Book Review: Stephen King's 'Holly' tries to place his horror formula in modern times
Author Stephen King. Picture: Getty Images
- Holly
- Stephen King
- Hodder & Stoughton, £25
One of the most published authors in the world, Stephen King could be said to be scraping the bottom of the barrel with his extremely dark, macabre and downright repulsive (in terms of the subject matter) latest novel.
But what saves this horror-fest from being shoved back onto the bookshelf in despair at the depravity of its two perpetrators of crime is the complexity and humanity of private investigator, Holly Gibney.
She has appeared in four other novels and one novella of King’s.
Here, she is very much centre stage, coping with the death from Covid of her difficult mother who refused to be vaccinated against the virus and was a Trump supporter, anathema to Holly.
This novel’s timeline goes back and forth and back again so that the reader is aware of the first crime committed by an unlikely couple whereas Holly comes into the picture when she is asked to look into the disappearance of Bonnie by the girl’s mother several years later.
Based in a small town in the American Midwest, a pattern emerges regarding a number of disappearances in the neighbourhood.
Holly is tasked with uncovering a lot more than finding out about the missing Bonnie.
The girl supposedly left a note saying ‘I’ve had enough’ meaning that she has either left town or taken her own life. Holly instinctively doesn’t believe that Bonnie wrote those words.
Not a whodunit but rather a why-the-hell-would-anyone-do-it, the elderly academic couple in this tale has a clever modus operandi.
They capture a gay creative writing teacher attached to the town’s university.
Emeritus Professors Emily and Rodney Harris are spotted by the teacher Jorge Castro struggling to get Rodney in his wheelchair into their van.
Jorge helps push the wheelchair up the ramp. But his good deed is actually a gateway to hell.
When he comes around having been injected with some substance, he finds himself in a cage in the basement of the couple’s house.
The only food on offer is raw calf’s liver. If he doesn’t eat it, he’ll get nothing. More than anything he wants water.
When Jorge asks Emily for an explanation as to what she and her husband are at, she utters one word: ‘maricon’ — a derogatory Spanish word for homosexual.
Indeed, Emily, outwardly politically correct, is homophobic, racist (she has racist thoughts about an up-and-coming black poet called Barbara she encounters) and generally intolerant.
Her diary reveals that she was half fascinated by the riot at Capitol Hill. She would never say so publically but this political sacrilege fascinates her.
She realises that if she uttered the racist word that came to her when she met the poet, “it would surely sully her reputation for the rest of her life in these puritanical times”.
Why the couple go on to lock up other characters as well as keeping a list of potential victims is revealed reasonably early on in the narrative.
But there is still a question. How do they do what they do? It’s a dark tale into which Holly goes deep. Thankfully, it’s not all grisly although the more pleasant strands of the book are interwoven into the grim story.
Barbara is mentored by an elderly and highly regarded poet. Holly also has ambitions to write poetry. She is an interesting character who prays when all else fails. In other words, she’s not your usual hardboiled detective.
In the author’s note at the end of the book, King says a newspaper story inspired him to write about ‘killer old folks’.
When you’ve written as many creepy books as he has, a new twist on man’s inhumanity to man is always welcome.
