BILLY SUMMERS by Stephen King, reviewed by Celia Rees

 

"From the very first page a brooding sense of foreboding underlies the whole story like a constant drumbeat..."

Celia Rees is a leading writer for young adults with an international reputation. Her titles include Witch Child (shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize), Sorceress (shortlisted for the Whitbread - now Costa - Children's Book Award), Pirates!, Sovay and Glass Town Wars. The chance discovery of an old family cookery book has now taken her writing in a new and different direction. In 2020 her first novel for adults, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook, was published by Harper Collins, and is now in paperback as Miss Graham's War.

Twitter: @CeliaRees Instagram: @celiarees1

Billy Summers is a good man doing a bad job. That is not to say he's doing a job badly - he's superb at it - the best in the business - it's just that his job is to kill people. He's a hired gun, a professional killer, the old fashioned word for it is 'assassin'. A brilliant sniper with ice cold nerves, he learnt his trade in Iraq.  A master of disguise, his  planning is meticulous. He has all the angles covered and gets away, clean and free, time after time. 

He's choosy about the jobs he takes, as a salve to his conscious he only kills really bad people, but his chosen area of work brings him into contact with very bad people indeed. The guys who hire him are likely to be worse than his targets, but that doesn't bother Billy. He has that covered as well. Or thinks he does, until it comes to one last job. 

Billy is not in it just for the money. His motivation is more complex. He approaches each kill like a game of multidimensional chess and takes satisfaction from a job well done and the salty excitement of getting away with it. He has a deeper reason: his targets have done terrible things but will evade any kind of punishment, unless Billy dishes it out to them. So he can be seen was some kind of exterminating angel, in his eyes, anyway.

But Billy's not getting any younger and he's tired of living on nerves and adrenalin this one last hit will provide him with more than enough to be home and free. He wants a shot at normal life, of happiness and King offers a glimpse of what that might be, but Billy has a bad feeling about this assignment right from the start, a creeping feeling that the luck that has held for so long is about to run out. He has always relied on sixth sense and intuition but now he brushes that aside to get this one last job done. In a Stephen King novel this is NEVER a good thing to do... 

Billy Summers has few traces of the supernatural, apart from a fleeting nod to The Shining, but from the very first page a brooding sense of foreboding underlies the whole story like a constant drumbeat, growing in intensity as the novel progresses and things, indeed, start to go wrong. 

Stephen King is a master story teller. He builds tension like nobody else can. He is brilliantly good at inviting and trapping the reader's sympathy for his flawed and faceted characters which, of course, ramps up the tension even more. When he's not doing that, he is giving the reader quick snapshots of modern America. He has written a great many books across many different genre but there is a consistency in his writing, he knows exactly what he is doing and in line with his other titles, Billy Summers is a very good read. 

Billy Summers is published by Hodder and Stoughton.

Celia's Miss Graham's War is published by Harper Collins.