The Stephen King bell ringeth once more, this time for Billy Summers. It’s a more grounded tale for King, putting a hitman front and center without any direct supernatural interference. And, by jove, it works quite well!
Billy Summers is a former Iraq War sniper who now works as a hitman. But he’s a good hitman in that he only kills bad people. People who deserve it, naturally. We meet Billy as he prepares for one final job (this always ends well). His contract involves killing a man before that man can testify in a high-profile case. It puts Billy’s hitman outlook to the test, but damn, the money is so good. Almost too good. Billy moves to a small town near the location of the hit under a false identity. He pretends to be a writer and actually begins writing about his life story. The novel juggles Billy’s past and present leading up to the hit, and the fallout when it all goes sideways. After the hit, Billy hides out in an apartment he booked under a false identity. He witnesses a terrible sexual assault and takes in the victim, further complicating his plan to disappear.
One time, a friend compared his current read to Stephen King “without all the random rambling.” I chuckled at this because I know the feeling all too well. King goes off on tangents. These tangents have a purpose, mind you, but that doesn’t change what they are. King can (and has and will) build an entire doorstopper of a novel out of sidebars. This can have an exquisite tapestry effect, as in Under the Dome, or it can be to the story’s detriment (wait for my Cujo review). Billy Summers feels like a classic King ramble became its own story, and the resulting book is an enjoyable read without too much excess fat.
As is fitting with any King book, Billy Summers puts its characters front and center. Billy himself is the star, and it’s truly a joy to watch him move through his little community before the hit takes place. He’s troubled by his violent past and does a lot of moral legwork to justify his post-war actions as a hitman. The foil to his inner turmoil is the town of Red Bluff, where Billy settles into his writer identity and befriends the locals. He plays board games with one family and shops at the local stores. His assumed identity is at odds with the impending fallout of his contract, and it’s a cool window into a character’s rent psyche: the violent, war-scarred hitman meets the kind, small-town writer. Will the balance hold?
The plot takes a sharp right turn from its simmering moral quandaries after the hit goes down. While hiding out, Billy takes in Alice Maxwell following her brutal assault outside his apartment building. He allows Alice to rest and heal in his place despite the obvious complications—she could tell anyone who he is or where he’s hiding. Instead, she and Billy strike up a tenuous friendship and embark on a revenge-fueled road trip. The money Billy was promised is nowhere to be found, so he’s ready to get it. Alice becomes something of an apprentice to Billy—not in the literal sense (she isn’t aiming to become a contract killer), but in the sense that she begins learning how to navigate danger, deception, and survival on her own terms.
Alice’s journey takes the front seat in the novel’s latter half. She gains agency and starts to make her own choices as they relate to Billy’s actions. She threads herself into their tapestry-in-progress and becomes an indelible part of Billy’s life. Alice allows Billy’s “good” side to emerge in a way he didn’t know was still possible. Through her, he gets to imagine a version of himself that isn’t defined solely by violence.
Alice isn’t just a plot device, though. Especially near the end of the novel, she decides how she will tell her story and how she will remember her relationship with Billy Summers. Her final choices (avoiding spoilers here) say more about the cost of violence than a bullet from Billy’s gun ever could.
In the end, Billy Summers has an ever-beating heart and a light at the end that feels uniquely optimistic to King against his backdrop of bleak stories. It’s one of his most human stories, and for that, I love it.
Rating: Billy Summers – 9.0/10
