DNF @58 pages.
The COVID pandemic is front and center in this - it’s all vaccines, masks, testing, trump etc and I don’t understand what it’s got to do with story at all - I think the author is just wanting to have his say on antivaxxers etc and I could not care less

Not one of SKs best for sure. This seemed forced. All of his worst writing traits were here. Cutesy dialogue, progressive speak in characters, and an overwritten build up. The finale was good but it went quickly and the ending I don't quite remember. There was no depth in this. which is sad because Billy Summers was so good. ( )

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 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. ( )

This was a grisly one even by Mr King’s standards. But I love Holly and this was definitely her book! ( )

'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 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 ( )