You don’t know about Holly Gibney unless you’ve read about her in a few books by a man named Stephen King. Holly got her start as a minor character in Mr. Mercedes and grew into a more prominent role throughout the Bill Hodges trilogy. Since then she’s taken on supernatural forces in The Outsider and in the short story If it Bleeds, but Holly is the first novel where she is the main protagonist. King has made it clear how much he adores Holly and enjoys writing her, and it’s easy to understand why. Holly’s family trauma and resolute struggle against her anxiety and other mental health issues make her a character readers want to root for.
In this new novel, Holly is dealing with complicated feelings after the death of her mother from COVID-19. (The novel is largely set in 2021.) Shortly after attending the Zoom funeral, she gets a call from a perspective client who wants her to look for her missing daughter. While her friends and her business partner urge her to take time to herself, she instead relishes the opportunity to distract herself with a case.
No one has seen Bonnie Rae Dahl in weeks. One night she stopped in the local Jet Mart on her way home from work, brought a diet soda, took off on her bike and disappeared. Because she’d broken up with her boyfriend and fought with her mother, the police wrote her off as a runaway.
Holly’s investigation keeps leading her back to Bell College and its environs, while also leading her to other people who’ve gone missing over the years. A college janitor disowned by her family, a skateboarder pre-teen with a a drunken single mother, a stoner without a family. Each of them conspicuously easy to dismiss. Is it just a coincidence, or are they being taken? If they are, who is doing it, and why?
While these questions are mysteries to Holly Gibney, they are not to the reader. In parallel with the investigation narrative, King flashes back to previous disappearances and the exploits of two of his most unlikely monsters yet.
King is adept at drawing out the tension of Holly’s case, expertly parsing out revelations and action to keep the reader entertained. Where he falls a little flat is in his attempt to make Holly “of the moment.” The novel is set in the near past, in a world recognizably similar to the real world. Holly and the other characters frequently discuss COVID, Trump, the insurrection, masks, and vaccines. The unnamed, fictional city Holly lives in is reeling from the aftermath of an unjust police shooting.
All of this, of course, is fitting material for any writer. But King’s normally good ear for dialogue departs him when these issues arise. Whenever the real world impinges on the story, the effect is deleterious. King’s opinions are not the problem, but rather it is the artlessness with which he inserts them into the text. Conversations abruptly grind to a halt whenever a character veers out of the way to let Holly (and the audience) know that they are unvaccinated, or that they believed the 2020 election was stolen, etc. It’s simplistic and feels more appropriate to a middle-school class project than a novel for adults.
Still, eventually the story eventually demands that King put his soapbox away and get back to the case. When he does, Holly soars.
