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Stephen King Pays His Dues in a ‘One Last Job’ Novel

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By James Lasdun

• Aug. 3, 2021

BILLY SUMMERS By Stephen King

The sole hint of supernatural activity in Stephen King’s new novel comes well over halfway through, when its protagonist, a hired killer and aspiring writer named Billy Summers, notices some weird goings-on in a painting of topiary animals. It doesn’t lead to anything: Shrugging off the pictorial shape-shifting, Billy turns the painting toward the wall of the cabin where he’s working on a memoir, and gets back to his blood-drenched memories of Falluja, where he served as a sniper in the Marines.

King’s fans will recognize the leafy animals from “The Shining,” and it turns out the cabin stands across the valley from the ruins of that novel’s infamous hotel, the Overlook, where, as the cabin’s owner tells Billy, “bad stuff happened.” It’s a nicely ironic piece of self-reference: Unlike that demon-haunted story about a writer-turned-killer, this tale of a killer-turned-writer is haunted only by books — King’s own, but a mass of others too. They aren’t necessarily the ones you would expect — no mention of Poe or Lovecraft or Shirley Jackson (acknowledged influences) — but at some level “Billy Summers” is clearly the work of a writer in retrospective mood: taking stock, paying his dues. Among the authors name-checked in its spacious narrative are Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Faulkner, Tim O’Brien, Cormac McCarthy and Robert Stone, along with Billy’s own favorites, Thomas Hardy and Émile Zola. For much of the book, when he isn’t shooting people or writing about them, Billy is immersed in “Thérèse Raquin.”

His tastes may be highbrow (and staunchly realist), but the story he finds himself caught up in is very much — and very explicitly — a genre piece. Lured from the brink of retirement by a hit job offering a half-million-dollar advance, with another million and a half on delivery, Billy enters familiar, ill-omened territory: “If noir is a genre,” he reflects ruefully, “then ‘one last job’ is a subgenre.”

Fittingly enough, the plan concocted by the mob boss who hires him calls for Billy to pose as a writer. This is in order to blend into the small-town community to which his target is due to be extradited at some point, to face murder charges. If all goes well, Billy will get a shot at him on the courthouse steps a few blocks from the rented corner office in which he is to bide his time, pretending to be at work on a book. The device allows King to have fun with the unflattering mutual mirrorings of literary and criminal enterprises, each with its apparatus of talent, middlemen, contracts and deadlines, and each entailing its own kind of risk, as Billy discovers when he steps into character: “Any writer who goes public with his work is courting danger.”

By “public,” he means his employers, who have almost certainly cloned the laptop they’ve provided him with, and whom he increasingly suspects of plotting to kill him as soon as he has served his purpose. To outwit them he feigns cluelessness, doing his best to stay in the “dumb self” persona he has perfected over the years. He pretends to read only Archie comics, and opens his memoir in the voice of Faulkner’s “idiot” child from “The Sound and the Fury,” Benjy Compson, confident that the mobsters keeping tabs on him will read it as precisely the subliterate ramblings they’d expect from a chump like him.

A lot of writerly angst seems encoded in all this; lingering pique, perhaps, from ancient debates about the literary merits of King’s hugely popular fiction. (Harold Bloom dismissed his 2003 National Book Award medal for distinguished contribution to American letters as “idiocy.”) It certainly makes for an interestingly complicated subtext, which is soon matched by the text itself as Billy starts planning his own counterscheme for getting out alive (and getting paid) — an elaborate ploy involving serial identities, multiple disguises, secret addresses and a daunting quantity of phones and computers.

King layers it all in patiently, detailing the little worlds of the downtown office and the residential suburb where Billy whiles away his days and nights, using the memoir to reveal Billy’s grim back story (suffice it to say he embarked on his shooting career at an exceptionally tender age), and staging small lapses of judgment on Billy’s part that come dangerously close to exposing him (there’s a funny moment when he can’t resist hitting all the targets in a carnival shooting game). By the time his mark arrives the sense of what’s at stake in the shot Billy will finally take has been cranked up to the max, and the first of several lavish action scenes erupts with a satisfying release of pent-up tension.

That’s about a third of the way through. The remaining two-thirds feature Billy tracking down, first, the mobster who has indeed been trying to double-cross him and, next, the Mr. Big (or Mr. Even Bigger), a jowly right-wing media mogul based on you-know-who, who got the mobster to hire him in the first place. For these missions, and for company at the cabin where Billy holes up for a spell, King supplies his middle-aged hero with a 21-year-old love interest, Alice, arranging for her to be dumped (literally) on his doorstep from a van by three men who have just raped her.

Here, it has to be said, the book stumbles. Aside from the creaky coincidence, there’s something at once prudish and prurient about the ensuing relationship that’s hard to take. Post #MeToo, the conventional sexual dynamics of the pairing obviously wouldn’t work, and King tries hard to square them with those of our own moment, keeping things chaste while also keeping sex very much to the fore. The result is a weird sort of latter-day Hays Code effect, all separate bedrooms and nobly resisted temptation, offset by graphic anatomy shots and regular moments of accidental intimacy: “Her butt is socked into his basket.” Alice herself seems a throwback to an old idea of womanhood. She’s happy to let Billy avenge her rape rather than do it herself (the passage, featuring Billy in a Melania mask with a hand mixer, might have made for a vintage King scene in another era but feels dated now), and she adapts herself to Billy’s plans with a gratingly chipper obligingness — “‘Roger that,’ Alice replies, smart as you please” — uncomfortably reminiscent of the “cool girl” male fantasy skewered by Gillian Flynn in “Gone Girl.”

That these significant flaws don’t totally derail the book is a testament to its author’s undimmed energy and confidence. His eye for detail, especially at the dreckier end of roadside culture, is sharp enough to keep the long car rides that crisscross the novel lively and vivid, and he remains in possession of a seemingly effortless verbal flow that surges on over bumps and banalities in the story line (must the bad guy always turn out to be a pedophile?) without letting up. But next to classics of the One Last Job novel and its close variants — including my own favorite, George V. Higgins’s “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” — it seems driven more by formula, in the end, than the real reckoning with fate and mortality that the genre, at its best, affords.

James Lasdun’s latest book is “Afternoon of a Faun,” a novel.

BILLY SUMMERS By Stephen King 517 pp. Scribner. $30.

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BILLY SUMMERS

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 3, 2021

Murder most foul and mayhem most entertaining. Another worthy page-turner from a protean master.

The ever prolific King moves from his trademark horror into the realm of the hard-boiled noir thriller.

“He’s not a normal person. He’s a hired assassin, and if he doesn’t think like who and what he is, he’ll never get clear.” So writes King of his title character, whom the Las Vegas mob has brought in to rub out another hired gun who’s been caught and is likely to talk. Billy, who goes by several names, is a complex man, a Marine veteran of the Iraq War who’s seen friends blown to pieces; he’s perhaps numbed by PTSD, but he’s goal-oriented. He’s also a reader—Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin figures as a MacGuffin—which sets his employer’s wheels spinning: If a reader, then why not have him pretend he’s a writer while he’s waiting for the perfect moment to make his hit? It wouldn’t be the first writer, real or imagined, King has pressed into service, and if Billy is no Jack Torrance, there’s a lovely, subtle hint of the Overlook Hotel and its spectral occupants at the end of the yarn. It’s no spoiler to say that whereas Billy carries out the hit with grim precision, things go squirrelly, complicated by his rescue of a young woman—Alice—after she’s been roofied and raped. Billy’s revenge on her behalf is less than sweet. As a memoir grows in his laptop, Billy becomes more confident as a writer: “He doesn’t know what anyone else might think, but Billy thinks it’s good,” King writes of one day’s output. “And good that it’s awful, because awful is sometimes the truth. He guesses he really is a writer now, because that’s a writer’s thought.” Billy’s art becomes life as Alice begins to take an increasingly important part in it, crisscrossing the country with him to carry out a final hit on an errant bad guy: “He flopped back on the sofa, kicked once, and fell on the floor. His days of raping children and murdering sons and God knew what else were over.” That story within a story has a nice twist, and Billy’s battered copy of Zola’s book plays a part, too.

Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-982173-61-6

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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by Nora Roberts ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 21, 2024

A touching story of love and grief ends in an epic battle of good versus evil.

Roberts’ latest may move you to tears, or joy, or dread, or all three.

Every summer, John and Cora Fox visit Cora’s mother, Lucy Lannigan, in Redbud Hollow, Kentucky, leaving their children, 12-year-old Thea and 10-year-old Rem, for a two-week taste of heaven. The children love Grammie Lucy far more than John’s snooty family, which looks down on Cora. Lucy, a healer with deep Appalachian roots, loves animals, cooks the best meals, plays musical instruments, and makes soap and candles for her thriving business. Thea—who’s inherited the psychic abilities passed down through the women of Lucy’s family—has vivid magical dreams, one of which becomes a living nightmare when a psychopath robs and murders John and Cora as Thea watches helplessly. Thea’s description of the killer and her ability to see him in real time help the skeptical police catch Ray Riggs, who goes to prison for life. Although Thea and Rem go on to have a wonderful childhood with Grammie, Thea constantly wages a mental battle with Riggs, who tries to use his own psychic abilities to get into her mind. Over the years, Thea uses her imagination to become a game designer while the more business-minded Rem helps manage her career. Thea eventually builds a house near Lucy, where a newly arrived neighbor is her teen crush, singer-songwriter Tyler Brennan. Tyler has his own issues and is protective of his young son but slowly builds a loving relationship with Thea, whose silence about her abilities leads to a devastating misunderstanding. At first Thea tries to keep Riggs locked out of her mind. As her powers grow, she torments him. Finally, she realizes that she must win this battle and destroy him if she’s ever to have peace.

Pub Date: May 21, 2024

ISBN: 9781250289698

Page Count: 432

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024

ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE | SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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ONE PERFECT COUPLE

by Ruth Ware ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 21, 2024

The most cinematic Ruth Ware novel so far.

A reality TV paradise becomes a nightmare for the show’s unlucky contestants.

Lyla Santiago and Nico Reese have been dating for more than two years, and she’s beginning to feel like their relationship may be hitting a wall; she loves him, but his main focus at 28 is on his acting career, while, at 32, scientist Lyla is starting to dream about settling down. When Nico pleads with her to join him on a new reality TV show, One Perfect Couple , Lyla views it as an opportunity to see whether their relationship can go the distance—in reality as well as on TV. They arrive on a remote Indonesian island to find blue waters, white sands, romantic huts, and eight other contestants, all beautiful, glamorous, and clearly committed to bolstering their visibility by competing on the show. The director seems a bit shady; he insists (as their contract demands) that they turn in all electronics, plies them with booze, and then leaves with the crew—and the first ousted contestant. That night, a huge storm sweeps across the island. The next morning reveals a fatality among the wreckage: a hut and its inhabitant have been crushed by a tree, and the outbuildings have been destroyed. The remaining contestants are cut off from all communication, with the exception of one radio, and there is a very limited supply of food and water. So Love Island becomes Survivor , and one person in particular is set on being the last person standing. Ware offers another take on the locked-room mystery, but this time, her focus is less on creating a creepy atmosphere of dread, as she did in earlier novels, than on showing the absolute brutality of which some humans are capable. But she still has a good time herself: There’s a funny self-referential line to an earlier novel, plus some female characters MacGyver-ing a battery. The prolific Ware continues to stretch herself, taking on something new in each novel and writing strong—and increasingly kick-ass—female characters.

ISBN: 9781668025598

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024

THRILLER | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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Billy Summers by Stephen King review – his best book in years

The monsters are all too human in this noir tale of an assassin on one last job

N o matter what he writes, Stephen King will always be considered a horror novelist. It’s unavoidable now; he is responsible for too many of the fantastical nightmares that prowl popular culture. Yet in his latest novel, Billy Summers , there are no supernatural shades whatsoever (save a late Easter egg reference to a certain haunted hotel). Instead, he is in full noir mode, with a modest tale of an assassin on the requisite one-last-job-before-he’s-out. It meanders, it pays only the scantest regard to the rules of narrative structure, it indulges gladly in both casual stereotyping and naked political point-scoring. And it’s his best book in years.

The set-up is straightforward. Billy is an ex-army sniper turned killer-for-hire who, conveniently for the purposes of readerly sympathy, only kills “bad men”. Tasked with a hit on a small-time crook, he relocates to a provincial city in an unspecified southern state where, due to the machinations of plot, he must live a double life in the local community while waiting for his shot. Like all good King protagonists, he fills his time with writing his life story. It’s a tale of violent youth and wartime tragedy that begins as an unwelcome interruption to the main proceedings but gradually accrues more weight as a window on to Billy’s off-kilter moral code.

For 200 pages, Billy Summers feels like a retread of King’s alternative-history doorstop 11/22/63 , told this time from the assassin’s perspective. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine that the genesis of the novel lies somewhere in King’s research into Lee Harvey Oswald.

Like 11/22/63, the first half is pedestrian in pace but rich in colour and characterisation. King has always excelled at sketching everyman’s US, enriching the details into a minor epic register. It’s what elevates him above his genre peers, and it’s in full force here. Cook-outs with Billy’s neighbours, games of Monopoly with their children, date nights and diners – all are part of King’s mythologising of American life.

Often this feels anachronistic – Billy’s tales of his childhood in a foster home sound more like the 1950s than the 90s, and a present-day visit to a fairground is barely different from a scene in The Dead Zone, way back in 1979. But King is not losing his touch. The book has plenty of references to contemporary TV and music, as well as allusions to changing demographics and progressive politics. (Not a single chance is missed to put the boot into Trump.) Any nostalgia in Billy Summers is intentional: it lulls us into a false sense of security. Knowing King’s penchant for the slow burn, it’s easy to imagine that the novel will build over 400 pages towards its climax in the sniper’s nest. Surprise, then, when we find that Billy’s time in the suburbs is the calm before the storm.

At the midpoint, Billy Summers takes an entirely unexpected turn, introducing a character who will alter the course of Billy’s life and the nature of the novel. From here on the focus narrows, the pace quickens and the ethics become murkier. This strikes an odd balance with the sunlit, languorous first half. It shouldn’t work, but it does, largely because King is so good at character and making us care through incidental details. A little girl’s crayon drawing becomes a totem. The song “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” becomes a poignant refrain. By the inevitable, biblical climax, unlikely plot contrivances or dated sexual politics are forgiven, because we can’t help but be won over by the eternal figure of the lone individual making a stand .

In interviews, King often references the American naturalism of Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, and the hardboiled crime fiction of Ross MacDonald and Donald E Westlake . Billy Summers combines these two strands into the author’s own brand of muscular, heightened realism. He may always be considered a horror novelist, but King is doing the best work of his later career when the ghosts are packed away and the monsters are all too human.

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BOOK REVIEW: Billy Summers

The king of horror and supernatural haunting, Stephen King, hasn’t forgotten his fan base — there’s a nod in his new book to The Shining’s creepy Overlook Hotel — but in Billy Summers , King’s latest, he takes readers on a different kind of thriller ride in what some are saying is his best book yet. It may also be his most moving, getting us to care deeply about a professional killer.

And maybe his most surprising novel as well, with a narrative arc that includes a lot of seemingly unrelated subplots — the mob’s way of doing business, marines in Fallujah fighting house to house in late 2004, friendship between old comrades in crime, a platonic love story between the protagonist and a young woman who’s been gang raped, a nail-biting climax in Montauk — and discovery of the challenges and joys of writing. It’s an eclectic mix but it all comes together.

From the very first paragraph of this over 500-page suspense tale of a contract killing and its consequences, you know you’re in the hands of an award-winning pro and increasingly under the spell of the protagonist, 44-year-old former marine — Bronze Star, Silver Star, Purple Heart sniper Billy Summers.

Billy’s in a hotel lobby reading “a digest-sized comic book, Archie’s Pals and Gals,” but “he’s thinking about Emile Zola and Zola’s third novel, his breakthrough, Therese Raquin.” Not your usual hired gun. Or average neighborhood Joe, though Billy contrives to let others think so — the mob bosses who pay him to kill and the ordinary folk he moves near, as a cover, feigning identity. That way, he gets to carry out what he says will be his last job, though unbeknownst to the mob bosses, the getaway part will be of his devising, not theirs.

The mob puts him up in a middle-class working community where Billy gets known as the affable David Lockridge, an aspiring writer, working on a memoir. But he’s also secretly holing up under another alias, Dalton Smith, in a solitary basement apartment not far away. As Dalton, he passes himself off in disguise as an overweight computer guy. It’s in that apartment, one night, that he hears a noise, which turns out to be three guys dumping a girl’s inert body onto the ground and speeding away. Billy’s instinct is to save her.

The many-layered narrative, typical of King, is made manageable here by a changing typeface, as the reader follows Billy as the dim-bulb Dave Lockridge, trying to write a slightly fictionalized memoir. He does so in the voice of William Faulkner’s slow-witted Benji Compton from The Sound and the Fury . His tale is of a lonely child of an alcoholic mother with a penchant for abusive men, one of whom, one day, beat up and killed Benji’s little sister and started to go after him. But the 10-year-old knew where a gun was and used it. As Billy writes his story, however, waiting out his assassination orders, he feels increasingly competent as a writer and Benji becomes Billy. Billy, who after he shot the man who killed his sister, moved to a foster home and then joined the Marines. And eventually became a hired gun.

As he writes as Billy, waiting for his kill date, he reviews his escape plans. And reassesses his rationale that as a hired gun he’s been killing only really bad people. The seductive draw of writing fiction though gives him a power and a sense of release he never had — that he can own his own story. He sees that while nonfiction presents facts, fiction can present truths.

Billy Summers — such an innocuous title! But the story IS noir, with no shortage of nerve-grating violence. It’s also, however, redemptive, more Faulkner than Zola, more hard-won hope than deterministic despair. It’s 73-year-old Stephen King celebrating the writing life.

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The Best Fiction Books » Crime Novels

Billy summers, by stephen king.

** *Audiofile magazine Earphones Award for a truly exceptional audiobook***

Five Books review

The new Stephen King novel,  Billy Summers , is just out and has been receiving rave reviews;  The Guardian   called the assassination thriller “his best book in years”—Cal Flyn, notable novels of Fall 2021 .

“In his latest novel, Billy Summers , there are no supernatural shades whatsoever (save a late Easter egg reference to a certain haunted hotel). Instead, he is in full noir mode, with a modest tale of an assassin on the requisite one-last-job-before-he’s-out. It meanders, it pays only the scantest regard to the rules of narrative structure, it indulges gladly in both casual stereotyping and naked political point-scoring. And it’s his best book in years”

Guardian review of Billy Summers by Stephen King, 4th August, 2021

Other books by Stephen King

Holly by stephen king, fairy tale by stephen king, the shining by stephen king, it by stephen king, on writing: a memoir of the craft by stephen king, the green mile by stephen king, our most recommended books, the hound of the baskervilles by arthur conan doyle, magpie lane by lucy atkins, the talented mr ripley by patricia highsmith, the woman in white by wilkie collins, the moonstone by wilkie collins, sidetracked by henning mankell.

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Book review: An unforgettable antihero in new crime thriller from King

"Billy Summers"

Author: Stephen King

Scribner, 517 pages, $30

“Billy Summers” is Stephen King's latest foray into crime noir. Billy is a hit man extraordinaire. Trained as a sniper by the marines, he has never failed at his job. His ability to blend in with his surroundings is topped only by his almost Houdini-like disappearance after the job is done.

Lately he feels like it is time to quit. Before he can announce his retirement, a job arrives promising a $2 million payment — half a million up front and the balance on completion of the task. As always, his sole criterion for accepting a job is the fact the potential victim must be a very bad guy. Once he decides the $2 million is worth it, he begins planning his moves.

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It will be a long wait before he can have access to the mark, so he ingratiates himself in the community for six months under the cover of being a writer on a short leash to finish a novel promised to his publisher. Along the way, he learns a lot about himself through the friendships he develops in the community.

Once the bad guy is dead, Billy disappears to another area of town under a different name to await word of his payment. It doesn't come, and he realizes he's been lied to and set up. He has now become the hunted.

As he develops a plan of revenge, fate drops a huge surprise on him in the form of a young woman named Alice Maxwell. He saves her and before long, like a Stockholm syndrome victim, she is completely enamored of him.

The relationship between these two surprises him. He now has someone to care about. But given the age difference, he keeps it platonic.

King has once again created an unforgettable antihero. Another great read from the master.

Richard Klinzman lives in Middleburg.

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Billy Summers

By stephen king.

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for Billy Summers by Stephen King, a thriller about a hitman doing one last job that goes sour.

Billy Summers is a hitman and a decorated former Marine sniper. He's ready to retire, but before he does, he accepts one last job that offers a huge payday that would set him up comfortably for his post-hitman life.

However, as the details of it come together, he knows something about it feels very wrong.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

The one-paragraph version: Billy Summers, 44, is a hitman who only kills "bad" men. He accepts one final job (from Nick) before he retires with a major payday attached. However, Billy starts to suspect Nick intends to kill him when the job is done. Sure enough, the job goes as planned, they try to kill him, but Billy gets away. He soon meets Alice, 20, who has just been sexually assaulted, and he helps her punish her attackers (non-lethally). Then, Billy confronts Nick. Nick tells him the one who ordered the job was Klerke (who wanted Billy dead since it was one less loose end). Klerke likes young girls, so Alice dresses up as a teenager so she and Billy can confront Klerke. Alice shoots Klerke. One the way out, the mother of one of the guys Billy injured comes out of nowhere and shoots Billy. He dies.

Billy Summers is a hitman and former Marine sniper who only accepts jobs killing "bad" men and wants to retire altogether. Nick , who Billy has worked for many times before, offers Billy one last job -- one that pays $500K upfront and $1.5M after it's done.

The target, Joel Allen, is also a hitman. He's wanted in the area for murdering a guy who won a bunch of money off of him in a poker game. Joel has been claiming that he has some valuable information that the police wants in order to make some type of deal, and apparently someone doesn't want him talking, which is why Billy has been hired to take him out.

The job requires Billy to spend quite some time as a resident in a small town where some office space has been rented out for Billy's use. The cover story is that Billy is a writer named David Lockridge who has been tasked by his agent to stay there and go to the office and write each day in an attempt to get him to meet his deadline. The office has a direct view to the courthouse, where Joel will eventually be taken to be arraigned for murder. Billy is meant to shoot him at that time and then disappear.

Billy gets suspicious when Nick offers up a getaway plan for after the hit takes place, since typically he leaves that up to Billy to figure out. Nick's plan involves Billy escaping in a city transit truck that will have someone waiting to drive him away. Billy suspects that Nick intends to then kill him. Instead, Billy starts to formulate his own plan.

While he waits for the big day, Billy also starts writing the fake book his character is supposed to be writing, just as a way to kill time because he wants to. He changes all the names, but writes about his own story, starting with his little sister being beaten and killed by his mother's drunk boyfriend when he was 11. Billy ended up finding a gun and killing the boyfriend. He later ended up in foster care and then joined the Marines at 17.

In present day, the shooting goes off without a hitch. Billy evades the transit truck and gets away by disguising himself as one of the office workers in the building. He then goes to hide out at an apartment he previously rented under another name, Dalton Smith , where he intends to lay low for a while since there is a media frenzy surrounding the shooting. When Nick doesn't pay him after the shooting is done and instead demands to know where he is, Billy knows that his suspicions about Nick were correct. He also soon learns there's a $6M bounty on his head.

While Billy is trying to remain out of sight, he sees a young woman get dumped out of a truck onto the street, drugged and half-dead. Not wanting to attract police attention to the street, he reluctantly goes out to save her. It turns out Alice, 20, had just been sexually assaulted by a group of men. Alice recognizes Billy as the person on the news as the shooter, but she ends up wanting to stay with him for a while.

As Billy continues writing his story, he writes about his experiences in the military and discovering that he was quite a talented sniper. He also writes about an incident in Fallujah where he and his buddies were sent to check out a large house and a majority of them were killed there. One of the survivors, Johnny Capps , later hooked Billy up with his first job as a hitman.

When it's time to hit the road, Billy first goes to confront Alice's attackers. He demands that two of them apologize to her over the phone, and then he sodomizes the last one (who was the one lured her there) with an object. After that, Billy and Alice head for a place in Colorado to meet with Bucky , who is Billy's "broker" and the only person Billy fully trusts, and to plan how to go after Nick.

At Nick's estate, Billy pretends to be a migrant worker who is there to deliver gardening supplies. He has to kill or injure a bunch of Nick's men, including seriously injuring a guy named Frank whose mother Marge also works for Nick. Billy manages to extract a promise from Nick to pay the money owed and to tell people that Billy is dead.

Nick also tells Billy that the person who ordered the shooting was Roger Klerke , a wealthy man who owns an assortment of media companies. Roger originally hired Joel Allen to kill his son, Patrick Klerke . Roger has a predilection for very young girls which Patrick had learned about, and he managed to get photo evidence of it. Then, when Patrick had learned that Roger wasn't planning on passing his company to him, he had lashed out by blackmailing Roger.

Joel Allen successfully killed Patrick, but in doing so Joel found out about the blackmail evidence as well. So, when Joel later got into his own trouble and was trying to use that information to cut a deal with the prosecution, Roger wanted Nick to hire someone (Billy) to kill Joel. Roger also wanted Billy dead to prevent a repeat of the Joel Allen situation.

Billy and Alice stay for a long time at Bucky's place, and Billy finishes writing his life story to bring it all the way to present day. Meanwhile, Billy learns that Frank lived but now get seizures and screams with pain all the time. When it's finally time to deal with Klerke, Alice takes photos of herself dressed up as a teenager to send to Klerke to entice him into meeting with them. Klerke takes the bait, and Alice and Billy show up at his place, and Alice shoots Klerke.

On their way out, Marge (Frank's mom) comes out from nowhere and shoots Billy. Billy shoots back. Marge dies, and Billy is injured. Alice and Billy rush off. (From here, the story is written as if Billy is writing it as part of his life story). When they get back to their hotel, Billy thinks about how he's bad for Alice, and she's better off being free from any outlaw stuff. He leaves with hopes of becoming a writer and maybe even someday being able to atone for the things he's done.

Then, in the final chapter, we learn that the last part of Billy's story was written by Alice, not Billy. Billy actually died and Alice wrote it to convey his thoughts and how she wished he would have survived.

For more detail, see the full Chapter-by-Chapter Summary .

If this summary was useful to you, please consider supporting this site by leaving a tip ( $2 , $3 , or $5 ) or joining the Patreon !

Book Review

• Fun premise
• Good build-up of suspense
• Not a horror novel (may be a pro or con for you)
• Predictable plot turns
• Over-reliance on common tropes
• Questionable plot justifications

I had decided I was going to take a break from reading Stephen King novels (for no particular reason other than feeling like I’d read quite a few of them lately), but then everyone was saying how great Billy Summers is and so I felt like had to check it out for myself. So, here we are.

With Billy Summers , Stephen King venture out of the realm of horror that he’s known for, as he’s done quite a few times before . Instead, this is essentially a straight-up thriller-slash-suspense novel. In it, the titular Billy Summers is a trained sniper who works as a hitman. He takes one last job before retiring — one with an enticingly large payday — but it goes wrong.

In Billy Summers , I think King does a good job of building up suspenseful scenes, and the writing itself is of course fine, which is what you’d expect from Stephen King. Though to be honest, I felt it a was little sloppier than his shorter, more streamlined, works.

In general, I found the book really engaging through the first third of it or so. However, I soon realized how predictable it was becoming and started losing interest. (Discussed further in the Spoiler-ish Thoughts section at the end.)

In the book, King calls out specifically how hitmen doing “one last job” that goes poorly is a very common trope , so I was hoping it meant that he intended to take his story in a new and interesting direction.

Unfortunately, it plays out pretty much like you’d expect and turns in to a bunch of other tropes. For example, when they’re the protagonist, hitmen in books and movies are almost always rigidly principled, especially when it comes to women and children, which is why you’re supposed to like them, and Billy Summers is no different.

I imagine if this book had been authored by a debut author, I perhaps would have had lower expectations and a more kindly view on it, but I guess I expected more from Stephen King. I’m used to being surprised and delighted by his plot machinations, so I was hoping this one would be the same.

There’s also some plot justifications that I thought were pretty questionable (also discussed in the Spoiler-ish Thoughts), which was distracting for me. It’s not so far-fetched that the book is impossible to enjoy or anything like that, but I would have preferred tighter plotting.

Also, as the story progresses, Billy crosses paths with Alice, a twenty-year-old girl who has just been sexually assaulted and is left barely alive by the side of the road. She’s ends up being semi-in-love with Billy and is eager to be a part of his world. Their partnership was a little implausible in my opinion, seeming more like male fantasy than anything else, but whatever.

German Version (Left) vs US Version (Right)

Read it or Skip it?

I didn’t love it. It thought it was too long-winded, not particularly inventive, and the plot felt like a mish-mosh of movie tropes and three separate stories smushed together. After the point where we find out what went wrong, from there the book played out exactly as I expected it to, with no real surprises or plot turns (with one exception, discussed in the Spoiler-ish Thoughts below).

Billy’s also an overly-perfect character — an impossibly efficient killer who is handsome, principled, likeable, who loves reading, writing and Émile Zola, and who has a barely-legal woman a fraction of his age fawning over him — that smacks of wish-fulfillment.

I found it more suspenseful in the beginning when there was more of a possibility that the plot could potentially take an interesting or unexpected turn, but once I realized this was not that kind of book, my enthusiasm waned a lot.

To be fair, based on other reviews, it appears plenty of other people are enjoying this book more than I did, so perhaps your mileage will differ. And as mentioned above, I think I had higher expectations for this book since I do like Stephen King, and so I’m probably being a bit harsher about it than I would if it had been published by a less experienced author.

See Billy Summers on Amazon.

Spoiler-ish Thoughts

SPOILERS START HERE. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.

I felt throughout a vast majority of the book that there were just no surprises in this book. Basically what happens is, Billy takes a job and suspects that they’re going to try to kill him when it’s over, so he makes a contingency plan. Then a hundred fifty pages later, the job goes exactly as planned and yes it turns out they planned to kill him exactly as expected, but his contingency plan works out perfectly.

Of course, predictably, Billy wants to confront Nick about it, and he suspects someone else is really pulling the strings on this job. So, Billy confronts Nick, which goes exactly as intended, he gets precisely the information he wants, and yes Nick confirms that his suspicions were right.

So, predictably, Billy goes to find the guy pulling the strings, Klerke, and plans to kill him. That also goes off without a hitch.

Billy spends a lot of time fretting about contingencies that could happen and what could go wrong, but nothing ever does. I just got so bored with this. The blurb on the book says “So what could possibly go wrong? How about everything.” But then in the book nothing ever goes wrong?! The only thing that went wrong was entirely foreseeable and so Billy planned for it, and his plans went off without a hitch.

(Yes, I know there’s also his military backstory and Alice’s revenge thrown in there, but neither of those things really impact the main plotline in any meaningful way, so whatever.)

Okay, so obviously there’s one exception to all this — right after it’s all over, Marge shoots him, which I guess I would consider somewhat unexpected, but it’s so egregiously un-clever and cheap (lady who hates him coming out from nowhere to shoot) that there’s nothing really satisfying about it.

Then, of course we’re led to think Billy survived when it turns out he’s actually dead. I wouldn’t say I was shocked by this twist, but sure, okay, I would at say at least it made things more interesting. However, after reading through 500 pages of ZERO surprises, I had a hard time being too impressed by that. And Billy dying in such a cheap way after all of this is just so maudlin .

That all said, one of my biggest issues was that the whole justification for Billy ending up in this situation was so shaky. Basically, Klerke wants him dead to avoid a repeat of the Joel Allen situation, but it seems so unnecessary? If Billy is killing Joel from afar in a brief moment when he’s in transit there’s no reason for Billy to find out about any of the blackmail information that Klerke is worried about. Moreover, if Klerke should want anyone dead, it would make 100x more sense for him to kill Nick or Giorgio or Judy, not Billy, since Billy knows nothing and all these other people know all about it.

Billy Summers Audiobook Review

Narrated by : Paul Sparks Length : 16 hours 55 minutes

I started out listening this on audiobook, but didn’t love the narrator and switched to reading it instead. I thought the sort of clipped way the guy spoke was kind of annoying and made it less enjoyable to listen to, so I gave up on it pretty early on.

I get the feeling he was trying to sound kind of emotionally detached to tap into that war-weary, loner hitman vibe, but it didn’t work for me.

Hear a sample of the Billy Summers audiobook on Libro.fm.

Book Excerpt

Read the first pages of Billy Summers

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Wow 😳 That was a thorough review! Thank you so much. I never read or listen to him, but now I’m afraid that’s the audiobook I may have requested. 😩

Have to say I agree with everything you said! I listened to the audiobook (all the way through!) but felt the delivery all wrong… which may have affected my overall enjoyment of the book, tbf.

I completely disagree with everything you said. I felt the book started out strange and mysterious only to turn surprisingly sweet and gentle once Alice showed up. I loved the way they bonded with each other and can safely say I didn’t see any of the surprises coming. Yes it was ultimately a revenge tale that pondered what the difference between right and wrong really means, but at it’s heart it was a love story between a man looking for redemption and finding that redemption in saving the young girls life. Billy Summers was very emotionally satisfying to me and I can honestly say I was moved to tears throughout. It’s easily the best thing he’s written since his masterful dark tower series ended.

I totally agree with the comments of Michael and Chris. This book grabbed me from the very beginning and held me in emotionally, initially due to Billy’s bonding with his neighbors and friends, and subsequently, due to his relationship with Alice. It’s a wonderful story about redemption, which is something we all need to see and hear more of in this increasingly cynical and oftentimes, heartless world we live in.

Thank you for doing this review! However, I side with Michael’s comment and found Billy Summers very enjoyable and hard to stop (I listened to the audiobook all the way through). True, some things were a little predictable. I grew to like Billy’s character and my favorite scene was his visit to Tripp & roommates to avenge Alice. The mentions of Trump and pandemic shutdown felt a little unnecessary to me, although maybe King included them to lock the time of the story into American history.

Actually I think Billy did survive. That’s what the stain and the bag of glass is.

We get it you did not have to mention it in your review 3 times…..you hate the book because you think it portrays “wishful male fantasy” as you said…..you hate it because a young girl was enamored with a man that saved him Nevermind he never even attempted to have sex with her, I guess it’s still a “male wish fulfillment” fantasy. :D In other words, your a diehard feminist don’t need no man. It was a very good book. Terrible review.

I’m a little over 200 pages in and the inaccuracies and political commentary are taking me out of it. A military veteran with a decidedly Democratic/liberal outlook? Ok, I’ve seen a couple. A sniper who only uses an app to zero his rifle? Never. A sniper who sticks his rifle barrel out of a window? Never. A person of this skill-set considering using a .32 or .38 as a defensive firearm, knowing the capabilities of the people who would be sent after him? Come on! At this point, I’m pushing through because I hope King’s ability to write outshines his inability or unwillingness to research his topics.

Stephen King evokes John Wick and pandemic anxiety in the tense, fractured Billy Summers

The first half of king’s new crime novel is some of his best work in years. the second half is a different story..

The final page of Billy Summers —Stephen King’s latest effort to master pulp crime fiction just as he tamed horror several decades ago—includes, like many of King’s books, a note saying when he wrote it. In most of King’s novels, this addendum serves as little more than a cheery footnote, a reminder of the hard work and the sheer amount of time that must be poured into the author’s brick-heavy tomes to bring them to life. But in Billy Summers , those dates arrive with a meaning that no one could have anticipated when King first sat down to craft his story of a hitman with a heart of gold: June 12, 2019 - July 3, 2020.

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To be clear, Billy Summers is not a pandemic novel, at least not in the traditional sense. Outside of a few allusions to the COVID-19 lockdowns, King resists the urge to import details directly from a reality that has sometimes felt cribbed from the pages of his most famous works. But the steadily growing cabin fever is nevertheless inescapable as one dives deeper into the book, and a first act of stunning formal control gives way to a second half that is frequently unfocused, lurid, and, at times, clichéd. All of which builds to a climax that seems to pull from the darkest recesses of home-brewed Twitter and cable news paranoia; it’s wish fulfillment for those living in a world where the rich and powerful orchestrate acts of monstrous evil, while we’re all stuck at home, brokenly clicking along. The action then settles, almost miraculously, into an epilogue that brings the book’s best qualities back to the forefront.

But first: That opening half, which sees its title contract killer shacking up in a nondescript Midwestern city, waiting several months for his next target to be delivered to a nearby courthouse. In the meantime, the Iraq vet-turned-freelance-sniper must blend in with the locals, a setup King uses to get the wheels spinning on a delicious engine of tension. By the time the date of the hit arrives, our uber-competent undercover anti-hero is running something like five different identities in an effort to keep everyone—his neighbors, his employees, himself—in the dark about what’s actually going on. The most prominent of these is also the one that tips the book into more recognizable King territory, as Billy’s employers (having bought into his persona as a slow-witted murder-savant) mockingly set him up as a first-time novelist to explain his extended stay in town.

If Billy Summers has a thesis—beyond the burbling morass of vengeance fantasies that threaten to transform the second half into something akin to Stephen King’s Death Wish —it’s in the sequences that dive into Billy’s attempts to turn his cover gig into a real one and filter his life story into prose. King has written so many author-protagonists over the years that it’s tipped over from a running joke into simply being part of the background radiation of his oeuvre. But he’s rarely put this much time and energy into depicting the actual cathartic work of the job, up to and including drafting whole chapters of Billy’s writing as he processes his abusive childhood and military service to untangle the web of identities he’s crafted around himself. The rapture with which Billy realizes he can finally peek out from behind the masks and speak in his own voice (if only to himself) could have been corny in another book, but in King’s hands, it comes off as infectiously genuine. In addition to those loftier ideas, these excerpts are also a chance for King to engage in a bit of metafictional gamesmanship, crafting text that reads like the work of a gifted beginner, distinct from the more familiar tone used in the rest of the book.

At least in the early going, the bulk of Billy Summers is a delightfully tense crime thriller, tracking the protagonist’s efforts to pull “one last job”—the character, an aggressive consumer of literary fiction, notes the trope himself. Ostensibly light on incident, Billy’s preparations highlight King’s sharp skills for observation—sizing up the people in his orbit for how they might help or pose a danger to his schemes—and begin to unlock some of the traumas that drove him to kill for cash. The fact that those deep-seated motives seem to have been largely pulled from The Big Book Of Professional Murderers Who Are Also Good, Sensitive Guys, We Swear, can probably be chalked up as much to the genre as King’s actual plotting. The result, despite its surface familiarity (it’s wild how much of Billy’s story tracks with HBO’s Barry , for example, to say nothing of the outright John Wick reference that pops up),   is somehow both hard-boiled and human, and on par with much of King’s best work.

All of this holds true until the halfway point, when, with the pull of a trigger, King jettisons huge swaths of the tension that made Billy Summers such a compulsive, memorable read. What replaces it is a sort of surreal vigilante road trip tale, shot through with sexual violence and revenge, which adds a seemingly unintentional queasy element to the book’s central relationships. The complicated layers of identity fall away, and what we’re left with verges on the simplicity of a morality play.

It would be reductive to assume that this portion of Billy Summers (which begins with Billy locking himself away for weeks at a time and even features him bingeing NBC’s The Blacklist ) was written strictly post-outbreak, and the rest before. But as the singular focus of the first act morphs into a sprawling revenge thriller that sees King invent ever-more-awful (human) monsters for his hero to hunt, it’s hard not to feel like a sheer dividing line was crossed somewhere. Certainly, it’s strange that the portions of the book in which its hero fritters away his days playing Monopoly with local kids are far more compelling than those in which he roams the country, executing crime lords and rapists. Given King’s experimentation with serialization over the years, it’s hard not to wish that the two stories—and that is, ultimately, what this feels like—could have had more separation between them, if only so the second half didn’t suffer so much by comparison.

It’s the writing that saves Billy Summers —both the prose itself and the depiction of the act. Together, they give the book the lifeline it needs as its ripped-from-the-headlines ending looms. Even in the most hoary of crime scenarios, King can still build tidal waves of tension from the smallest deviation from plan, sending Constant Readers plunging deep into the flop-sweat insecurities of his heroes as they watch a situation potentially spiral out of control. In situating Billy’s atonement in communication and creation, not violence, King manages to find a space for redemption that might otherwise have rung hollow. For a book whose only supernatural element is the occasional looming ruin of the distant Overlook Hotel—where another King writer stand-in once fared far more poorly with his isolation and “gifts”— Billy Summers is winningly optimistic about the life of the creative mind. More than almost any other King book in recent memory, it’s a product of its time, but not a victim of it.

Author photo: Shane Leonard

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Review: Stephen King’s ‘Billy Summers’ stars a hitman writer

This cover image released by Scribner shows “Billy Summers” by Stephen King.” (Scribner via AP)

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“Billy Summers,” by Stephen King (Scribner)

Among the many remarkable things about Stephen King is that he has yet to run out of ideas. Or put another way: He’s very good at finding new ways to explore themes that have interested him his entire career.

“Billy Summers” tells the story of the title character — his past and his present. A sniper in the Iraq war, now an assassin for hire, Billy displays a “dumb self” to his clients while inside he’s very curious and introspective, having “even plowed his way through ‘Infinite Jest.’” So when he takes one last job that requires him to have a long-term cover story, he chooses writer. In what other profession could he keep such weird hours and be responsible to no one but his creative muse, right?

The passages where Billy writes his life story are some of the best in the book. King’s adept at shifting voices, from the “dumb self” narrative voice Billy uses in his story, to the killer whose brain never stops wondering who’s trying to manipulate him. “Billy saves what he’s written, gets up, and staggers a little because his feet feel like they’re in another dimension,” writes King. “He feels like a man emerging from a vivid dream.” It’s not hard to imagine King himself somewhere in Maine doing the same decades ago after bringing a chapter of “The Stand” to life.

Redemption is the novel’s central theme. Billy has always told himself he only kills bad men who deserve it, but when he starts having doubts about his final job, he distracts himself by writing his life story.

It’s when he finds an audience for his story that the book really starts to find its groove. Before that, it’s heavy on inner monologue as Billy thinks through all the possible consequences of his actions and the motivations of the people around him. The plot is straightforward and not really very compelling until about the midway point, when Alice Maxwell enters the story. A victim of gang rape, she’s dropped out of a slowly rolling car around midnight outside the apartment where Billy is lying low. Her story reveals a compassionate side to Billy and flips a switch in the narrative. She gives him a new purpose as an avenging hitman while serving as an eager audience for Billy’s life story.

The action kicks into a higher gear as Billy and Alice head west to tie up loose ends. There’s even a cameo from a certain hotel landscaped with animal topiary. It’s just one of those “King-winks” for fans. And those fans will happily ride along with Billy and Alice. For readers who are new to the King canon, there are literally dozens of other books — most of them are also movies or TV shows at this point — with which you’re better off beginning your Stephen King journey.

Master of crime, too? Stephen King hits the mark with assassination thriller 'Billy Summers'

It’s downright unfair, really: Not only is Stephen King an undisputed master of horror , he’s a virtuosic crime novelist as well. Look out, bodice-ripping romance, he’s probably coming for you next.

King has been dipping into noir and detective thrillers recently with the “Mr. Mercedes” trilogy, “The Outsider” and "Later,"  but his new book, “Billy Summers” (Scribner, 528 pp., ★★★½ out of four, out Tuesday), proves this run is no fluke: He actually is as good at the hard-boiled prose – in this case, the tale of an extremely effective assassin trying to get out after one last job – as he is the scary stuff. There’s also multiple coming-of-age stories, a book-within-a-book, an overarching mystery, a dash of political commentary, some twists and a touching side to the narrative exploring the fine line between bad men and actual monsters.

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A decorated Iraq war vet, Billy is the man to call if you need an assassination done right, though he has a strong code: Billy only puts a bullet in people who he feels deserve to be put down. Uncannily adept as both a shooter and an escape artist, Billy decides that his latest assignment, sniping a fellow hired gun powerful people want dead because he knows too much, will be his last. The caveat is he has to wait for his mark to be extradited back to a small Southern town from LA., so Billy has to blend into the community for several months and pretend he’s a writer working on a book as he sets up for the big day.

A superstitious sort, Billy finds himself unwittingly forming close relationships in town (his absolute truth: “I like to fly under the radar”) and actually becoming inspired to write about the traumas from his childhood as well as his stint as a peacekeeping Marine in Fallujah, Iraq. The gig goes sideways, of course – as “one last jobs” usually do in crime thrillers – and King fashions a sprawling road trip/revenge piece/character study involving mobsters, moguls, patsies, soldiers and one young woman brought to a crossroads after a sexual assault who becomes a major player in Billy’s existence.

Check out: USA TODAY's weekly Best-selling Booklist

King’s known for his literary villains, yet in creating his killer title protagonist, he exquisitely gets into the mind of a hitman and roots around in there to figure out what kind of person would do wetwork, the loneliness involved for those who choose that as a career path and the effect it would have on friends and loved ones. “Bad people need to pay a price. And the price should be high,” Billy says, though much of his journey is figuring out really what kind of man he is.

Stephen King: Author talks new novel 'Later,' kid protagonists and storytelling during COVID-19

At the same time, King also in meta fashion discusses the nature of identity and storytelling. To do his job, Billy has to juggle various personas to keep off the radar of cops and crooks – even pretending to be his “dumb self” so people underestimate him – though his novel becomes a PTSD-laden place where his inner truths get worked out. King even seems to be speaking from experience when Billy opines about half-finished novels in the world and how “the work got too heavy for the people trying to carry it and they put it down” – though by looking at the man’s output lately, King’s shouldering those literary burdens like Atlas.

Those worried he’s gone full Raymond Chandler, never fear: King makes it clear that “Billy Summers” very much exists in his creepily familiar world. It’s also very much a part of ours as well, with a few Donald Trump references and a foreshadowing of the COVID-19 crisis as Billy hunkers down and has to watch life go by outside, less because of a pandemic and more because of his morally questionable chosen profession.

The biggest crime here, however, would be missing out on “Billy Summers” and King’s new reign as a pulp genius.

The BiblioSanctum

A book blog for speculative fiction, graphic novels… and more, book review: billy summers by stephen king.

I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own.

Mogsy’s Rating (Overall): 2.5 of 5 stars

Genre:  Thriller, Mystery

Series:  Stand Alone

Publisher:  Simon & Schuster Audio (August 3, 2021)

Length:  16 hrs and 57 mins

Author:  Website  |  Twitter

Stephen King books can be hit or miss with me, which is why I don’t often pick them up right at release, preferring to hang back to see what other reviews are saying before I take the plunge myself. With Billy Summers though, I broke with that trend. Maybe it’s because I had a rather good run with the last few King novels I read, or the fact that the synopsis to this one sounded a bit different from what I was expecting. In any case, I became too overconfident, and in hindsight I probably should have passed on this one. Admittedly it wasn’t a complete miss, but personally speaking, it was also far from anything I would call a hit.

The eponymous protagonist of Billy Summers is a former sniper in the Marines and a veteran of the second Iraq War. Ever since leaving the military, he’s been making a living as a killer for hire, making a name for himself as being the best in the business because he always delivers. His only rule? The target must be a truly bad person, because he will not go after innocents.

When we find Billy at the beginning of this story though, he has come to grow weary of the assassin’s lifestyle and is contemplating retirement. However, as these things always go, there is one last job, and it’s a doozy. Not only is the client paying $2 million, the biggest offer Billy’s ever received, the hit will also require him to go undercover for months in a small conservative town, living under a whole different identity. There will also be lots of challenges in the way, but if he can pull it off, the money will set him up for life.

And so, Billy moves into the quiet neighborhood his clients have arranged for him under the guise of being an author looking for a quiet place to work on his new book. But with months still to go before the big hit, there’s a lot of downtime, and even though his new identity is only a cover story concocted for the job, Billy thinks, what the hell , and decides to try his hand at this whole writing thing anyway. As a result, what we have here is something akin to a novel within a novel, the present story featuring embedded snippets from Billy’s work-in-progress which is essentially an autobiographical account of his life.

I confess, my feelings were all over the place with Billy Summers . There were some really good parts, but then plenty of low points as well. Since most of the positives were towards the end of the novel, I’ll begin with the negatives. Stephen King books are a lot of things, but rarely are they tedious or dull, which is why I was shocked at how often I found myself bored and my attention drifting off with this one, especially since I was listening to the audio. After a strong intro, the momentum simply petered out, perhaps not surprisingly coinciding with the chapters where our protagonist’s own life story was just starting to take shape. I have to say, I did enjoy the early sections where Billy recounted his childhood which included the tragic circumstances around his little sister’s death. This terrible event would eventually shape the man he’ll one day grow up to be, playing into many of his actions and motivations in the second half of the novel.

However, I was much less impressed with the “war story” part of Billy’s novel. These sections were overflowing with war movie tropes and felt very much like a narrative cobbled together using a bunch of scenes from some of the most iconic war films ever made. Coming from King, this heavy reliance on clichés was somewhat disappointing, not to mention some of the inaccuracies, particularly when it came to certain details like military terminology or weaponry. On the whole, what probably should have been the most compelling chapters of the novel focusing on the protagonist’s service in Iraq ended up being the sections I wanted to skip over the most, which was beyond frustrating.

But what floored me the most were the circumstances around Billy’s first meeting with Alice, a young woman with whom he forms a fascinating and unique bond. To be fair, I loved her character, and as a duo, the two of them would go on to share some incredibly harrowing and also touching moments on the page together. Still, that doesn’t really change the iffiness of those early scenes, and without having to reveal any spoilery details, I’ll just say there were overall some problematic issues in the portrayal of certain topics, including trauma victims and rape. There was just an “off” vibe to it all that left a bad taste in my mouth.

Fortunately, the ending was pretty good, but alas, rather predictable again, robbing it of any surprise. Like I said, this book wasn’t all bad, and I didn’t dislike it. There was always enough intrigue and an entertainment factor that keep me going. But still, even after you take into account all that was positive and done well, it’s impossible to ignore everything else that went awry—uneven pacing, the drawn-out lulls where not much happens, as well as the predictability of the plot and overabundance of clichés, etc. I’m sure Billy Summers will find tons of fans, as Stephen King novels never fail to do, but overall I can’t really say it did much for me.

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Category: 2.5 stars , Audiobooks , Mystery/Suspense/Thriller     Tags: Billy Summers , Simon & Schuster Audio , Stephen King

16 Comments on “Book Review: Billy Summers by Stephen King”

I‘ve put this on my tbr some three weeks ago because of some ravish review here on WP. Now, I‘m not convinced anymore.

It depends on the King books you like. I think he tried to write a bit outside his comfort zone here…didn’t really work so well

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Not great pacing , clichés and predictability? That’s surprising for him!

It really is! Which is why I’m even more disappointed!

Yep, sounds like the pendulum has swung for King for this book 🙂

Yep, streak broken! 😀

Stephen King having problems with pacing does have an ominous sound, indeed… Maybe I will skip this one. Thanks for sharing! 🙂

Sorry to hear this didn’t work out. I was a little iffy with the war veteran scenario (not my favorite), so I may pass on this one.

Yeah, you can tell he was out of his element with that scenario too. Felt like he was trying to write his own Full Metal Jacket, borrowing so many cliches.

I might have already mentioned this in the past, but my early years with King were all completely positive, I loved his work. But then I just sort of stopped reading him until many years later. After that I found his books very hit or miss. Some of your reaction to this reminded me of my reaction to Duma Key, one I didn’t finish because I was getting too bored too early on.

I confess, I don’t really enjoy his really early stuff, but some he’s written some good ones in the last couple decades or so. Recently though, his stuff has become more iffy for me again.

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Ack King, not the best one then

No where near his best.

Well, I will give this one a miss then. Lynn 😀

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Billy Summers by Stephen King

• Publication Date: August 2, 2022
• Genres: Fiction , Suspense , Thriller
• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Gallery Books
• ISBN-10: 1982173629
• ISBN-13: 9781982173623
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Billy Summers Hardcover – August 3, 2021

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• Print length 528 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Scribner
• Publication date August 3, 2021
• Dimensions 6.13 x 1.6 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1982173610
• ISBN-13 978-1982173616
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A surprising, sleight-of-hand novel of love, heartbreak, redemption, and retribution from a master storyteller.

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; First Edition (August 3, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 528 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982173610
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982173616
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.75 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 1.6 x 9.25 inches
• #498 in Mystery Action & Adventure
• #752 in Thriller & Suspense Action Fiction
• #2,344 in Suspense Thrillers

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About the author, stephen king.

Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, MR MERCEDES, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both MR MERCEDES and END OF WATCH received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively.

King co-wrote the bestselling novel Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and many of King's books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including The Shawshank Redemption, Gerald's Game and It.

King was the recipient of America's prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine.

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