It’s a long, long way from Melbourne to Honolulu, and I spent a large part of it with Stephen King’s Holly Gibney (funnily enough, I read Needful Things on my first trip to US – SK is apparently my go-to companion for the long haul flights). Regular King readers will recognise her as a recurring character, but Holly can be read as a standalone.
Holly is a creepy, creepy old novel, a lot like The Outsider’s early sections in vibe, actually. A taut crime/horror/suspense novel, Holly bounces back and forth in time to take us through the last days of several murder victims, before culminating in a pretty classic ticking clock, heroine-in-peril ending. All the usual King tropes are here, including the very real fear for his lead character – if there’s one man I don’t trust not to kill off his eponymous detective, it’s King.
One thing I’ve disliked about some of SK’s recent work is that he starts out with what feels like a classic crime novel, and ends up writing his way out of the mystery with a supernatural explanation. Again, The Outsider comes to mind here – Holly is what I wanted that to be, I think: just a cracking story. It might be that I was a captive audience, but I found myself remembering anew just how good a storyteller Steven King is. The characters are engaging, the plot is tense, the ending didn’t let me down.
I notice that there’s a lot of chatter around about how many Covid/Trump rants there are in the novel. I might be in the minority, but I didn’t find it took me out of the action as much as other reviewers did. I’m Aussie, so maybe I just don’t have that big an emotional stake in the politics one way or the other? I think overall, King is pop fiction, and that’s always going to be something of a reflection of the times, isn’t it? He’s entitled to express his frustrations in his fiction; readers are entitled to agree or disagree. I also am old enough to have read everyone’s first novels after 9/11 (Dead Air comes to mind, first and foremost), so I may have a slightly more tolerant view of the requirement for my favourite authors using their fiction to work through trauma.
Was it Austen, Bronte, Wilde or Dumas? Nope. But I don’t need that all the time. What I needed was something that would keep my mind off Mr Girlwhogotoverit on my left being unable to sit still, and Captain Manspreader on my right falling asleep on my shoulder approximately 15 seconds after take off. King delivered something compelling enough to overcome all that.