Do you remember the character of Holly Gibney? The little protégé of old Bill Hodges, who taught him everything about being an investigator and who ended up selling him his private detective agency… Even if the answer is no, don’t miss this excellent dark novel by Stephen King.
Since she faced the monsters of the trilogy Mr Mercedes And The outsider, the shy and insecure young woman has come a long way. It’s been five years since her mentor’s death, but Holly still wonders what Bill would do in her place when she finds herself at a dead end. And here she is who now manages the agency alone because it is 2021, in the middle of a pandemic, and her partner is in quarantine after catching the virus.
It is therefore she who takes the reins of the investigation when a worried mother asks her to find her missing daughter, who no one really cares about with everything that ignites the headlines – the hospitalizations, the crisis in the health system. health or the demonstrations surrounding the death of a young black man killed by a white police officer.
In parallel with Holly’s investigation, we go back a few years to discover that there were other disappearances – never solved – in this small, quiet town in the center of the United States with a prestigious university.
Stephen King serves us here a true thriller, built according to the rules of the art: an investigation, no suspect, few leads to follow and many people to question.
But it wouldn’t be a Stephen King novel if it didn’t have this touch of horror that plunges us into particularly dark places of the human soul. “Evil knows no bounds,” he writes. And sometimes, it takes forms – or faces – that the mind does not even allow itself to imagine.
Holly is a character that Stephen King says he loved “from the beginning” and that he wanted to find again. Her heroine is perhaps not perfect, between her assumed bad habits, her OCD and all her questioning, but it is precisely for all these reasons that she ends up becoming a superhero in our eyes, by trying as she can obtain justice for all these young people who disappeared without leaving a trace. It will even be, unsurprisingly, at the heart of a new TV series in the United States.
For several novels, Stephen King has increasingly used fiction as a platform to express himself on current issues that divide, and he gives it to his heart’s content here – on health measures, vaccination, the existence or not of this famous flu, racial prejudices, movements like Black Lives Matter; many American media have even classified this novel as its most political. But it also attacks Holly to another question which, it seems, haunts him more and more: aging. We let you discover in what diabolical way the master of horror chose to tackle the subject.
Holly
Albin Michel
522 pages