We meet him at the start of the novel where he’s reading an Archie comic, but one of his favourite books is Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola.īilly Summers is essentially a book that is about writing, as there’s a story within a story that tells of Billy’s past as written by Billy himself. So, there’s a lot of waiting around before Billy is to do his deed and he passes the time with a cover story that he’s a writer by writing a sort of autobiography about his life and also, rightly or wrongly, getting close to his neighbours. The hit is to be done before this man can make a plea deal that will bring his sentence from the death penalty to life in prison but might blow the lid on crimes others have committed in the deal. He is stationed in a small city in the American South to wait until a chance arises to kill a man, a murderer who has killed a teenager in the past, when the bad guy is brought back from California (where he has been arrested for lesser crimes) to the city to go to trial for murder. However, as Summers is thinking of retiring from the biz, he is summoned once again for one last job that will pay $2 million.
He makes a point of only killing bad men and is paid modestly for his efforts, never making more than $70,000 for ending someone’s life. The story is about a former Marine and Iraq War veteran who has turned into a hitman, the titular Billy Summers. However, this is a book that starts out being very good and only gets better and better from there, climaxing in a bittersweet ending. It could be said that because a major character is introduced almost halfway into the read that King might have painted himself into a bit of a corner and had to throw something new into the mix. What’s more, the book goes on for at least four acts, which means that you get curve balls thrown into the mix - this is a novel about crosses and double-crosses, and seeking vengeance and justice for all of them. It’s two stories in one, but there’s enough here to fill at least three novels. To that end, I’m happy to report that King’s latest novel, Billy Summers, is destined to go down as a classic as it is one of his very best novels - or at least best in terms of his late-career output. Perhaps this might be for the best because how many times must we get a variant on “the car that kills people” short story or novel? It could be that King’s well has run dry in this regard, but it might turn out that this change to writing crime fiction offers a little more variety to the King oeuvre. Stephen King has seemingly turned some of his attention away from the occult or supernatural and has become something of a crime writer.
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