Revenge and betrayal

Billy Summers

by Stephen King

Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Billy Summers is an Iraq war veteran with enough trauma in his past to create PTSD in ten people. If you have problems reading about violence in general, violence against children and young women, or murder, then this is not the book for you.

Since it’s a Stephen King book, you’d expect it to be full of supernatural horror, but you’d be wrong. There is a nice reference to the Overlook Hotel (of The Shining) but it’s there as a gimme to the fans, or Constant Readers as King has been known to call them (us). Otherwise, there isn’t one supernatural moment in the book.  Mr. King can do a straight-up thriller as well as anybody, thank you.

 Billy Summers is a novel about escaping one’s past and about living up to your own and others’ expectations.

After three tours in the sand, Billy is pretty sure that the only thing he’s good at is killing. His post-deployment profession is hired assassin. He got his Sniper badge in the Marines, oorah. He can put a man down at 1,200 yards or more, disappear like Houdini, and use one of his carefully-crafted identities to blend in with the rest of the world.

One of the most overused tropes in thriller-style fiction is “one last job.” Whether the “job” is a bank robbery, a grift, or a sniper attack, countless heroes and anti-heroes have said they’re coming clean after this one last time. King is up-front about the trope, even acknowledging it in the text.

“He’s thinking of all the movies he’s seen about robbers who are planning one last job. If noir is a genre, then “one last job” is a sub-genre. In those movies, the last job always goes bad.”

 This last job is a doozy. It requires Billy to embed himself in a redneck burg for months.

"You get along with people without buddying up to them. They smile when they see you coming. … Hoff tells me that a couple of food wagons stop at that building every day, and in nice weather people line up and sit outside on the benches to eat their lunches. You could be one of those people.”

Part of his cover story is that he is writing a book. So Billy, a man of a dozen identities, moves to Red Bluff in an unspecified Southern state to become a writer. He gets to know his neighbors at work and at home and feels terrible for lying to them about who he is. The assassination he’s contracted for happens seamlessly less than a third of the way through the novel. Billy does his Houdini act and this is starting to look like a short book.

Meanwhile, Billy discovers that he likes writing. Through the device of a book-within-the-book, we learn about Billy’s traumatic past. We follow him into the city streets of Fallujah, where he lost most of his unit in one raid. While he’s hiding out post-assassination, another person enters the story. This is what takes Billy Summers from a good book to a great book. Billy encounters a local woman in dire circumstances. The rest of the novel centers on exacting revenge for several betrayals.

I recommend Billy Summers to anyone who likes thrillers.