Billy Summers
I've been listening to the audiobook of Stephen King's latest, Billy Summers. It's pretty damn good. Ostensibly the story of an assassin paid a couple of millions dollars for 'one last job' it is, of course much more than that.
Billy, the assassin, is a nice guy - except for all of the assassinating he's done over the years, and even then he only kills 'bad guys'. But does that make him a bad guy? Partly, Billy Summers is a moral investigation of that question. Partly its a hard boiled procedural of how Billy goes about his work, and specifically his 'one last job'.
But weirdly, and enjoyably, it's King riffing for hundreds of pages on the similarities between writing a novel and killing somebody. There's some minor spoilage involved in explaining how he comes to construct the story around that comparison, and I hate spoilage - so I won't go into it.
But this is one of da King's best, I reckon. It's not a supernatural tale, but there is plenty of horror on the page. It ramps up as we get to know more about Billy and his background, about how he came to his line of work and what makes him so emotionally adept at it.
It's good enough that even though I've already got the audio I'll probably add a hard copy to my library as well.
It's fascinating, isn't it, the bad guy who only kills bad guys? Tony Soprano, John Wick, Jax Teller, Dexter Morgan - we give them all a pass. Though POV tends to create sympathy for characters as well. It does seem to take work to make a character both interesting but unsympathetic - thinking eg Patrick Melrose (and perhaps not even him), Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld from McAll Smith's 2 1/2 pillars of wisdom trilogy, or McEwan's Michael Beard.
OK, on my list of books to read next, possibly even in the top 10 of that list, largely due to the short length. Wut? I confess I struggle with King. His writing is wonderful, but his books are so often so long with stuff that doesn't actually progress the story (the haunted car stuff takes up, what, about 37 of the 500 or so pages of Christine? I exaggerate. At least twice that). Which, IIRC, makes Aristotle cry. It's bearable because his writing is so good(*), but it takes me time. I've been struggling on and off with The Stand for over a couple of years now.
But, yes, at least it's not Proust.
(*) unlike the Martster whose books could easily be trimmed by =>50 per cent without losing anything and gaining a focus on the good part: the story. High concept? Unlike WhiteKnight 2, actually got to space.