Spoilers!
Out there in the universe is a video of Lee Child and Stephen King being interviewed, two of my favorite authors inexplicably together. When I saw that, I started wondering what it would be like if Stephen King wrote a Jack Reacher-like story. As it happens, he did! His 2021 novel, Billy Summers, is I what I interpret as his take on the Reacher book, but with King hallmarks: waxing philosophical about good and evil, life and death; deliberately meta ruminations on the craft of writing and storytelling; and the distinct zaniest that comes with any of his writings. I thoroughly enjoyed this offering, and while there are just too many good King books to do a proper ranking, Billy Summers certainly ranks up there, probably in my top 15, as does the titular character among King’s best, fully-realized characters.
Billy is an Iraq War veteran, having served during the most brutal battles of the Iraq War in 2004-ish, and he segues the U.S. government’s training of him as a sniper assassin into being an assassin-for-hire. His only code of conduct is that the person he kills has to be a bad guy. He takes on a new job, what he deems his last job (and then he waxes philosophical and meta about how “the last job” is a subgenre onto itself within the assassin genre, and he has the self-awareness that last jobs never go well, and yet), where he’s asked to kill someone like himself: a hired gun, who was arrested for killing a man after a poker game. The job requires him to embed himself within the town where the assassination will occur in a fake identity as a writer, and Billy takes that opportunity to write a semi-autobiographical story. See, he plays dumb with his associates in the assassin world, but he’s actually a bright guy who admires high-brow literature and such.
The story we learn is that Billy killed his first “bad guy” when he was 11, and it was his mom’s boyfriend, only after the mom’s boyfriend quite literally stomped to death his younger sister Billy had tasked himself with protecting. He feels he failed. He then goes into the foster system, and eventually the Marines and the “suck” (the battlefields of Iraq). Some of King’s best writing in Billy Summers comes from Billy’s writing of his time serving in Iraq. While in this identity, Billy is sociable with his neighbors, including their children, his office mates at his high-rise office building, and through a third secret identity (his clean one for his get-away after his “final job”), he befriends the neighbor couple and helps water their plants. Points to Billy for somehow keeping all these identities and relations straight.
All of this, brief as I’m mentioning it, is what makes Billy the kind of anti-hero figure we, as readers, like. He’s a good guy in a bad profession, albeit he thinks of himself as a bad guy because whether the people deserve it or not — and he thinks they do — killing is still a nasty, scarring business. What’s particularly remarkable about Billy Summers is that King spends about 176 pages on the aforementioned, and it was absolutely enthralling! I mean, there are scenes here of an assassin playing Monopoly with the neighborhood kids, and I was glued to the page. So much so that by that 176th page when Billy finally shoots the man he’s been contracted to kill, I was feeling all kinds of tension wondering if a.) he’d actually go through with it because of the bonds he forged through his fake identity; and b.) if something was going to go wrong. Nope, he kills the guy and everything goes perfectly. Except that the killing is a deeper conspiracy than he realized. The man he killed is the man who killed an entertainment mogul’s son at the behest of the entertainment mogul who is also a pedophile. (This a small thing, but it did take me out of the story: The entertainment mogul is the head of World Wide Entertainment, or WWE, in the book, which was a weird name choice by King since WWE, the professional wrestling company, exists in the real world.) So, a hit is put out on Billy in addition to the usual heat from law enforcement.
So, Billy stays low within his “clean’ secret identity at the apartment below the couple with the flowers he still regularly waters. Then, a 21-year-old named Alice is dropped on his doorstep almost in deus ex machina fashion. New to the city, she was gang-raped, beaten up, and left for dead by three dudes outside Billy’s apartment. Billy rescues her. This is what makes us like Billy even more than we already did! He’s a good guy. Part of the reason from a plot perspective she exists is that because later, to go after the entertainment mogul, Billy uses Alice as “bait,” i.e., a 16-year-old girl as a sex offering. I found that rather disturbing from Billy, admittedly, given he came into contact with Alice because of a gang rape. The other aspect of their relationship I was eyerolling was the sexual tension between the two. At one point, she kisses him full on the mouth and admits she loves him in a way that isn’t daughterly. He thinks of her as daughterly and maybe aptly, sisterly given what happened to his sister, but also has a gross scene where he’s so pent-up apparently sleeping next to her that he goes to finish himself off in the bathroom. Yup.
Those two issues of mine aside, Billy and Alice were a fun odd coupling, and an odd coupling always makes for compelling storytelling. And yes, she serves more of a purpose than as bait; she’s what allows Billy, the 11-year-old version of Billy, a redemptive arc for failing in his eyes to save his sister. What’s particularly sweet is that Billy even lets her read the story he is writing (and continued to write even after the ruse was up). As it happens, she needs to finish his story because Billy dies. Ugh, he dies! They kill the entertainment mogul, but as they’re getting away, Marge — the feisty 70-something mother of one of the seedy people Billy put into a coma earlier in the book — barges in and clips Billy in the stomach out of revenge. That’s what later kills him. My final issue with the book is the almost cartoonish way Marge came out of nowhere, at the perfect time, no less, to kill the protagonist. King brushes it off by having Billy proclaim something to the effect of, “That damn, Marge!” But I suppose it’s a necessarily “evil” here because it allows for King’s insight — and thus, Alice’s insight — that telling stories is not only a magical escape from real world pain, but through storytelling, you can tell whatever story you want, like a story where Billy rides off into the sunset like a happy-ending Western.
Billy Summers is unlike most Stephen King books I’ve read up to this point, aside from his aforementioned King hallmarks, and that’s a positive. I liked seeing King try something different, flex some different writing muscles, and he still kept me as enthralled as ever until the final page. If you’re looking for what Stephen King is all about, but aren’t a fan of horror and/or supernatural stories, then try giving Billy Summers a read.
Milam's Musings 