Book Review: Holly

Spoilers ahead!

Grounded Stephen King is a fun time. Sure, I enjoy the supernatural, science fiction, and otherworldly horrific King stories, but some of my favorites are also the purely grounded ones (Misery might be my favorite of King’s!), and King set out to make a grounded one with his 2023 crime novel, Holly. In the Author’s Note, he mentions being inspired by a news headline about a honor killing with the headline, “Everyone thought they were a sweet old couple until the bodies began turning up in their backyard.” Indeed, you can’t get any more grounded than the villains of your story being two people in their late 80s.

Set at the height of COVID in the summer of 2021 (but with flashbacks to the old people’s prior killings dating back to 2012), Holly follows, well, Holly Gibney, a private detective who isn’t just rightly afraid of contracting COVID-19, especially after her Trump-loving mother dies of it, but is also a hypochondriac in general, and a chain-smoking one at that. King acknowledges the irony multiple times, but also, I’m certain Holly smoked at least 95 cigarettes throughout the course of the book. An alternative title of the book could be, And Then Holly Smokes. Weirdly, I pictured Holly in her 20s, but I believe she’s supposed to be in her mid-50s in this book. I think her Finders Keepers detective agency is supposed to be a late career change. Also worth noting, I first read Holly’s character in 2018’s The Outsider, but I haven’t read the other Holly books.

While Holly doesn’t contract COVID-19 in the book, she does get contracted by Penny Dahl to find her daughter, Bonnie, who went missing and the police aren’t doing anything about it. Soon, Holly realizes others have gone missing without a trace, too, and they all have the connection of going missing around the same wooded area and not using a vehicle when they went missing: Bonnie used a bicycle, Peter Steinman used a skateboard, and I believe Ellen Craslow was on foot. Jorge Castro was the first victim, and he was a jogger.

Emily and Rodney Harris are prestigious and acclaimed professors at the local college. They’re also cannibals who believe vehemently that eating human meat will prolong their lives, and importantly, help Emily with her sciatica and Rodney with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. They’re also anti-vaccine, thinking their “alternative medicine” will combat the virus, and virulently racist and homophobic, particularly Emily. That’s why Jorge was the first victim; Emily hated him for being Hispanic and gay, and being in her way at the university. When I first understood the scope of the evil happening and before I read King’s Author’s Note I mentioned, I thought King was making a commentary about right-wing conspiracy types. That is, a conspiracy among the fringe ring-wing conspiracy types is that Democrats are killing and eating babies to stay young. Look up the adrenochrome conspiracy. So, naturally, King exploits that to show it was projection all along: the right-wing fringe conspiracy types were the ones actually engaging in it. He claims it was a headline that set him off, but I suspect as he got to writing, and with how often he mentions Trump and Emily’s hatreds, that conspiracy had to of factored in. This one is more of a stretch, but we later find out that Emily is really the ring leader of the Harris duo, and Rodney only went from the theoretical to the practical with cannibalism out of love for Emily. Emily Harris. Eric Harris. The similarities are right there! I digress …

But I also think there is something deeper at play here, and I don’t know if King would admit this, either. King, who is 76 years old, wrote a book about the fear, quirkiness, and joy of getting older. Fear, of course, represented to the extreme by the Harris couple. The quirkiness of getting older represented by one of Rodney Harris’ bowling buddies, where the 70-something man is still ripped to shreds, dating someone 20 years younger, and likes to speak with exclamation points. And then the joy of getting older represented by Olivia Kingsbury, a renowned poet, who is on the eve of her 100th birthday. Kingsbury ends up mentoring Holly’s younger cohort, Barbara Reynolds, who is trying to get her poetry published. Another digression, but something that ends up happening when you name a book after the main character is that supporting characters surpass them in intrigue! For me, Olivia was a more interesting character than Holly, and so was another character I’ll return to. Olivia is funny, helpful, and doesn’t care for Emily Harris, or if she farts (King can’t help himself with that!). Oh, and she outlives the Harris couple despite not eating humans.

The other character I enjoyed more than Holly, who is even more of a side character than Olivia, was Ellen Craslow, one of the women taken by Emily and Rodney Harris. Not only was she a Black lesbian, which riled Emily up, but she was vegan. You see, when they abduct one of these people, they make them eat calf’s liver so it makes their human liver apparently more nutritious. Being a vegan, Ellen steadfastly refused. To her death. She was courageous and brave! It’s not that I disliked Holly; it’s just that Holly smoked a lot and used “oough” and “frack” a lot.

Also, and maybe this isn’t fair since I’m the reader and know more than Holly does about the Harris couple, but if I was a private investigator, two things I would have done in the course of my investigation that Holly didn’t do:

1.) When talking to Penny about her daughter, or Lakeisha about her best friend, a natural question to ask is if Bonnie had any other jobs besides the library to tease out all possible investigative threads, which would have revealed that Bonnie worked for Emily! Holly later gets this from a loose acquaintance of Bonnie’s.

2.) Holly starts interviewing the old people who bowled in a bowling league, including Rodney Harris. When she’s interviewing these people, she already has knowledge that an old white woman with sciatica was seen at the trailer park going into Ellen Craslow’s home. Why not ask if they know any women with sciatica?! Obviously, if she asks Rodney that, he could lie, but you still should ask it!

Those are my nits to pick, but otherwise, I enjoyed how King set up this story, with grounded cannibals, and how Holly, and then Barbara, unravel the story. Neither could believe, obviously, that two people nearing 90 years old, could be kidnappers and killers, much less cannibals. They used the ruse of one of them being in a wheelchair and needing help to get back into their van while the other would shoot the victim up with Valium, a sedative. And sure, if you think about it too much, you’re like, how could such old people move these unconscious (and dead) bodies around so easily, or pose any sort of threat to the much younger and wiser Holly, but the way King writes it, it works and you believe Holly’s in peril at the end, even though she does best the two old-timers, obviously.

Whether King was purely inspired by a headline he saw and wanted to grapple with the juxtaposition of evil in the suburbs, and/or if he wanted to add some commentary about right-wing conspiracy theorists, and/or if he was grappling with his own old age and the fear, quirkiness, and joy of it all, Holly serves as a fun, if horrifying, crime book and a thinker. To the latter, I don’t mean a thinker of “whodunit” because we know who is doing it, but I mean a thinker about old age and the fact that we all die. But will we embrace the light like Olivia or shudder from it in uh, the most horrific way, like the Harris couple? If it came to it, I dig Ellen’s way: dignified defiance.

Long-time King fans, I’m not sure what they will think about this, maybe they’ll miss the supernatural elements. Or not think it’s not “scary” enough. I don’t think King wrote a scary book; he wrote a horrific one. One of the most horrifying images King has written is the Harris couple spreading “lotion” made from human fat onto each other, and after Rodney applies this to Emily’s hip and back, he licks the “lotion” from under his fingernails. Plus, like I said, it’s not the first time King’s written a grounded book. For non-King fans, even though this isn’t the first Holly Gibney book, if you’re looking for an accessible entry into King, starting with his most recent book, Holly, isn’t a bad way to go about it.