Like all good King protagonists, he fills his time with writing his life story. Tasked with a hit on a small-time crook, he relocates to a provincial city in an unspecified southern state where, due to the machinations of plot, he must live a double life in the local community while waiting for his shot. Billy is an ex-army sniper turned killer-for-hire who, conveniently for the purposes of readerly sympathy, only kills “bad men”. It meanders, it pays only the scantest regard to the rules of narrative structure, it indulges gladly in both casual stereotyping and naked political point-scoring. Instead, he is in full noir mode, with a modest tale of an assassin on the requisite one-last-job-before-he’s-out.
Yet in his latest novel, Billy Summers, there are no supernatural shades whatsoever (save a late Easter egg reference to a certain haunted hotel). It’s unavoidable now he is responsible for too many of the fantastical nightmares that prowl popular culture.
N o matter what he writes, Stephen King will always be considered a horror novelist.
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