‘Holly’: Stephen King’s timely work of crime fiction about not judging a book by its cover

At the age of 76, with nearly 70 novels and short story collections behind him, American author Stephen King shows few signs of slowing down. His latest novel Holly, hefty in scale and elaborate in plotting, is the work of an energetic writer, not one who is getting tired.

The book is a compelling composite of the crime and horror genres, as addictive as the cigarettes which the title character finds herself smoking, as she investigates a spate of abductions in a Midwest town. One of the incidental pleasures offered by Holly is its allusion to books from earlier in King’s long literary career. The terrifying incarceration experienced by the novel’s victims, for example, recalls that of the central figure in Misery (1987). A reference to blood poured over a high school prom queen summons up thoughts of Carrie (1974), King’s first novel.

That said, this new book shows King experimenting and innovating, rather than simply being content to reactivate the tropes of his previous fiction.

As well as showing that literary vitality is not reserved for the young, Holly strikes other blows against ageist thinking. The novel is a “whydunit”, not a whodunit, so it is no spoiler to reveal that its villains are two elderly professors, long retired from their lecturing careers at Bell College of Arts and Sciences (a fictitious institution that seems, from geographical markers and references to Cleveland sports teams, to be in Ohio).

Instead of engaging in pursuits lazily associated with retirees – daytime television, say, or the newspaper’s quick crossword – Emily and Roddy Harris embark on an end-of-life killing spree. They evade detection for so long precisely because of a tendency not to suspect the elderly of multiple homicides (their status as academics, perhaps, makes them doubly exempt). As Holly says ruefully: No one expects old people to be serial killers.

‘Another dark place’

The novel’s central character, Holly Gibney, a middle-aged private investigator, has been featured in other recent crime fiction by King. As well as forming part of crime-solving teams in the Mr Mercedes trilogy (2014-2016) and The Outsider (2018), she appears in the first novella of the collection If It Bleeds (2020) – a story which, according to King in an Author’s Note appended to Holly, presents in miniature the plot of this substantial new volume.

Readers of this latest book will find themselves entering the minds of other characters besides Gibney herself. The novel moves between perspectives, even taking us disturbingly into the mentalities of the elderly serial killers. But Holly is at the book’s heart.

As the narrative begins, she is very recently bereaved, unsure of the future of her private investigation business, yet she dedicates herself wholeheartedly to the challenge of finding out what has happened to five abductees. Gibney gets by on clear, patient thinking; as she reflects, “Her wits are all she has.” In one respect, however, her skills of observation and analysis let her down. Late on, deciding what to do in a difficult situation, she makes a mistake about the very genre – the kind of narrative – she is in. “Holly isn’t in a horror movie […] she tells herself she isn’t making a poor decision.”

King’s turn towards crime fiction in recent work, including Holly, should not be taken as implying abandonment of the horror tradition to which his name is most strongly attached. If crime writing has its cosy variants (for example, the classic murder mysteries elegantly republished by the British Library), it also heads at the other extreme towards horror. With its dungeon, its food- and water-deprived captives, its bloody meat juice one of them thinks might make “a clot lollipop”, Holly clearly sits in the more horrific side of the crime genre’s spectrum.

Little wonder, then, that in the author’s note, King thanks readers for “coming to another dark place with me”.

In our time

King skilfully interweaves two timelines in Holly. The first, beginning October 17, 2012, documents the Harrises’ career in serial killing; the second, beginning July 22, 2021, centres upon Holly’s investigation of their crimes. Gradually, these chronologies converge. The moment when they finally intersect, bringing Holly vulnerably into the same time and space as two pitiless murderers, is heart-stopping.

Stoughton

Holly is studded with references to very recent events in American public life, lending it the urgency of a newspaper or TV news bulletin. Racism in US policing, critiqued so powerfully by Black Lives Matter, is reported. So, too, is the Trump-inspired assault on the Capitol in Washington, DC in January 2021.

King is a vigorous critic of Trump on the social media platform X – here is a recent post that attests to that: “Donald Trump: Worst. President. Ever.” And in his new book, he has the impeccably anti-Republican Gibney as his proxy. Above all, Holly is suffused by thoughts of COVID-19. It joins novels such as Ali Smith’s Summer (2020) and Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends (2021) in the expanding corpus of pandemic fiction. Characters reveal their worth in King’s novel by their attitudes to the virus. If they are anti-vaxxers and express hostility to mask-wearing or elbow-bumping, they are catalogued by the text as morally lacking.

By contrast, Holly Gibney herself is scrupulous in observing protocols. The US private eye tradition includes any number of misanthropes and narcissists: think only of Mickey Spillane’s thuggish Mike Hammer in the decades following the Second World War. In creating Gibney, however, King has fashioned not only a resourceful investigator but a good, empathetic citizen.

This is a novel that should make new fans for King, as well as engage his existing readership. A perfect book to hunker down with this autumn.

Andrew Dix is a senior lecturer in American Literature and Film at Loughborough University.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

Holly, Stephen King, Hodder & Stoughton.