Like so many of King’s protagonists, Billy Summers is a writer, or at least becomes one. He pretends to be stupid so he can outwit his mob employers, but he’s actually a sensitive, internally conflicted genius trying to get over his memories of Fallujah.
Summers was King’s last big novel, a crime caper put out in 2021 about a USMC veteran-turned-hitman who loves the work of French writer Emile Zola. Take Billy Summers, which I mentioned, as a case study of exactly this phenomenon of rinse and repeat. Like a convincing prosecutor, King draws readers into the reality of his usually writer protagonists, eventually bringing the reader around to inhabit these characters’ moral realities and identify with their desired outcomes. Here is an extended page-turner set in Maine, or a fantasy world or a crime story that confirms everything you already believed about how the world works but takes you on some twists and turns along the way!Įverybody enjoys going on an adventure where they already know they’ll end up back where they started by the end, only with even more evidence that they were right all along. It’s something that once-popular leftist authors like John Grisham also mastered: creating engaging plots around simplistic moral messages such as racism being bad, the death penalty being cruel, or great wealth leading to corruption. His writing consistently betrays the attitude and indoctrination of a simplistic, sneering, arrogant progressive underneath the outer layers of plot and theme. The hero is always misunderstood or internally conflicted, never truly irredeemable or disgusting.īy couching childish wish fulfillment and hate in crime, horror, fantasy, and the supernatural, King hit a sweet spot in the literary market and has kept tapping that same well year after year by providing high-fructose sociopolitical corn syrup for those who want to be told their worldviews and prejudices are all true. The bad guy is always a beer-belching macho man or a twisted killer, never a soft-spoken artist. The bully is always the intolerant religious creep, never the alternative hippie kid. This is voyeuristic pseudo-moralism that reinforces a progressive absolutism. The writing is insufferably self-righteous if you understand what King is actually doing in almost all his books, but that’s exactly his talent and why he became famous.
Alternately, they are young people struggling to understand the horrible injustice of the adult world. The vast majority of his protagonists are tortured writers or individuals who have to defeat the past ghosts or current demons of injustice and horror in some way.
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