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Review: ‘Billy Summers’
by Stephen King
By Jeff Strickler
Star Tribune
L
ike Stephen King’s other
books, “Billy Summers” is full
of monsters. But they’re not the
paranormal type usually asso-
ciated with the horrormeister.
These monsters are murderers,
mobsters, rapists and thieves
— in short, wrongdoers of every
stripe.
Take the title character. Billy is
a hit man who has been sum-
moned to a small Southern town
by a mob boss, Nick, with a job
off er. The target is Joel Allen,
a former mob henchman who
has been arrested on multiple
charges. The mob is worried that
he’ll try to trade his inside infor-
mation about their organization
for a lighter sentence.
It’s a tricky assignment. Allen
is in protective custody, so the
only access Billy will have to him
is when he’s led up the steps of
the courthouse for his arraign-
ment. But Allen’s bulldog of a
‘BILLY SUMMERS’
By Stephen King
Published by Scribner
528 pages, $30
lawyer is throwing one wrench
after another into the legal pro-
cess, making it impossible to tell
if Billy is going to have to wait a
few days, weeks or even months
to get his shot.
In a small town, there’s no way
a stranger can lurk around the
courthouse without raising curi-
osity. Billy’s best approach is to
become one of the townspeople
and blend in to the point where
— he hopes — he’s no longer
noticed.
His cover story is a handy one
for himself and King. He claims
to be an author struggling to
concentrate on his novel. With
his deadline approaching, his
agent has told him to hole up in
the small town until his manu-
script is fi nished. So he takes an
offi ce in a building that overlooks
the courthouse.
This works for Billy because it
explains why he needs to remain
secluded in privacy. When he
gets bored playing games on his
computer, he actually does start
to write a book. And this part
works for King because it gives
him a chance to brood over the
nature of creativity — “writing is
a kind of war, one you fi ght with
yourself” — while also providing
the venue for a novel within a
novel.
Adding to Billy’s stress is his
growing distrust of Nick. With
the bulk of his fee coming after
he makes the hit, Billy is certain
that Nick wouldn’t hesitate to
betray him to avoid having to
make the payment. “Sooner or
later, bad people do bad things,”
Billy reasons.
Ironically, he never applies
that logic to himself. That’s
because he doesn’t think he’s a
bad person. On the contrary, he
thinks he’s providing a valuable
service to society by eliminat-
ing people who deserve to be
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eliminated. “He basically sees
himself as a garbage man with a
gun,” is how King describes him.
Which puts the reader in a deli-
cate position. King does such a
good job of getting us to bond
with Billy that we fi nd ourselves
hoping for a successful assas-
sination.
King also deserves applause
for resisting the urge to pan-
der to readers’ short attention
spans. Thanks in large part to
Hollywood, thriller fans these
days expect something — or
someone — to be blown up as
soon as the story starts. But
King falls back on traditional
pacing, taking time to defi ne
the characters and establish
the situation before launching
the action.
We’re 150 pages into the
novel, and Billy still hasn’t even
set eyes on Allen. But don’t
worry; there are still more than
300 pages to go, and King has
plenty of mayhem on his mind.
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