So his publishers have set him up in a small house in a nice neighborhood with an office in downtown Red Bluff, high in a towering office building overlooking the courthouse. The mob guys who hire Billy set him up as a man named David Lockridge, a writer with a chance at a big contract, but first he has to finish his book. What’s Billy gonna do during that time? Establish his cover story. Whenever the extradition order can be carried out. When is the target, Joel Allen, coming?Ĭould be up to a few months. The target is currently in jail in California, half the country away, but he’s coming back to Red Bluff (where exactly Red Bluff is, King never specifies, just some “red state just below the Mason-Dixon line, east of the Mississippi”). We go with it because, well, it’s a King book and it’s 514 pages and, okay, let’s just keep going and see where he takes us.īut this isn’t just some normal “man is hired to shoot target, man shoots target, man gets paid” story. Never mind the host of moral quandaries that brings up, the least of which is “bad” by whose standards. King wants us to know upfront that Billy may be a killer, but he only kills people who deserve it. Billy is hired to kill a “bad man”, the only kind of job he ever takes. The man knows his way around some prose.īILLY SUMMERS is the kind of novel that, as a writer myself, baffles me with just how easy he makes it seems. He’s been publishing novels for FORTY-SEVEN years, and publishing fiction in general for longer than that. Let’s read it and see what happens.īut see, what I was forgetting was, this is Stephen frickin’ King, and even when his books are terrible, his writing is NOT. Hitman on ONE LAST JOB before he retires, THE BIG SCORE to send him off into his golden years, but SOMETHING GOES WRONG. WOW, that’s a cover only a mother could love.īILLY SUMMERS, at first glance-well, second glance, once I got past that cover!-is a story I felt I was going to yawn all the way through. In this particular case, a terrible cover did not make for a terrible book.īut make no mistake, that’s one UGLY cover. I did that with his 2021 book BILLY SUMMERS, and I was totally 100% wrong. I still will look at the cover first and form an opinion of the book as a whole. Even when it’s a Stephen King book and I KNOW I’m going to buy it and read it and, most likely, enjoy it. I know I’m not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I have to admit I do. Rating: Sometimes Horror Writers Write Crime Novels and Sometimes They’re Really Good
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