Kevin Drake

This is Stephen King writing as his Twitter persona, where he launches into unhinged rants fueled with hatred and not the King who has put out some great books in recent years (such as Later, The Outsider, Fairy Tale, and If It Bleeds). On Twitter, King openly hates anyone who doesn’t vote the way that he does and that’s his choice in how he wants to conduct himself on social media…but he’s never allowed this vile and churlish side to taint his books. Sure, he makes it obvious in all his novels that he’s a leftist…but he’s never made a book unreadable to most of the country before. Until now. Holly is very hard to get through unless you want to listen to King spouting dated propaganda from the most hysterical days of 2020-2021. Much of what he attests in here about masks and his support for the government compelling people to be vaccinated against their will has been called out as folly by 2023; an Editor should have forced him to correct the falsehoods, because King wrongly (and obsessively) paints the masks as magic force fields when they did absolutely nothing but virtue signal. King wishes the government has the power to keep us masked and locked in our homes forever with no right to say No to anything the government wants to do to our bodies…and if you don’t feel the same way then King’s advocacy for our loss of basic human and civil rights is hard to sit through. In this book, every other chapter scolds readers that they are bad people if they do not wear masks…which King believes can somehow magically defeat the supposedly most deadly virus of all time, despite being made of paper or cloth. It’s just insanity seeing page and after page of this discredited nonsense jammed into this book. It’s a shame that cooler heads didn’t prevail and instead set the novel in the present with no mention of 2020-2021. The story has two excellent villains in the form of a pair of elderly professors and their sick kidnapping schemes to acquire “livestock” for their experiments in “perfect nutrition.” The detective story Holly Gibney stumbles into and pieces together is intriguing and there’s interesting development for Barbara and Jerome, who were characters I enjoyed in If It Bleeds. Not only did this book not need the political screeds and hateful attacks at King’s own basket of deplorables, but including this unhinged personal insanity added probably 200 unnecessary pages that dates this book and makes it unreadable for anyone who wants to move forward and permanently escape the hysteria we endured from 2020-2021. This should have been published as a novella after all of this unnecessary political screeching and mask advocacy was excised. I was really looking forward to Holly Gibney getting her own book in which to shine but was so disappointed that King chose to instead expand his Twitter feed into a 400 page squandered opportunity. The thing that makes this worth reading at all are those villains though. Those two creepy professors in the little college town. It’s a shame he had to ruin them by setting this in 2021.