Billy Summers
Stephen King copyright 2021
Scribner, 527 pages
I sometimes think of Stephen King as being the Al Hirschfeld of writers. With minimalist precision, with just a few strokes he can create a fully recognizable and unique character. It takes amazing skill to do that, and the results are so simple and effortless that the ability is often deprecated.
King is also a master at plots that are complicated, deeply interwoven, and as inevitable as a Shakespearean play. In his earlier days, he often had rather weak endings (Needful Things ended literally by banishing the baddie by clicking your heels and thinking of home), but it’s been a very long time since he had a disappointing ending.
When he goes in-depth on a character, the results are amazing. When you finish such a book, you feel like you’ve lost a friend. You sometimes feel you know them better than you know yourself.
King has always excelled at stand-alone and resourceful female characters (Shelley Duvall, combining Princess Buttercup and Ruby Rhod, was not a Stephen King character – just read the book to find out, who Wendy Torrance really was – and it was probably one of the reasons for his legendary distaste for the movie.) He started having strong and memorable characters starting with Rose Madder, Trisha in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, or Jessie in Gerald’s Game.
Even Annie Wilkes, in her psychotic way, was a strong character. Nobody will ever forget her saying “I’m your number one fan.”
In Billy Summers, King has brought all his strengths to the fore. His central viewpoint character, sometimes known as Billy Summers, starts out as a somewhat dim paid assassin who chuckles at Archie comic books and only shoots bad guys. In the beginning, he reminds me of Junior Kilfong (Morgan Paull), who is a rhinestone cowboy assassin in Andrew McLaglen’s brilliant 1971 Fool’s Parade. Junior corners Mattie Appleyard (James Stewart) and cocks his double barrel, snapping his gum, and explains in a Jethro accent that Steve (Mike Kellin) tells him that Matty and his friends are atheists, and “I only shewt ath’ists. But whut I most like to see is ath’ists confess their sins before gawd and then I shewts them. Now, will you confess your sins?” This gives Matty an opening, and what ensues is one of the funniest scenes ever put on film. Really, it’s a true gem of a movie.
The reader learns early on Billy is no Junior. His act is in fact an act (Junior really was dumb as a post) and more subtle. Only one of the people who hire him for his specialized talents suspects there might be more going on in that head than meets the eye. And even that is based, not on flaws in Billy’s act, but on the resourceful ability of Billy to assassinate people and then simply vanish. Nineteen kills, and nobody even suspects him. Nobody pulls that off just by putting on a Jughead crown.
Billy is looking for the legendary “one last job” where he can hang up his rifles, call it a career, and retire to some place that has boat drinks. That dream job shows up, promising two million dollars to shoot another paid assassin, one that Billy is assured shot a fifth-grade boy just to send a message to his parents. Even “Dumb Billy” doubts that story, but some research shows that the target does indeed qualify as a “bad guy.”
But the job is kinda hinky from the start. He is given a cover story that he is a promising writer battling alcoholism whose editor has sent him to the nowhere town of Red Bluff (somewhere in the deep south and not the one in California’s toilet bowl) to stay sober and write a novel. God knows where King came up with that character device! He’s there for several weeks, awaiting for his target to be extradited from California to come to Red Bluff to be arraigned.
The durance vile in Red Bluff erodes Billy’s stand-apart persona as a paid killer. He makes friends, including with some of the neighborhood children, and even has a brief affair with one of the workers in the building (with the courthouse view) in which he is sequestered. And he decides that since he is supposed to be writing a book anyway, he’s going to go ahead and write a book—a lightly fictionalized autobiography. All this has a subtle but profound effect on his approach to life.
By the time the job rolls around, Billy is deeply suspicious of the motives and plans of the people who have hired him, and he takes steps to ensure that not only will he avoid the law after the shooting, but also his employers.
The day rolls around, Billy takes his shot, and all hell breaks loose. But the story is just getting started at that point.
King interweaves “Dumb Billy” and Emile Zola-reading Billy, and Billy’s book, which also interweaves the two personae, creating a masterfully blended portraiture.
Shortly after the killing, a well-hidden Billy encounters Alice, one of the most engaging and complex characters King has ever created. Together, they form an incredible partnership.
It’s one of King’s most powerful and deep novels, and it roars to a moving and enormously satisfying ending.
There is none of King’s trademark supernatural elements, save one sly one that forms a sort of brick joke late on the story. Billy and Alice are holed up in a cabin overlooking the ruins of the old Overlook Hotel in Colorado. In Billy’s writing cabin, there is a painting of the topiary in front of the old Overlook. The “hedge animals” keep moving closer to the fore each time Billy looks at it, until he gets thoroughly creeped out and throws it off a cliff. Oh, and there is a scene in a cornfield at Hemingford Home.
It’s a remarkable novel, King at his very best.