one of Stephen King’s most compelling and ingeniously resourceful characters, returns in this thrilling novel to solve the gruesome truth behind multiple disappearances in a midwestern town.
“Sometimes the universe throws you a rope.” —BILL HODGES
Stephen King’s Holly marks the triumphant return of beloved King character Holly Gibney. Readers have witnessed Holly’s gradual transformation from a shy (but also brave and ethical) recluse in Mr. Mercedes to Bill Hodges’s partner in Finders Keepers to a full-fledged, smart, and occasionally tough private detective in The Outsider. In King’s new novel, Holly is on her own, and up against a pair of unimaginably depraved and brilliantly disguised adversaries.
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 in this chilling new masterwork from Stephen King.
“I could never let Holly Gibney go. She was supposed to be a walk-on character in Mr. Mercedes and she just kind of stole the book and stole my heart. Holly is all her.” —STEPHEN KING
I may be off on the count, but I believe this is my 89th King book and—as I very much feared once I heard the title months ago—it falls firmly into that broad swath of “middle” books.
It can’t touch his best—those first dozen, plus a smattering of others like It, Misery, The Green Mile, Bag of Bones, Duma Key, 11/22/63—but it’s nowhere near as bad as his worst—Tommyknockers, The Eyes of the Dragon, Cell, Lisey’s Story, Sleeping Beauties, The Institute, or Fairy Tale anyone?
This is the sixth (and honestly, hopefully the final—though I doubt it) appearance of Holly Gibney after Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch (collectively known as the Bill Hodges trilogy), The Outsider, and the title story in If It Bleeds. And, as King says, this book is “all her.”
King does an awful lot of meandering setup in the first half of this novel that, shockingly, is quite boring. I’ve read a lot of King stuff I wasn’t overly fond of, but I’ve rarely found him boring. Sadly, this novel and the one that preceded it committed that sin, which bothers me a lot.
And while I’ve never been as enamoured of Holly Gibney as King has been, I didn’t mind her quirky character. She was, at least, interesting.
Unfortunately, this book seems to jettison much of what made Holly so much fun and made her seem…is average the right word? I’m not sure, but I didn’t find her as quirky or as interesting. Maybe, much like when Thomas Harris had Hannibal Lecter as a side character, he was fascinating, but as soon as the spotlight was turned fully on Lecter, I lost all interest in Harris’s subsequent novels. It could be the same thing is happening here…too much Holly.
But it’s more than that. King used to be able to create wonderfully real characters that you loved and cared for and then also create a menacing, terrifying opposition that would just keep coming and coming, filling me, as a reader, with dread.
Now, King creates rather cozy characters who still suffer—in this case, Holly’s feeling the triple whammy of covid, the death of her mother, and the realization that she’d been lied to for years—but these are such common things that they don’t carry much weight. We’ve all suffered the death of a family member. The entire world experienced covid. We’ve all been lied to and betrayed. So, this stuff? It’s cozy, not soul crushing. At least, not in the manner that King delivers it in this novel.
And the menacing opposition? Somewhat toothless, to my mind. Yes, this is very much a cat and mouse story, but King makes a couple of decisions with the story—that I will not spoil—that immediately lower the stakes and take away that common, yet oh-so-effective plot device, the ticking clock.
He also makes the odd decision to hide much of the inherent horror in his story until the very end, where it’s fed to the reader (pardon the pun…which you’ll get once you read the novel) in a series of info dumps during wrap up.
Overall, I feel like, in the hands of a Joe R. Lansdale, or an S.A. Cosby, this book would have been structured far different, and the heat would have turned up a lot higher. Instead, what we got was lukewarm leftovers out of the microwave instead of the sizzling steak, grilled to perfection that we’re used to with King.
I love Stephen King’s writing a lot, however—and it pains me to say this—he’s not the spellbinding, dangerous writer he used to be. He has his flashes of brilliance still, and when he does, I rejoice in those novels, but overall, where I used to be absolutely pumped to hear of a new release, now it’s often met with, god, I hope it’s better than the last one.
And that sucks.
