Holly

I've read most of King's books and, while much of his early and middle works are scary and entertaining, I find his more recent work much more satisfying. Part of this is personal preference - I enjoy mysteries and thrillers more than pure horror - but it's also that he's embraced his ability to build characters and frame his plots around those characters rather than twisting the characters to fit the plot. The difference in this integration is particularly evident if you compare a book like Insomnia to one like Holly. Insomnia is a masterful piece of character-driven storytelling. The horror elements, though, are forced. The story would actually be better without them. But in Holly, the horror element takes its shape from the show more characters. It's still coherent with King's evolution of Lovecraftian horror, but it fits better in the story. In many ways, that makes it more frightening because it's more believable.

The antagonists in Holly are truly disturbing and strangely familiar - not so much in what they do (which is no crazier than the actions of real-life serial killers), but in the way they think, which is merely an extension of a lot of the rhetoric we all get to hear these days.

I've seen complaints about King's "political agenda" in Holly. King makes no secret of his political and social views, as anyone with access to the platform formerly known as Twitter knows. More importantly, though, nothing he writes here is imposed on the story. If anything, he's reporting the conditions during the pandemic as they were. In an era when wearing a mask was (still is?) seen as a political statement, everyday public interactions inevitably touched on political topics. And frankly, King portrays characters on the other side of the political spectrum with remarkable kindness. The bad guys, of course, are the extreme logical extension of certain current political beliefs, and are not likeable at all, but even there, King shows them as people who can be both loving and cruel, not one-dimensional comic book villains.

Holly herself is the best part of the book, of course. I've complained in the past about King's ability to write women, but here he's created a really believable female protagonist who is rounded and whole and imperfect and deeply appealing. Perhaps I'm partial to Holly because the damage she must navigate to live is familiar, perhaps because that damage manifests in ways similar to the experience of being on the spectrum. I don't know if KIng meant to write an autistic character, but he succeeded. It's nice to see a character like this who isn't presented as being too disabled to function in the world, but whose difficulties are not downplayed.

Like most of King's work, Holly is the sort of book you shouldn't pick up unless you have a lot of time in the next day or two. When the audiobook came up in my Libby queue, I set aside my current reading to start it, thinking I'd dip in and out over the next week. That was less than twenty-four hours ago. I've had next to no sleep. I bought the physical book this morning so I could read it during my down time and listen to the audiobook from the library while I drove and did chores. It's not even noon of the second day and I've finished. I've no regrets about buying the book, though, as I will have to reread it more carefully. This reading was a gulp, lol. show less

Right, this is my final final final notice: I am definitely done with Stephen King. He went off the boil a long time ago - a lot like the crazy old oxygen thieves in this story - and his attempts to write about current events and relatable characters are laughable. I even borrowed rather than bought a copy, knowing full well I would be wasting my money, and boy, were my (low) expectations met.

First off, I don't care about 'soapboxing' in fiction when the ranting is relevant, but nothing dates a novel like Covid and Donald Trump (apart from maybe Minidisc players and iPods) - nobody cares or wants to read about the Lost Years now, and all the elbow bumping and 'are you vaxxed?' reverse nostalgia was even more cringeworthy than King's show more obsession with the 1950s.

Secondly, both the eponymous Holly and the undead oldies eating the neighbours were deeply fucking annoying. Holly with her 'poopy' aversion to swearing - just say the F-word, you'll feel better - and her weird exclamation of 'oough' grated on my nerves even before she started in with her warped health issues. She wishes someone dead at one point because they don't have Covid, which killed her mother - and that was actually a blessing in disguise - but then this throwaway line really pissed me off: 'Hearing of a non-smoker who's died of lung cancer always makes Holly feel a little better about her own [chain-smoking] habit.' Yes, that does make you a shitty person, Holly. I discovered after I started reading that there are two or three other books in the series, but I will not be filling in the gaps in this lifetime.

Lastly, the plot is ridiculous. I can understand the plot bunnies that King cobbled together to form the story but the execution - pardon the pun - requires more suspension of disbelief than I am apparently capable of. I would have welcomed a scene where they followed the 'process' through to the end, because I cannot believe it's that easy to dismember and dispose of a human body. 'Feed 'em through the woodchipper' is a lazy cop out. Also, why should we believe that the crazy old pair want to live forever - because they're college professors? Because they wuv each other? Anyone decaying at that rate absolutely should shuffle off the mortal coil. And did King really have an English professor misquote Hamlet for the yucks?

Finally - does King have grandchildren, or even great grandchildren? Because kids haven't behaved or talked like that since the 90s at the latest. Even the fact that Barbara is called Barbara in 2021 is bad enough. Stop now, old man, you're embarrassing yourself. show less

Holly Gibney, the obsessive-compulsive, shy and reclusive character we first met in Stephen King’s Finders Keepers trilogy has come a long way since those early days, and now she is the protagonist of a novel focused solely on her: she has inherited the investigative agency Finders Keepers from Bill Hodges, who befriended her and started her on her journey of self-reliance, she is moderately successful in her chosen career and has made a few friends who support and understand her quirky personality.

As the novel starts, she is attending her mother’s funeral via Zoom: it’s 2021 and the height of the Covid pandemic, which would be a good reason for the agency to scale down its activities, but when Holly receives the impassioned show more request of Penny Dahl, whose daughter disappeared after leaving a cryptic message on her bike, she decides to investigate - if nothing else, to avoid dealing with the discovery that her overbearing mother and uncle had concocted a sort of financial fraud to try and keep her under their thumbs and deny her the new-found independence she’s come to appreciate.

As Holly starts her investigation she finds out that Bonnie Dahl is not the only person who disappeared in mysterious circumstances and that there might be a serial killer on the prowl: in this respect, King does not keep his readers in the dark for long because he reveals early on the identity of the killer - or better, killers - focusing rather on Holly’s search for clues and on her slow but constant reach for the truth, which in this case is totally devoid of supernatural elements, but instead sheds light on the horrors that twisted human nature can visit on others. King is not new to this more… mundane approach to horror, and in this case injects it with an added layer of dread thanks to the dichotomy represented by the outward appearance of the two aged professors-turned-killers on one side, and their twisted, appalling motivation for kidnapping and murdering those hapless victims on the other - a bone-chilling folie à deux carried on with gleeful casualness.

From my point of view, Holly turned out to be a story of two halves: on one side the narrative and character exploration half that worked quite well, and on the other what I labeled as the “King’s Manifesto” portion, which did not turn out quite as great. Holly’s journey toward independence and self-assertiveness continues here showing us that she keeps becoming her own person with every passing day: of course the shadow of her mother still peeks from the sidelines now and then, but Holly succumbs less and less to her smothering influence. Of course a big help comes from the discovery that she’s been lied to for a long time about the family’s financial situation, in an attempt to lure her back into the fold: the anger that comes on the heels of this revelation feels like a healthy reaction, and I liked to see how Holly manages to process it all on her own, since this time she is removed from her usual support group, given that both Robinson siblings are very wrapped up in their own affairs and her partner Pete is in isolation because of Covid.

Granted, her insecurities are still there under the surface, and they are expressed in some of her obsessive-compulsive habits, including the chain smoking that made me cringe every time she lighted a cigarette, but it’s encouraging to see her so at ease in her investigative work, so determined to get to the bottom of the mystery that looks even deeper and more gruesome than what she initially thought. Even in her most harrowing, most desperate moments, when it looks that she might become a victim herself, Holly keeps hold of some inner core of strength - and gallows humor - that shows she is not the timid, mouse-like creature that Bill Hodges encountered a few years back, not anymore. And it’s a very encouraging discovery, one that might hopefully lead to more stories about her.

Sadly, the novel’s background did not work for me as well as the personal journeys, mainly because I don’t enjoy any reminders of the Covid times: we all endured those days and that memory is still too fresh for it not to become bothersome - I believe we need some distance, some perspective, before we are able to look at those times with a modicum of equanimity. And then there is what I call the “King’s Manifesto”: we can all agree that the Covid epidemic, like many worldwide occurrences, brought to the fore the best and the worst of humanity, and that it exasperated the polarized stances that have become endemic in our present society. Portraying those opposite attitudes as part of the story’s background did certainly add the necessary depth to the main narrative, but in my opinion it would have worked better if the author had done so with a few, well-placed brush strokes: he decided instead to throw whole bucketfuls of paint to the canvas, so to speak, and did it repeatedly, as if in doubt of his audience’s power of understanding, and that proved quite annoying in the long run, and distracting, while all I wanted was to focus on Holly’s investigation and her search for justice for the victims.

Maybe Stephen King badly needed to vent and took the opportunity to do so here, but I hope that he’s done with the preaching (which never works in favor of good stories…) and will revert back to the bone-chilling storytelling he’s better known for. show less

'Holly' is the Stephen King book I didn't know I'd been waiting for. It has all the things I love about King's writing but with no supernatural elements. 'Holly' stands or falls by the quality of its writing, its plot and its characters and it's a roaring success.

It's a longish book (438 pages / 15 hours 24 minutes) that never drags and which kept me engaged to the last page.

'Holly' is a gripping story about how Holly, a recurring Stephen King character who runs the Finders Keepers Private Investigation company, takes a case that results in her slowly uncovering the evil wrought by a pair of serial killers who have managed to kill people secretly and with impunity for years.

I loved the way Stephen King placed evil at the centre of the show more story without having to rely on anything supernatural. In previous books ('The Outsider' and 'If It Bleeds') Holly has gone up against supernaturals whose success as predators depended partly on the fact that most people were unwilling to accept the possibility of their existence. This time the evil she's up against is entirely human in origin but still owes part of its success to people's inability to imagine that a couple of retired college professors might be killers.

I liked the book never glorifies the serial killers and never turns the investigation into a game played between the killers and the detective. Instead, he makes sure that we feel the full impact of the evil being committed. He shows us the victims both through the eyes of those whom they've left behind and by showing how they react to the terrible circumstance that they've been placed in. One victim's response is so brave and so dignified that it was both wonderful and heartbreaking to read. These killings have consequences: the grief and uncertainty of the bereft and the waste of the lives cut short.

Although the book isn't, strictly speaking, a horror story, I could feel my dread growing with each page. It wasn't because the baddies were bad (although they were irredeemable narcissistic entitlement made flesh) but because I was becoming increasingly invested in Holly and Barbara, both of whom seemed to be at risk. I knew that watching even one of them falling prey to the killers would be hard to take, even if they survived.

I was grateful that 'Holly' was relatively low on action because the action when it came was intense, brutal and memorable. I couldn't taken a lot of that.

Fortunately, a lot of the book was taken up with Holly's interviews with people as part of her investigation and with her discovery that her recently deceased mother had deceived her. I liked watching Holly work things out and I loved seeing her grow in confidence as she takes on her first major solo case. I enjoyed how Holly's interviews turned into brief character sketches of a variety of people, some nice, some terrible but all credible. It was an extra bonus that, as she was carrying out these interviews during COVID, part of the character sketch was achieved by the interviewee's opinions on whether mask-wearing made sense and whether COVID was a hoax.

One of my favourite threads in the book was watching eighteen-year-old Barbara's blossoming relationship with a nonagenarian poet who became her mentor. I loved their discussions on poetry and on their motivations for writing and what writing actually does and how it feels when you know that you've written a line that really works. I could have read those pieces as free-standing text and still enjoyed them. That Stephen King managed to use them to move the plot forward and to increase the sense of threat that I felt on Barbara's behalf is a sign of his skill as a storyteller.

Ageing is an important theme in this book. I loved the way Stephen King showed the empty vanity of struggling not to age and the dignity of accepting but not bowing to it.

I recommend the audiobook version of 'Holly'. Justine Lupe's narration is excellent. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

https://soundcloud.com/simonschuster/holly-audiobook-excerpt-2 show less

Holly is the latest novel by Stephen King, and it follows one of my favorite characters from his Mr. Mercedes series. I will also say it is probably one of his darkest stories in recent years because there is nothing otherworldly about it. In Holly, the villains are human, albeit despicable, vile ones.

One of the things I loved about Holly is the fact that while Holly Gibney is the hero, and she is a recurring character, you could consider it to be a standalone novel. While there are references to the goings-on of the Mr. Mercedes series and the other two novels that make up the Holly Gibney series, it has nothing to do with what is happening in this story. In other words, you don't miss anything by not understanding those references.

I show more was not prepared for Holly to be as gruesome as it was. There is one particular scene that nauseated me, and I usually have an iron stomach when it comes to disgusting scenes. The odd thing is that it isn't a particularly bloody scene either. It's just that Mr. King does an excellent job describing in detail exactly what the character is experiencing, and it is anything but pleasant.

Holly takes place during the pandemic, just after the world started opening back up and people were questioning whether we should continue masking or not. It still feels surreal to read stories set during 2020 - 2021 because it was such a weird time. However, it is a comfort to recognize that the characters also feel odd about the entire situation - much like we all did then.

For the audiobook, Simon & Schuster Audio and Stephen King opted to have Justine Lupe narrate Holly. Since she is the actress who played Holly Gibney in the Mr. Mercedes television series, it is the perfect choice. While not everyone can make the transition to audio narration, Ms. Lupe has no such issues. She brings to her performance the same anxiety and self-doubt that are Holly's biggest faults. In many ways, Ms. Lupe's performance is a welcome homecoming to such a lovable character. show less

Holly Gibney and her associates are on the case when a young woman goes missing and her mother is desperate to find her. As they investigate, it appears that this is not a solitary disappearance but a case of many different types of people suddenly vanishing. Is it possible they have uncovered a serial killer at work?

Stephen King may have created his creepiest villains yet, on par with Annie Wilkes, by virtue of being unfortunately all too possibly real. And, by being folks that most people would consider 'harmless,' they really prey on people's kindness before betraying them with horrific torture and violence. Although some readers did not seem to like this, I enjoyed the book bouncing around in time so that we the readers saw what the show more killers were up to long before Holly and her pals started connecting the dots.

A lot of the book takes place shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic hit worldwide, so there's lots in here about masking, vaccinating, getting ill, dealing with grief, etc. It's handled well (as long as you agree with King's politics; if not, well, you probably gave up on reading him a while ago anyway), but it felt all too real. That's not a bad thing per se, just a warning that this book won't take you out of present concerns very much.

The audiobook version is read by Justine Lupe, who is just fine. I guess with a female protagonist, the powers that be felt it was necessary to have a female narrator. However, every other time that Holly was featured in a Stephen King work, Will Patton was the audiobook narrator and not having him now felt wrong -- like when a TV show recasts an actor mid-series and we're all just supposed to pretend the character always looked and sounded like this.

Overall, I'm glad to have another installment of Holly's adventures and hope that King will find other worthy cases for her to investigate in the future. show less

I may be off on the count, but I believe this is my 89th King book and—as I very much feared once I heard the title months ago—it falls firmly into that broad swath of "middle" books.

It can't touch his best—those first dozen, plus a smattering of others—but it's nowhere near as bad as his worst—Tommyknockers, The Eyes of the Dragon, Sleeping Beauties, The Institute, Fairy Tale anyone?

King does an awful lot of meandering setup in the first half of this novel that, shockingly, is quite boring. I've read a lot of King stuff I wasn't overly fond of, but I've rarely found him boring. Sadly, this novel and the one that preceded it committed that sin, which bothers me a lot.

And while I've never been as enamoured of Holly Gibney as show more King has been, I didn't mind her quirky character. She was interesting.

Unfortunately, this book seems to jettison much of what made Holly so much fun and made her seem...is average the right word? I'm not sure, but I didn't find her as quirky or as interesting. Maybe, much like when Thomas Harris had Hannibal Lecter as a side character, he was fascinating, but as soon as the spotlight was turned fully on Lecter, I lost all interest in Harris's subsequent novels. It could be the same thing is happening here...too much Holly.

But it's more than that. King used to be able to create wonderfully real characters that you loved and cared for and then also create a menacing, terrifying opposition that would just keep coming and coming, filling me, as a reader, with dread.

Now, King creates rather cozy characters who, while they still suffer—in this case, Holly's feeling the triple whammy of covid, the death of her mother, and the realization that she'd been lied to for years—but these are such common things that they don't carry much weight. We've all suffered the death of a family member. The entire world experienced covid. We've all been lied to and betrayed. So, this stuff? It's cozy, not soul crushing. At least, not in the manner that King delivers it in this novel.

And the menacing opposition? Somewhat toothless, to my mind. Yes, this is very much a cat and mouse story, but King makes a couple of decisions with the story—that I will not spoil—that immediately lower the stakes and take away that common, yet oh-so-effective plot device, the ticking clock.

He also makes the odd decision to hide much of the inherent horror in his story until the very end, where it's fed to the reader (pardon the pun...which you'll get once you read the novel) in a series of info dumps during wrap up.

Overall, I feel like, in the hands of a Joe R. Lansdale, or an S.A. Cosby, this book would have been structured far different, and the heat would have turned up a lot higher. Instead, what we got was lukewarm leftovers out of the microwave instead of the sizzling steak, grilled to perfection that we're used to with King.

I love Stephen King's writing a lot, however—and it pains me to say this—he's not the spellbinding, dangerous writer he used to be. He has his flashes of brilliance still, and when he does, I rejoice in those novels, but overall, where I used to be absolutely pumped to hear of a new release, now it's often met with, god, I hope it's better than the last one.

And that sucks. show less