First Lines of Stephen King's "Billy Summers"

"Billy Summers waits in the hotel lobby, waiting for his ride. It's Friday noon. Although he's reading a digest-sized comic book called Archie's Pals 'n' Gals, he's thinking about Emile Zola, and Zola's third novel, his breakthrough, Therese Raquin."

- Stephen King, Billy Summers

Recently, I contracted a nasty case of swimmers ear, and luckily I had Stephen King's latest novel on hand to entertain me. Finding it hard to do anything else, I consumed the whole book in six days: a testament to both the propulsiveness of King's prose (even after all of these years!) but also the compelling story he's written. Many people make this claim, but in his recent novels I've found that his climaxes tend to border on the absurd: Take the final confrontation in Mr. Mercedes, the "supernatural showdown in Doctor Sleep, or even The Outsider's siege: they can feel by-the-numbers and sometimes even - as hard as it is to admit - boring.

This was not the case here. I was quickly sucked into Billy Summers. King's really does have a masterful eye for detail and an ability to create compelling characters. The plot of the first half of the book is a standard crime novel, and the second half builds on a "hit gone wrong" and moves to a darker place that explores the evil inside us all. Interestingly enough, the narrative is interspersed with an excellent "coming of age" story and war narrative, written by Billy himself, that provides insight into his character but also is a great book in it's own right. It avoided any supernatural elements and kept me reading and engaged to the very last page.

But there's one caveat that I have to mention. King has never shied away from gruesome details either physically or psychologically, but as I get older, i'm bothered by the extremely graphic details about sexual trauma. I'm not sure that level of detail is necessary for the story and, combined with (spoiler alert!) Alice's almost immediate recovery from a terrible sexual assault to become Billy's assistant, it rang false and perhaps somewhat titillating. Honestly, I couldn't avoid thinking this aspect was the male gaze at work, and pondered how the same story would have played out if written by a woman. It was a disturbing blemish on an otherwise excellent novel.