Holly Turns a Popular Stephen King Supporting Character Into a Thriller Star
Stephen King has spent quite a bit of the lead-up to Holly, the first full-length novel starring the title character, reminding us that it was never supposed to happen. His quotes about how private investigator Holly Gibney simply refused to let go of his imagination have become a key part of the book’s publicity campaign, emphasizing not only that she is a supporting player made into a star but a kind of calling King has developed in his writing.
The author’s fascination with Holly, and her way of looking at the world, has been made clear through her appearances in a half-dozen books in less than a decade, making her one of his most prolific recurring characters. But what is it about her that keeps him going back, and that made him go back to this specific story at this specific time? What called King to Holly, and was that calling worth it?
The book begins in 2021, as Holly loses her mother to COVID-19 and tries to take some time away from Finders Keepers, the detective agency she inherited from her mentor Bill Hodges. But the cases don’t stop, and when a desperate mother calls Holly for help locating her missing daughter, the detective in her can’t let go of the mystery. What begins with a single young woman going missing soon unspools into a dark web of mysterious vanishings, all pointing to a very unlikely duo of suspects. Holly’s no stranger to dark predators, even supernatural ones, but nothing can prepare her for what she finds lurking inside a stately old home where two aging academics who’ve got their particular vices down to a science.
In the same present-tense prose that’s propelled Holly’s past life on the page, King immediately re-immerses us in the world of his unconventional detective, jumping back and forth in time and even switching perspectives between hunter and hunted to give us a wide-angle view of what’s unfolding. The narration is engrossing and inviting, the characters lived-in and tactile, and the dark deeds at the core of the mystery satisfyingly eerie. But what makes Holly work is more than the thriller aspects of the narrative. What called King back to the title character was not just her voice and her mind, but what someone like Holly Gibney would make of the rapidly changing world we’ve all lived in for the past three years.
Like all of us, Holly navigates the pandemic with a layer of often frightening uncertainty tinging her daily life, even as vaccines roll out and the world starts to attempt some version of “normal” again. Like all of us, she suffers losses, confusion, even outright anger at the way those around her behave in these strange times. And, like all of us, she finds that chances for self-reflection reveal a life more complex than she perhaps realized.