Holly is Stephen King’s latest novel revolving around retired professors Emily and Rodney Harris, who live in one of a row of expensive Victorian houses and look normal, but actually have a cage in their basement and are serial-killing, racist cannibals. The victims are all different from each other, which spotlights the predator’s method of using a wheelchair to pretend despair and attracting their suspects, then sedating them with Valium. This is one of the several clues that brings them to Holly Gibney’s attention.
Holly Gibney, a private investigator, struggling with her mother’s recent death from COVID and with mixed feelings about becoming a sudden millionaire as a result, is tasked with the job of finding out who is killing all these individuals that seem to ‘disappear’ from the face of the earth. Holly is kind, conscientious, punctual to a fault, loyal and resourceful. She is put on the case by a missing girl’s over-emotional mother and so the novel unwinds back and forth in time, leading us through the lives, thoughts and feelings of all its characters. How the victims are targeted, caged and given raw liver to eat, and then slowly made to wait for death before they are killed by the professors, is described in striking detail by Stephen King – leading to a nuanced analysis of the thought process of the professors and their victims alike.
Stephen King seems to like poetry as do I, which made the book even more interesting for me: there is a poetry prize mentioned in the book which one of the character Barbara receives. Even the murderers are sprouting Shakespeare – the irony!
COVID seems to have impacted Stephen King’s thought process, as Holly is extremely diligent in wearing a mask, and scrupulous in using hand sanitizers every time she steps into public space. There is a whole narrative questioning whether people should be vaccinated or not – and Stephen King, being logical, clearly sides with those who vaccinate. There is mention of the COVID death toll and hospital wards overflowing and with patients. Holly’s own mother didn’t get the shot and died an untimely death and her partner at the detective agency Finders Keepers has COVID throughout the case.
Stephen King has shown that even though he believes pure evil exists, in his view, good ultimately triumphs over it
The Harris’s have murdered Jorge Castro in 2012, Cary Dressler in 2015, Ellen Craslow and Peter Steinmen in 2018 and finally Bonnie Dahl in 2021. All murders were three years apart, give or take, except for Ellen and Peter. Professor Rodney Harris is known as Mr Meat at the university because of his focus on meat being so important for the diet and this is another clue that leads Holly to the Harris’s, but what she finds is extreme. She expects murder or sexual predators, not cannibalism and a cage for victims. It is Penny Dahl, Bonnie Dahl’s mother, who is shown to have a problematic relationship with her daughter, much like Holly’s was with her mother’s, who recruits Holly to the case and keeps prodding her on.
In the showdown between the old professors and Holly, she kills them both from within her cell, strangling both their necks and the fight scenes that Stephen King writes out are so compelling they keep you turning the page to see whether Holly survives or not. In the end, she does, and she’s also discovered by her friend Barbara who cracks the case on her own and visits the Harris’s house in her search for Holly as she has gone missing. It is Penny Dahl who is worried when Holly doesn’t call her on time and rings the alarm bells thinking, rightly, that she might have been kidnapped as well. Penny is the first person Barbara calls – from the hospital swarmed with reporters – when Holly escapes. A gruesome book with a happy ending, is still an excellent book, I’d say.
The novel is slow in the beginning but fun, the narrative a bit lazy and boring towards the middle, so much so that I was almost about to put it down, but then suddenly right towards the centre the storytelling pace picked up and it became so thrilling that I wanted to know the ending and I completed the rather long book in one night.
Overall, Holly is a brilliant read, exceptionally well written and well-knit together. Stephen King has yet again proven that there is a reason he is the master of storytelling and has churned out more than 70 books over the course of his lifetime. As for the case of the fight between good and evil, evil will always exist and good will always be there to fight against it. As one of the policewomen Izzy says towards the end, “Just when you think you’ve seen the worst human beings have to offer, you find out you’re wrong.” However, by keeping Holly alive and giving her an elevated status towards the end, Stephen King has shown that even though he believes pure evil exists, in his view, good ultimately triumphs over it. I hope most humans agree.