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[Book Review] Stephen King Snipes Our Heart With ‘Billy Summers’

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Billy Summers tv series

Stephen King respects pulp. Scroll through his Twitter feed long enough, and you’ll see that the best-selling author lives for hard-boiled stories centered around characters with guns in their hands, heat in their hearts, and principles on their mind. Bosch, The Good Fight, Big Sky, Designated Survivor, Chance, the list goes on. Hell, one cursory glance at his own eclectic catalogue proves that he’s spent the last decade less concerned with what’s under the bed and more intrigued by what’s behind the yellow tape. Holly Gibney ring a bell?

But if there’s anything King loves more than a good pulpy story, it’s sitting down and writing a better one himself. Granted, at 73, the Master of Horror is far removed from his salad years of peppering smutty magazines with pulpy parables, but like the best protagonists in this chewy genre, there are some muscles he’ll never stop flexing. Even more to that point, there are some muscles he’s come to sharpen and refine over the years, particularly as his own sensibilities evolve. His latest novel, Billy Summers, is a testament to these truths.

On the surface, the 500-page thriller captures the last gig for the titular assassin, a decorated Iraq war veteran who is hired to take out the trash (and only the trash, mind you). As with any swan song, there are myriad wrinkles and peculiarities to the job, all of which keep Billy (and, by proxy, us Constant Readers) sweating. What grounds him, though, is his cover: Billy is a struggling writer working out the kinks of his debut novel in a commercial office space that also provides a choice vantage point for his hit. Simple enough.

Yet what feels like an easy King conceit — hey, the man loves dreaming up fictional writers — winds up giving the novel its curious depth. Because really, the hit becomes secondary to the pathos that King mines from Billy’s time behind the computer. Not so much the story within the story, but the feelings and emotions elicited from the act of writing itself. It’s in these passages that King snipes our hearts, namely because he’s writing from his own. Without spoiling much, there’s a confessional tone here that suggests King is wrestling with the immortal currency of his own written word — and it’s a palpable feeling, to say the least.

Rest assured, that’s not to say the action takes backseat. Hardly. If anything, this may be King’s most actionable novel in the last decade. When he’s not running and gunning with bullets and brawn, he’s delectably building out his world — even when he’s exploring familiar locales. (Hint, hint, Constant Readers.) Again, it’s all muscle memory to him, which is why Billy Summers reads like a sum of all his strengths. Who we meet, where we go, and how we get there is all vintage King through and through. Sure, some of it’s cheesy, some of it even on-the-nose, but none of it ever comes across like a cover for him.

If anything, Billy Summers feels like a bookend. To horror. To thrillers. To even his past pseudonym Richard Bachman. Put it this way, the story could have easily pivoted down any one of those roads. Instead, King weaves them together into a greatest hits collection that works by its lonesome. It’s a brazen mix that’s emblematic of the multi-faceted nature of King’s Dominion, a world of worlds that has made us laugh, cry, and cower to varying degrees. Those feelings are no doubt shared by King — at least if we’re to take this novel’s sentiments to heart (and we should) — which is why he’ll never stop refining the pulp.

And why we’ll keep living in it.

Billy Summers is available for pre-order and releases on August 2. Follow The Losers’ Club: A Stephen King Podcast via the Bloody Disgusting Podcast Network to keep tabs on all things King through epic book breakdowns, chummy interviews, and newsy recaps.

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‘The Angel of Indian Lake’ Book Review – Stephen Graham Jones Wraps Horror Lit’s Greatest Slasher Trilogy

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Angel of Indian Lake Slasher novel

With The Angel of Indian Lake, author Stephen Graham Jones tackles one of the most daunting tasks in horror: bringing a trilogy to a satisfying close. Making it even more challenging is that the final entry in Jones’ slasher trilogy endcaps two perfect entries in horror lit, with 2021’s My Heart is a Chainsaw recontextualizing the slasher formula and last year’s Don’t Fear the Reaper appropriately escalating the lore and carnage in a way that only an uber-slasher fan like Jones could.

It’s been four years since Jade Daniels stepped foot in Proofrock, Idaho. After saving the town once again and thwarting another deranged killer, Jade took the fall for her best friend and final girl, Letha. She already has a track record, after all, and Letha’s a family woman. Through Letha, Jade winds up in a place she least expected: teaching high school under the judging eyes of Proofrockers, who still blame Jade for not one but two waves of catastrophic slaughter. It doesn’t help that Jade’s return to town heralds a new reign of terror that threatens to destroy Proofrock for good. Between long-running grudges, serial killer cultists, mysterious disappearances, another wave of bizarre deaths, and that pesky Lake Witch, Jade’s return to Proofrock becomes a final stand for the town’s soul.

When the trilogy began, Jade was a troubled, lonely teen who clung to slashers like a life raft. She wore her encyclopedic knowledge of them like armor. But surviving two slashers herself, followed by two separate stints in prison and the stigma that followed, Jade returns to town a woman still navigating past traumas while trying to outgrow her adolescent defense mechanisms. But this is Proofrock, and that horror knowledge quickly proves to be necessary when one of her students goes missing, and the bodies start piling up from there. It helps that Jade’s best friend Letha won’t let her forget her horror roots or that she’s given Jade something to live for, especially where Letha’s daughter and final-girl-in-the-making Adie is concerned. While Jones’ extensive love of horror infuses every page, his heroine takes a bit to reacclimate, especially thanks to the horror she’s missed while serving time. 

The previous two novels have packed in quite a bit of supernatural and reality-based slasher terror and presented a robust suspect list from the outset. Moreover, two novels deep into Proofrock’s history and present means a lot of loose ends to tie up when it comes to its characters. Jones finds ways to deepen character arcs and flesh out Proofrock’s denizens further through nonstop horror action. Here, the red herrings can be as deadly and unhinged as the actual killer. Rampaging bears, forest fires, and supernatural happenings intercut the slasher carnage, and Jones finds creative ways to carve up an even bigger body count than before, complete with narrative twists and breezy, dialectical prose. It’s nonstop horror. Fans of the previous entries will know that’s saying a lot. Taboos get broken straightaway, and Jones continues his streak of killing his darlings; many of the deaths in this novel are devastating.

It’s impressive how Jones wields the horror as connective tissue, juggling so much Proofrock history and horror at once. But it pales in comparison to his final girl, Jade. Letha remains a force of nature, even more so considering her personal stakes here, but it’s Jade’s story. Now three novels deep, Jade has always struggled to see herself as a final girl. It’s a title she’s eager to bestow on women she deems worthy or more fitting of the archetypical role. As savvy and resilient as she is, Proofrock always had a way of blinding Jade to her own potential. The selfless way she’s saved the town over and over while taking all of the bodily damage and blowback with none of the credit is of course inherent to the final girls Jade loves so much. 

The Angel of Indian Lake’s greatest triumph isn’t its satisfying slasher mayhem but the way it proves that Jade was right all along. She’s a scrappy survivor, which by definition puts her in that coveted category of final girls. But she’s so much more than that. Jones closes the loop on so many facets of Proofrock and its characters, evolving Jade’s penchant to crown those she deems worthy of final girl status, reshaping the concept of a final girl in the process. Jade is more than just a final girl. She’s a symbolic mother of final girls, putting her life and body on the line to support others, arming them with the strength and knowledge to unleash their inner final girls. Proofrock has seen a copious amount of bloodshed over three novels, but thanks to Jade, an unprecedented number of final girls have risen to fight back in various ways. The way that The Angel of Indian Lake closes that loop is masterful, solidifying Jade Daniels’ poignant, profound legacy in the slasher realm.

Through Jade, Stephen Graham Jones delivers horror lit’s greatest slasher trilogy of all time.

The Angel of Indian Lake publishes on March 26, 2024.

4.5 out of 5 skulls

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