High time we dropped the TV remote and hit the books.......
So let's kick off the binge with the most red hot item on the current best seller lists.....
Billy Summers by Stephen King (2021) We always know summertime's winding down and the Fall's approaching when Uncle Stevie delivers his hefty Big Book Of The Year.......
This one's an earthbound crime-and-punishment epic, so the major horrors on display here come primarily from the rapists and Pedophiles who take center stage in the book's second half.....
In the first half, King boldly puts his own spin on that very, very well worn action trope......the weary, noble hitman who's taking on one last big assignment before retiring from his career of erasing scumbags who had it coming anyway......
Billy Summers, our hit-guy, comes with a backstory filled with terrible childhood abuse and a young adulthood spent as a Marine surviving bloody combat in one of our useless Middle East wars. His employers, a collection of slimy Las Vegas gangsters, depend on Billy's sniper expertise but think of him as kind of a dim bulb, since he's strictly a comic book reader abd slow on the uptake.
That's just Billy's clever ruse, a trick he uses to hide the fact that he's really one savvy assassin who's thinking ten steps ahead of his overlords.
So he has no trouble figuring out that he's completely expendable in their plan to have him bump off an especially nasty, extradited-for-trial psycho before the murderous slimeball can spout damaging testimony on some powerful people.
What we did find hard to swallow here.......the gangsters, who probably think Billy's somewhere on the autism scale, set up an elaborate phony identity for him - as a fledgling novelist, of all things. Billy throws himself into their scam by actually writing a thinly fictionalized version of his own life story, though deliberately dumbing it down a little since the kingpins can access his laptop.
While this allows King to indulge in one of his great passions, writing about writers and their creative process, it's a stretch to believe that Billy's bosses would fashion such a persona for him, given they think he's not all that bright.
Sure enough, by the book's second half, Billy's on the run from both the cops and his employers and a twist of fate (and Uncle Stevie) places Alice in his path........a young girl who's been more or less dumped on his doorstep, drugged, brutally beaten and raped by her date and his two equally entitled roommates.
From that point on, the book becomes a redemptive journey for Billy and Alice, whom he slowly nurses back to health and attempts to heal both her physical and emotional wounds. This inevitably leads to two roads of revenge for odd couple......to first avenge Alice and next to hunt down the gangland creeps who so badly underestimated him,,,,and the real power-that-be behind them.
As always, King keeps a reader tearing through the pages to see what happens next and if you're one of his faithful readers, we can't promise any big surprises in the wrap--up, but you will find the finale hugely satisfying and heartfelt. And yes, he never misses an opportunity to take some pokes at Donald Trump. (Speaking of Baby Orange's enablers, you won't have any trouble figuring out whom King used as the inspiration for his disgusting main villain....)
If you're a devoted King-ophile like us, "Billy Summers" is a 4 star (****) end-of-summer must read. And speaking of hot bestsellers, stop in here tomorrow 'cause we'll be diving into a twisty thriller that Reese Witherspoon added to her Book Club roster......
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