Stephen King never (okay, rarely) disappoints, and this Holly Gibney novel, simply titled Holly, is no exception.
Since I started reading the Holly Gibney stories in a weird order, starting with If It Bleeds and The Outsider without having read the Bill Hodges trilogy, I figured it was fine to pick up King's latest book in the tradition of having had new Stephen King for the last few autumns. I do plan to read the Bill Hodges trilogy soon, but when they came out I was under the impression (which I now realize is mistaken) that King's "crime fiction" would be less interesting than his traditional horror.
There's a lot one could say about this novel, so let me focus on two of its more controversial aspects: being King's first novel in which the pandemic is part of the plot, and being less of a traditional horror story (while nonetheless being firmly in the horror genre in my opinion).
This is the first novel King has published long enough after the COVID-19 pandemic started so that the pandemic is happening in the story. And for those of us who've met Holly before, you can imagine that a nervous hypochondriac like her would not be too easy going about a disease that has killed at least one million Americans and was extremely deadly in 2021 when the novel is taking place. Of course, Holly is going to be concerned about masking and vaccination. And since much of the novel is from her point of view, it's going to consume a lot of her thoughts, just as it did for many of us living through that period. If only there had been more Hollys, maybe there would have been fewer deaths.
Which of course is precisely the controversy: of all the dumb mistakes we made in the US (and elsewhere, but like King I'll stick to the US) one of the worst was politicizing a deadly disease that should have brought us all together to fight a common enemy. Honestly the reviews of Holly lambasting King for his emphasis on COVID and his shots at Trump are hilarious. Have you not met Holly (this is EXACTLY how she would react) and do you know nothing about King (the guy is, to put it mildly, not a fan of Trump)? But in another way it's sad to me, because it shows that the culture war political divides that have made the pandemic worse than it had to be are still very much with us. And of course because I basically agree with King, this probably doesn't bother me. Still. It's pretty mild all things considered as a realistic portrayal of some of these divides. I don't see how else you could write about the US in 2021.
If I have any criticism of how King handles COVID and Trump, it's that characters are a little too forthcoming with their off-the-cuff thoughts on these topics. It seems that everyone Holly talks to for even a few seconds regales her with their opinions on these matters. But on the other hand, I spent much of 2021 interacting with strangers as little as possible, which Holly of course would have preferred if she were not in a line of work that requires interacting with strangers on a regular basis. I also live in a cozy little bubble of academia. Even pre-pandemic, I tended to go into interactions with random people as situations to be dealt with as efficiently as possible. Maybe chattier people, non-academics, and private investigators had a different experience?
As for my second topic, one thing longtime King fans may notice is that this is not a traditional horror tale. Of course, Constant Readers also know that King, despite his regal status in horror, has written a lot of different genres for decades: mimetic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, nonfiction essays, poetry, and whatever the Dark Tower is that I love so very much. In the last decade or so, he has been writing a lot of crime fiction. I have been reluctant to delve into it, but as every "crime fiction" story I read (Billy Summers, Later, If It Bleeds, The Outsider, etc.) has been amazing, I do fully intend to finally get to the Bill Hodges trilogy.
Of course King, being King, isn't afraid to mix in the occasional supernatural horror or fantastic element into his crime fiction, even into some of his Holly Gibney stories. But what about this one?
<mild spoiler alert!!!!>
There are no supernatural elements in Holly. But it is, I would argue, still very much horror. The octogenarian retired professors who are up to nefarious deeds are every bit as evil as Pennywise or Randall Flagg. Side note: this just goes to show what dealing with academic politics will do to people! If anything, as one character comments later, the fact that these are just regular humans makes them all the more disturbing. It's not that we live in a mostly good universe with some evil dimension rudely poking in. The evil is right here. The ignorance is right here.
(A meta-note on spoilers. King has said that he doesn't mind spoilers, because if the story is good enough you will still enjoy watching it play out. I agree. And he shows this brilliantly in Holly, as we know who the evildoers are early on while the novel still remains as engrossing as anything King has ever written.)
<end mild spoilers>
And in the end I think that has been King's larger philosophical inclination. Our universe is not all puppy dogs and rainbows. Sometimes horrific shit is going to happen. Sometimes it feels like all hope is lost in the face of horrors like diseases of the biological or political varieties. And death and horror and tragedy are very real. But there are also people like Holly Gibney out there, too. King's unflinching realism about the horrors of reality without an abdication of all hope is, I have long suspected, a key to King's enduring popularity that is fully on display in his latest novel.
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