If you can put up with COVID preaching on every page, condemnations of Trump every 10 pages, and BLM slogans every 50, it’s an excellent book. I’m not being sarcastic. It is an excellent book.
There’s no paranormal here, thank goodness. The horror resides not in demons or spirits but in very human evil. Holly is not a whodunnit, either. Readers know from the start who the serial killers are and what motivates them. The interest lies in the personalities of the killers, of the victims, and of the private detective, a 55-year-old, mildly autistic, frumpy, chain-smoking COVID fanatic named Holly. Because of her autism, Holly works alone, and some readers have complained about having to read about a lonesome character. But Holly’s aloneness lets the author show us exactly how she thinks and how she arrives at her conclusions.
There’s a larger idea behind the novel, and it has to do with the different ways in which elderly people can make sense of their aging and relate to young people. King is getting older, and he’s putting his experiences with old age to good use. The novel is very tightly plotted, unputdownable, and so engaging that I even interrupted my new Cormoran Strike for it.
I’m glad I rediscovered King many years after abandoning him over the intense boredom of his 1990s doorstop Needful Things. My eyes still glaze over when I remember it. But the writer clearly came back since then.
I very much recommend Holly but be warned, it’s COVID-nuts.
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