Holly Gibney is one of the most beautiful characters created by Stephen King. He himself fell under the influence of this young woman who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorders, has an acute sense of observation, is incapable of lying, feels uncomfortable in society and is very religious. In the end, she’s a great detective. Plus, she’s devilishly endearing.
So much so that if King initially intended to take him three little turns and then go off into Mr.Mercedeshe invited her back in the other two volumes of this trilogy, Black notebooks And End of roundbefore bringing her back into The outsider and in the novella If it bleeds. It was time to give him the reins of a book. It’s done. It is Holly. And it’s very good.
In the realistic vein of the master of horror, Holly is probably the most political novel by the author of Misery. Trump’s America, conspiracy theories, the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, all of this inhabits this thriller which takes place on two timelines.
The first, very straight, is slow combustion. We follow Holly, now head of the private detective agency Finders Keepers. It’s 2021, COVID is raging (not like in Cujo), we wear masks (or not), we get vaccinated (or not). Clashes between those who follow the directives and the anti-vaccinators. It’s so close and so far at the same time. In this context, a woman hires Holly to find her missing daughter, Bonnie. Holly accepts the mission, leads the investigation. While making detours into his own past. These parentheses allow us to better understand the character, to add flesh to him. Anyone who has adopted Holly will enjoy these pages. Others might find them long — too bad for them.
The second temporality, inclined so as to cut the first in due time, starts in fourth gear. Here, a couple of retired academics kidnap young people. Their first operation took place in 2012. They will repeat it every three years, until they reach Bonnie.
The reader therefore knows, from the start, who the culprits are and what their (repulsive) motivations are. Which give rise to terrifying pages. Evil, when it displays the face of banality, is difficult to digest. Especially since as the two temporalities get closer, the novel accelerates in pace and horror. The last third, with its grand-guignolesque side, can be read in one go. With a grimace. Or two.
There is also, implicitly, a speech on aging. Stephen King, who is 76 years old, knows the problems associated with age. He knows how to (de)write them. Also, the prolific writer knows that he has probably published more than he will publish. Only he could give so much weight to this sentence which accompanies the death of a poet: “A world of words dies with her.” » Finally, his speech is social. Much like there was a wave in popular culture of the 1970s of teenage characters or children possessed or otherwise threatening to the generation in power, could it be possible that Holly or a warning in the form of a fable, saying that we must be wary of still water and not neglect the old not dead?