Billy Summers (Stephen King)

Billy Summers
Stephen King
Simon and Schuster
Fiction, Crime/Thriller
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: The war in Iraq may have trained Billy Summers to be a sniper, but he was a killer long before then, ever since one of his mother's string of loser boyfriends murdered his kid sister in front of him. After the war, it seemed only natural that he'd fall into life as an assassin, one of the best in the business. He told himself that it's not so different from what he did in the war, that the people he kills are bad themselves, but there's only so long he can repeat that and believe it. After this last hit, he's decided it's time to hang up his gun for good. Perhaps that's why he didn't ask the questions he should have asked: why this job needs such an extensive setup, months embedding himself in a small Southern town with an elaborate cover story about being an aspiring novelist under a tight deadline... or why the payout was so large for a target who, while no angel, hardly seemed to deserve the kind of attention he was getting. But something's sour about this whole deal, something that leaves him a fugitive from both the police and his former employers.
A man in Billy's position would be a fool to stick his neck out to help anyone, let alone the young woman dumped in the vacant lot one evening after a brutal attack. But he can't look away, not if he wants to believe that there's still a good person under all the bad he's done. Now, his quest for revenge and the money he's owed, as well as the truth about the hit he was hired for, carries the added complication of Alice, who could all too easily be pulled down by his bad life.

REVIEW: This is the first King title I've read without overt supernatural elements (aside from a few nods to his previous titles), but Billy Summers hardly needs demons or ghosts to live a haunted, cursed life. Scarred from a young age, every step he takes seems to carry him further from the normal, happy life other people appear to live, into a future where the best he can manage is to rationalize life as a hired gun by only taking hits on murderers or child rapists or other objectively terrible people. The cover story provided by his handler, that of a writer, taps into a latent dream of his own, and once he discovers the power of writing to relive (and rewrite) his past, he comes to understand what kind of life he might have had had he never had to pick up a gun to defend himself from the man who murdered his sister, or learned to snipe in a war zone. Even as he plans for his own escape from the dark side, though, he has to wonder if it's too late to ever be that other person or live that other life, and though not overtly superstitious, he keeps seeing signs of his own impending doom. Rescuing Alice marks a turning point, one (possibly last) chance to do the right thing. She repays that kindness by becoming the ally he didn't realize he needed - though, touched by her own trauma, she could too easily fall into the sort of life he himself is trying to escape from. Meanwhile, Billy can't seem to stop writing the story of how he became who he is, though even he isn't sure if it's the beginning of a new page or an epitaph. As usual, King delivers complex characters going through various levels of Hell, struggling and often failing yet unable to give up or walk away, even as tragedy seems all but certain. There are a few lulls and sidetracks, and one or two elements feel a little too coincidental, but it's always interesting, if often dark and sometimes brutal.

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