Not one of SKs best for sure. This seemed forced. All of his worst writing traits were here. Cutesy dialogue, progressive speak in characters, and an overwritten build up. The finale was good but it went quickly and the ending I don't quite remember. There was no depth in this. which is sad because Billy Summers was so good. ( )

Right, this is my final final final notice: I am definitely done with Stephen King. He went off the boil a long time ago - a lot like the crazy old oxygen thieves in this story - and his attempts to write about current events and relatable characters are laughable. I even borrowed rather than bought a copy, knowing full well I would be wasting my money, and boy, were my (low) expectations met.

First off, I don't care about 'soapboxing' in fiction when the ranting is relevant, but nothing dates a novel like Covid and Donald Trump (apart from maybe Minidisc players and iPods) - nobody cares or wants to read about the Lost Years now, and all the elbow bumping and 'are you vaxxed?' reverse nostalgia was even more cringeworthy than King's obsession with the 1950s.

Secondly, both the eponymous Holly and the undead oldies eating the neighbours were deeply fucking annoying. Holly with her 'poopy' aversion to swearing - just say the F-word, you'll feel better - and her weird exclamation of 'oough' grated on my nerves even before she started in with her warped health issues. She wishes someone dead at one point because they don't have Covid, which killed her mother - and that was actually a blessing in disguise - but then this throwaway line really pissed me off: 'Hearing of a non-smoker who's died of lung cancer always makes Holly feel a little better about her own [chain-smoking] habit.' Yes, that does make you a shitty person, Holly. I discovered after I started reading that there are two or three other books in the series, but I will not be filling in the gaps in this lifetime.

Lastly, the plot is ridiculous. I can understand the plot bunnies that King cobbled together to form the story but the execution - pardon the pun - requires more suspension of disbelief than I am apparently capable of. I would have welcomed a scene where they followed the 'process' through to the end, because I cannot believe it's that easy to dismember and dispose of a human body. 'Feed 'em through the woodchipper' is a lazy cop out. Also, why should we believe that the crazy old pair want to live forever - because they're college professors? Because they wuv each other? Anyone decaying at that rate absolutely should shuffle off the mortal coil. And did King really have an English professor misquote Hamlet for the yucks?

Finally - does King have grandchildren, or even great grandchildren? Because kids haven't behaved or talked like that since the 90s at the latest. Even the fact that Barbara is called Barbara in 2021 is bad enough. Stop now, old man, you're embarrassing yourself. ( )

This was a grisly one even by Mr King’s standards. But I love Holly and this was definitely her book! ( )

'Holly' is the Stephen King book I didn't know I'd been waiting for. It has all the things I love about King's writing but with no supernatural elements. 'Holly' stands or falls by the quality of its writing, its plot and its characters and it's a roaring success.

It's a longish book (438 pages / 15 hours 24 minutes) that never drags and which kept me engaged to the last page.

'Holly' is a gripping story about how Holly, a recurring Stephen King character who runs the Finders Keepers Private Investigation company, takes a case that results in her slowly uncovering the evil wrought by a pair of serial killers who have managed to kill people secretly and with impunity for years.

I loved the way Stephen King placed evil at the centre of the story without having to rely on anything supernatural. In previous books ('The Outsider' and 'If It Bleeds') Holly has gone up against supernaturals whose success as predators depended partly on the fact that most people were unwilling to accept the possibility of their existence. This time the evil she's up against is entirely human in origin but still owes part of its success to people's inability to imagine that a couple of retired college professors might be killers.

I liked the book never glorifies the serial killers and never turns the investigation into a game played between the killers and the detective. Instead, he makes sure that we feel the full impact of the evil being committed. He shows us the victims both through the eyes of those whom they've left behind and by showing how they react to the terrible circumstance that they've been placed in. One victim's response is so brave and so dignified that it was both wonderful and heartbreaking to read. These killings have consequences: the grief and uncertainty of the bereft and the waste of the lives cut short.

Although the book isn't, strictly speaking, a horror story, I could feel my dread growing with each page. It wasn't because the baddies were bad (although they were irredeemable narcissistic entitlement made flesh) but because I was becoming increasingly invested in Holly and Barbara, both of whom seemed to be at risk. I knew that watching even one of them falling prey to the killers would be hard to take, even if they survived.

I was grateful that 'Holly' was relatively low on action because the action when it came was intense, brutal and memorable. I couldn't taken a lot of that.

Fortunately, a lot of the book was taken up with Holly's interviews with people as part of her investigation and with her discovery that her recently deceased mother had deceived her. I liked watching Holly work things out and I loved seeing her grow in confidence as she takes on her first major solo case. I enjoyed how Holly's interviews turned into brief character sketches of a variety of people, some nice, some terrible but all credible. It was an extra bonus that, as she was carrying out these interviews during COVID, part of the character sketch was achieved by the interviewee's opinions on whether mask-wearing made sense and whether COVID was a hoax.

One of my favourite threads in the book was watching eighteen-year-old Barbara's blossoming relationship with a nonagenarian poet who became her mentor. I loved their discussions on poetry and on their motivations for writing and what writing actually does and how it feels when you know that you've written a line that really works. I could have read those pieces as free-standing text and still enjoyed them. That Stephen King managed to use them to move the plot forward and to increase the sense of threat that I felt on Barbara's behalf is a sign of his skill as a storyteller.

Ageing is an important theme in this book. I loved the way Stephen King showed the empty vanity of struggling not to age and the dignity of accepting but not bowing to it.

I recommend the audiobook version of 'Holly'. Justine Lupe's narration is excellent. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

https://soundcloud.com/simonschuster/holly-audiobook-excerpt-2 ( )

Holly Gibney, the obsessive-compulsive, shy and reclusive character we first met in Stephen King’s Finders Keepers trilogy has come a long way since those early days, and now she is the protagonist of a novel focused solely on her: she has inherited the investigative agency Finders Keepers from Bill Hodges, who befriended her and started her on her journey of self-reliance, she is moderately successful in her chosen career and has made a few friends who support and understand her quirky personality.

As the novel starts, she is attending her mother’s funeral via Zoom: it’s 2021 and the height of the Covid pandemic, which would be a good reason for the agency to scale down its activities, but when Holly receives the impassioned request of Penny Dahl, whose daughter disappeared after leaving a cryptic message on her bike, she decides to investigate - if nothing else, to avoid dealing with the discovery that her overbearing mother and uncle had concocted a sort of financial fraud to try and keep her under their thumbs and deny her the new-found independence she’s come to appreciate.

As Holly starts her investigation she finds out that Bonnie Dahl is not the only person who disappeared in mysterious circumstances and that there might be a serial killer on the prowl: in this respect, King does not keep his readers in the dark for long because he reveals early on the identity of the killer - or better, killers - focusing rather on Holly’s search for clues and on her slow but constant reach for the truth, which in this case is totally devoid of supernatural elements, but instead sheds light on the horrors that twisted human nature can visit on others. King is not new to this more… mundane approach to horror, and in this case injects it with an added layer of dread thanks to the dichotomy represented by the outward appearance of the two aged professors-turned-killers on one side, and their twisted, appalling motivation for kidnapping and murdering those hapless victims on the other - a bone-chilling folie à deux carried on with gleeful casualness.

From my point of view, Holly turned out to be a story of two halves: on one side the narrative and character exploration half that worked quite well, and on the other what I labeled as the “King’s Manifesto” portion, which did not turn out quite as great. Holly’s journey toward independence and self-assertiveness continues here showing us that she keeps becoming her own person with every passing day: of course the shadow of her mother still peeks from the sidelines now and then, but Holly succumbs less and less to her smothering influence. Of course a big help comes from the discovery that she’s been lied to for a long time about the family’s financial situation, in an attempt to lure her back into the fold: the anger that comes on the heels of this revelation feels like a healthy reaction, and I liked to see how Holly manages to process it all on her own, since this time she is removed from her usual support group, given that both Robinson siblings are very wrapped up in their own affairs and her partner Pete is in isolation because of Covid.

Granted, her insecurities are still there under the surface, and they are expressed in some of her obsessive-compulsive habits, including the chain smoking that made me cringe every time she lighted a cigarette, but it’s encouraging to see her so at ease in her investigative work, so determined to get to the bottom of the mystery that looks even deeper and more gruesome than what she initially thought. Even in her most harrowing, most desperate moments, when it looks that she might become a victim herself, Holly keeps hold of some inner core of strength - and gallows humor - that shows she is not the timid, mouse-like creature that Bill Hodges encountered a few years back, not anymore. And it’s a very encouraging discovery, one that might hopefully lead to more stories about her.

Sadly, the novel’s background did not work for me as well as the personal journeys, mainly because I don’t enjoy any reminders of the Covid times: we all endured those days and that memory is still too fresh for it not to become bothersome - I believe we need some distance, some perspective, before we are able to look at those times with a modicum of equanimity. And then there is what I call the “King’s Manifesto”: we can all agree that the Covid epidemic, like many worldwide occurrences, brought to the fore the best and the worst of humanity, and that it exasperated the polarized stances that have become endemic in our present society. Portraying those opposite attitudes as part of the story’s background did certainly add the necessary depth to the main narrative, but in my opinion it would have worked better if the author had done so with a few, well-placed brush strokes: he decided instead to throw whole bucketfuls of paint to the canvas, so to speak, and did it repeatedly, as if in doubt of his audience’s power of understanding, and that proved quite annoying in the long run, and distracting, while all I wanted was to focus on Holly’s investigation and her search for justice for the victims.

Maybe Stephen King badly needed to vent and took the opportunity to do so here, but I hope that he’s done with the preaching (which never works in favor of good stories…) and will revert back to the bone-chilling storytelling he’s better known for. ( )