Surprise, then, when we find that Billy’s time in the suburbs is the calm before the storm. Knowing King’s penchant for the slow burn, it’s easy to imagine that the novel will build over 400 pages towards its climax in the sniper’s nest. (Not a single chance is missed to put the boot into Trump.) Any nostalgia in Billy Summers is intentional: it lulls us into a false sense of security. The book has plenty of references to contemporary TV and music, as well as allusions to changing demographics and progressive politics. Often this feels anachronistic – Billy’s tales of his childhood in a foster home sound more like the 1950s than the 90s, and a present-day visit to a fairground is barely different from a scene in The Dead Zone, way back in 1979. Cook-outs with Billy’s neighbours, games of Monopoly with their children, date nights and diners – all are part of King’s mythologising of American life. It’s what elevates him above his genre peers, and it’s in full force here. King has always excelled at sketching everyman’s US, enriching the details into a minor epic register. Like 11/22/63, the first half is pedestrian in pace but rich in colour and characterisation. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine that the genesis of the novel lies somewhere in King’s research into Lee Harvey Oswald. It’s a tale of violent youth and wartime tragedy that begins as an unwelcome interruption to the main proceedings but gradually accrues more weight as a window on to Billy’s off-kilter moral code.įor 200 pages, Billy Summers feels like a retread of King’s alternative-history doorstop 11/22/63, told this time from the assassin’s perspective. Like all good King protagonists, he fills his time with writing his life story. Tasked with a hit on a small-time crook, he relocates to a provincial city in an unspecified southern state where, due to the machinations of plot, he must live a double life in the local community while waiting for his shot. Billy is an ex-army sniper turned killer-for-hire who, conveniently for the purposes of readerly sympathy, only kills “bad men”. It meanders, it pays only the scantest regard to the rules of narrative structure, it indulges gladly in both casual stereotyping and naked political point-scoring.
Instead, he is in full noir mode, with a modest tale of an assassin on the requisite one-last-job-before-he’s-out.
Yet in his latest novel, Billy Summers, there are no supernatural shades whatsoever (save a late Easter egg reference to a certain haunted hotel). It’s unavoidable now he is responsible for too many of the fantastical nightmares that prowl popular culture. N o matter what he writes, Stephen King will always be considered a horror novelist.
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