Only King gets away with clichés
Most writers, if they can produce novels as meatily ambitious and emotionally involving as some of Stephen King's recent tomes (The Outsider, The Institute) would feel the need to give their brains and fingers a rest for a decade or so. But King relaxes in the short breaks between masterpieces by writing terse, pawky crime novels, homages to — or pastiches of — the hard-boiled school.
His latest novel — it's something like his 63rd — reads like an attempt to marry his two late styles: It's a thriller that has designs on readers' heartstrings, as well as their adrenal glands.
Billy Summers, formerly a Marine and trained sniper, is now an assassin, but one who accepts the commission only if the target is an evil person — in common with nearly every other fictional assassin you come across in our touchy-feely times. Ready for retirement at 44, he agrees to take on one lucrative last job, and pre-empts the reader by acknowledging the cliché: “`One last job' is a subgenre. In those movies the last job always goes bad.” And so it proves.
The pleasure stems from watching King work his magic on shopworn material and upcycle it into something both attractive and idiosyncratic — as he did in the great horror novels of his early career. He uses his plot as the springboard for a presentation of his philosophy of life. Suspense is secondary.
The slightly implausible setup of Billy's final job involves him pretending to be a novelist and hiring an office in a nondescript town while he plots his kill. A failed writer, he decides to spend much of his time producing a book — his memoir.
If the novel's first half resembles The Day of the Jackal, the second is more of a conventional revenge thriller as Billy realizes his client has tried to doublecross him. But although there's violence aplenty, what's more memorable is Billy's determination to redeem himself by becoming a decent man.
As we read, we believe wholeheartedly in the truth of King 's sentimental lessons, for the same reason we believe in his unlikely plot and stock characters: his storytelling genius.