Lured from the brink of retirement by a hit job offering a half-million-dollar advance, with another million and a half on delivery, Billy enters familiar, ill-omened territory: “If noir is a genre,” he reflects ruefully, “then ‘one last job’ is a subgenre.”īy “public,” he means his employers, who have almost certainly cloned the laptop they’ve provided him with, and whom he increasingly suspects of plotting to kill him as soon as he has served his purpose. His tastes may be highbrow (and staunchly realist), but the story he finds himself caught up in is very much - and very explicitly - a genre piece. For much of the book, when he isn’t shooting people or writing about them, Billy is immersed in “Thérèse Raquin.” Among the authors name-checked in its spacious narrative are Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Faulkner, Tim O’Brien, Cormac McCarthy and Robert Stone, along with Billy’s own favorites, Thomas Hardy and Émile Zola.
They aren’t necessarily the ones you would expect - no mention of Poe or Lovecraft or Shirley Jackson (acknowledged influences) - but at some level “Billy Summers” is clearly the work of a writer in retrospective mood: taking stock, paying his dues. King’s fans will recognize the leafy animals from “The Shining,” and it turns out the cabin stands across the valley from the ruins of that novel’s infamous hotel, the Overlook, where, as the cabin’s owner tells Billy, “bad stuff happened.” It’s a nicely ironic piece of self-reference: Unlike that demon-haunted story about a writer-turned-killer, this tale of a killer-turned-writer is haunted only by books - King’s own, but a mass of others too. It doesn’t lead to anything: Shrugging off the pictorial shape-shifting, Billy turns the painting toward the wall of the cabin where he’s working on a memoir, and gets back to his blood-drenched memories of Falluja, where he served as a sniper in the Marines. The sole hint of supernatural activity in Stephen King’s new novel comes well over halfway through, when its protagonist, a hired killer and aspiring writer named Billy Summers, notices some weird goings-on in a painting of topiary animals.
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