Holly by Stephen King
Stephen King famously writes two thousand words (or six pages) every single day[1]. So, of course he was writing during the heady start of the COVID pandemic. Out of this comes 2023’s Holly.
The titular character, Holly Gibney, was first introduced in Mr. Mercedes (2014) and returned in Finders Keepers (2015), End of Watch (2016), the Outsider (2018), and the novella “If It Bleeds” (2020).
This installment is set in the summer of 2021 and finds Holly turning her camera off during the Zoom funeral of her mother who died alone of complications from COVID after having refused to get a vaccine.
Unwilling to stop her life to sit with her feelings about this complicated relationship, Holly picks up the phone at her Cleveland-based private investigator’s agency and accepts the case of Barbra Dahl, a librarian at the local liberal arts college who has been missing since her bike was discovered abandoned outside a local convenience store.
Holly kinda has to take the case as her partner Pete is out sick with COVID even though he was smart enough to get double vaxxed.
In the course of her investigation, Holly uncovers clues hinting at a possible active serial killer. There’s also a couple of retired boomer professors willing to use up some of the natural resources of the city for their own selfish ends.
Given King’s authorship of one of the best pandemic novels, 1978’s the Stand, I expected his COVID book to make the virus a key player. But, COVID is not the central focus of this novel. Instead it, and the depressing reality of police violence on black people, and Trump, and the January 6th insurrection, creates a unstable, but ultimately almost mundane background for Holly’s investigation. Sure, folks are wearing gloves, pulling their masks up when they’ve slipped down, making small talk about what vaccine they received, bumping elbows, or complaining that everyone is getting all bent out of shape over the flu, but COVID isn’t the problem.
The virus makes police and healthcare services somewhat limited. Political divisions, cracked wider in the wake of Trump and the pandemic, makes interviews fraught. Backup is sometimes unavailable. It’s easier for details to slip through the cracks.
You don’t have to have read the other King books in which Holly makes an appearance to enjoy this one (I’ve only read one myself), but I am sure being more familiar with Holly’s wider story arc would make this installment more enjoyable.
Like most of King’s work, this one has plethora of fleshed-out characters whose inner joys and prejudices are skillfully presented for our scrutiny. The horror in this one isn’t supernatural. In fact, it’s super relatable and asks how far any of us is willing to go to extend the life of ourselves and our beloveds.
In this Rolling Stone article King talks about why he set Holly in 2021:
…I thought to myself, “Nobody would believe this if they hadn’t been through it. Nobody would actually understand the paranoia and the fear of Covid.” People will see archival footage when we’re old and gray. Well, I’m old and gray now, but when you’re old and gray, people will see footage of bodies being put in refrigerated trucks outside hospitals, and they’ll say, “Did that really happen? Could that have really happened?” And of course, it did. So in that sense, Holly is a time capsule of a particular time when I was writing the book.
Holly
Stephen King
© 2023
Hardcover/Audiobook/eBook
464 pages
Scribner
Verdict: 4/5
https://stephenking.com/works/novel/holly.html
Do you have a story about the COVID pandemic that you’d like to put into a time capsule? If so, email us at heycanwetalkaboutcovid@gmail.com. And remember, you can always ask to be anonymous.
[1] You can find out more about this in his excellent 2010 book On Writing.
