Stephen King respects pulp. Scroll through his Twitter feed long enough, and you’ll see that the best-selling author lives for hard-boiled stories centered around characters with guns in their hands, heat in their hearts, and principles on their mind. Bosch, The Good Fight, Big Sky, Designated Survivor, Chance, the list goes on. Hell, one cursory glance at his own eclectic catalogue proves that he’s spent the last decade less concerned with what’s under the bed and more intrigued by what’s behind the yellow tape. Holly Gibney ring a bell?
But if there’s anything King loves more than a good pulpy story, it’s sitting down and writing a better one himself. Granted, at 73, the Master of Horror is far removed from his salad years of peppering smutty magazines with pulpy parables, but like the best protagonists in this chewy genre, there are some muscles he’ll never stop flexing. Even more to that point, there are some muscles he’s come to sharpen and refine over the years, particularly as his own sensibilities evolve. His latest novel, Billy Summers, is a testament to these truths.
On the surface, the 500-page thriller captures the last gig for the titular assassin, a decorated Iraq war veteran who is hired to take out the trash (and only the trash, mind you). As with any swan song, there are myriad wrinkles and peculiarities to the job, all of which keep Billy (and, by proxy, us Constant Readers) sweating. What grounds him, though, is his cover: Billy is a struggling writer working out the kinks of his debut novel in a commercial office space that also provides a choice vantage point for his hit. Simple enough.
Yet what feels like an easy King conceit — hey, the man loves dreaming up fictional writers — winds up giving the novel its curious depth. Because really, the hit becomes secondary to the pathos that King mines from Billy’s time behind the computer. Not so much the story within the story, but the feelings and emotions elicited from the act of writing itself. It’s in these passages that King snipes our hearts, namely because he’s writing from his own. Without spoiling much, there’s a confessional tone here that suggests King is wrestling with the immortal currency of his own written word — and it’s a palpable feeling, to say the least.
Rest assured, that’s not to say the action takes backseat. Hardly. If anything, this may be King’s most actionable novel in the last decade. When he’s not running and gunning with bullets and brawn, he’s delectably building out his world — even when he’s exploring familiar locales. (Hint, hint, Constant Readers.) Again, it’s all muscle memory to him, which is why Billy Summers reads like a sum of all his strengths. Who we meet, where we go, and how we get there is all vintage King through and through. Sure, some of it’s cheesy, some of it even on-the-nose, but none of it ever comes across like a cover for him.
If anything, Billy Summers feels like a bookend. To horror. To thrillers. To even his past pseudonym Richard Bachman. Put it this way, the story could have easily pivoted down any one of those roads. Instead, King weaves them together into a greatest hits collection that works by its lonesome. It’s a brazen mix that’s emblematic of the multi-faceted nature of King’s Dominion, a world of worlds that has made us laugh, cry, and cower to varying degrees. Those feelings are no doubt shared by King — at least if we’re to take this novel’s sentiments to heart (and we should) — which is why he’ll never stop refining the pulp.
And why we’ll keep living in it.
Billy Summers is available for pre-order and releases on August 2. Follow The Losers’ Club: A Stephen King Podcast via the Bloody Disgusting Podcast Network to keep tabs on all things King through epic book breakdowns, chummy interviews, and newsy recaps.
