The monsters are all too human in this noir tale of an assassin on one last job
No matter what he writes, Stephen King will always be considered a horror novelist. It’s unavoidable now; he is responsible for too many of the fantastical nightmares that prowl popular culture. Yet in his latest novel, Billy Summers, there are no supernatural shades whatsoever (save a late Easter egg reference to a certain haunted hotel). Instead, he is in full noir mode, with a modest tale of an assassin on the requisite one-last-job-before-he’s-out. 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. And it’s his best book in years.
The set-up is straightforward. Billy is an ex-army sniper turned killer-for-hire who, conveniently for the purposes of readerly sympathy, only kills “bad men”. 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. Like all good King protagonists, he fills his time with writing his life story. 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.