The titular character of this novel, King’s second novel of 2021 after the brilliant Later, is a traumatized veteran of the Iraq War currently working as a hitman, but a principled one, a guy who only kills people that deserve it (and also, you know, have an enemy willing to pay him a lot of money). As this book begins, Billy Summers is about to do that one last big job that’ll set him up for retirement. This job requires deep cover; he’s going to move into a small town undercover of being a writer and he’ll be there for a few months before his target even arrives in town. Of course, things go sideways, there’s a betrayal, Billy ends up on the run with a young woman in tow, etc.
It must be nice to be Stephen King. I think he’s just a guy that no one says “no” to anymore and, whether you or I have any particular affinity for his writing, I think we’d have to agree that he’s earned that with his long career. Does King get edited anymore, I wonder? Probably somebody reads it for typos and maybe some fact-checking, but that’s got to be about all and that’s why he can publish a book that’s ostensibly a thriller about a hitman and spend about the first hundred pages just table-setting. This isn’t a complaint; this is leading into one of the things I liked the most about the book which is the methodical writing style. The plot moves very slowly over this book and King takes time to linger over details, helping us see the world as Billy sees it, a world where he has to know every variable about everything in order to do his job well and escape with his life. This style works when King is talking about Billy’s slowly paced day-to-day small-town existence and his technical prep work; as the book progresses, we discover that it also works, maybe best of all, when we’re watching Billy work, when we’re watching the violence. There’s a late sequence of Billy infiltrating a secure compound and the steady, slowly-paced, methodical breath of the prose is calm, precise and beautiful.
There are some things I had issues with. A large portion of the book revolves around Billy deciding to try to write his life story (while he’s pretending to be a writer, he decides to actually be one, which shouldn’t be surprising since this is a Stephen King novel) and I didn’t love those sections. He’s also suffering from PTSD because of something really bad that went down in Iraq at a location called the Funhouse and when it’s finally revealed in a lengthy flashback, it doesn’t quite live up to the horrifying hints we’ve been getting; I frankly wish King had just never explicitly told us what happened because the hints we were getting were creating a much more horrific event than the one we eventually got. And there’s a supporting character, a young college student that Billy comes across after she’s been raped and he takes her under his wing for various reasons and that relationship got more and more problematic for me as the book went along. Again, some ambiguity would have been nice, but by the end, the characters have both just kind of been like, “So, this is how I feel about you,” and it’s very cheesy.
Still, those problems were not enough for me to stop enjoying the book. King’s just a good writer and while there are problems, his prose carried me through some of the weaker material. And when the book is good, which is pretty often, it’s extremely good. Interesting that this was kind of the “prestige” King novel from 2021; it got a full hardcover release on the big publishing label, whereas Later came out in paperback on the small Hard Case Crime label. And I’d say Later is the far superior book of the two. Still Billy Summers isn’t a miss; it’s entertaining, suspenseful and well-written with only a few flaws to detract. 3 stars.
tl;dr – King’s second novel of 2021 is a flawed, but still entertaining thriller that’s surprisingly methodical and slowly paced; a pleasure to read, though there are certainly weaknesses. 3 stars.