Starting last December, I set out to read everything written by Stephen King, that has ever been published in book form. If not for this goal I would not have finished this novel.
The novel tells us about yet another of Holly Gibney’s criminal cases with multiple people missing over a long period of time. Holly is working alone this time while her teammates are preoccupied or disabled.
I would describe this novel as a thick puddle of liberal coated cringe. Now, I get that it takes place during the COVID-19 pandemic and it would be strange if characters would not be affected by the virus or the government’s restrictions placed at the time. But, my God, after the first forth or the novel I though adhering to wearing the mask and offering people her elbow instead of her hand to shake WAS the prime objective of Holly. Again, I get that she is autistic to an extreme degree and that her mother succumbed to COVID, therefore she is expected to follow all the pandemic rituals with religious fervor. But then I would argue she is an even more insufferable liberal caricature: a frumpy autistic victim of parental hyper control who got cornered by an alleged rapist this one time … Every other paragraph there is a mention or a hint of contemporary US liberal agenda as if Stephen King was paid by liberal words for this one.
The villains are cartoonishly ridiculous. Old white anti vegan people who munch off the life essence of gay, female, and black people. Gee whiz! How original and how subtle, eh …
I wasn’t there in the US during the pandemic. Maybe it was just like King writes it with everyone around you spewing a politically charged buzz word every ten minutes. It sure looks like it is the case now, at least on the internet. Maybe Stephen King did not have a choice, so to speak. He had to write like this to portrait the times. Except no, no he had not. Do you know why I am convinced he had not? Because I have read his novella “Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream”. And not only was it good, had a similar murder mystery theme, set in roughly the same time in American history, but it had almost all of the same liberal agenda in it. The difference was that it was thinly sprinkled in.
Let me give you an example. Stephen King never introduces black characters as being black, which is good. It gives these characters all the right and opportunity to flesh themselves out, so to speak. But more often than not, when it is revealed that a character is indeed an African American it has nothing to do with anything plot wise. Now, this a good in itself too, because, to a great extent, it really does not matter what the ethnic background of a character is. But the way Stephen King revealed a black character in “Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream” – chef’s kiss! It was subtle, it was natural, and it actually had something to do with the story. Same with the COVID masks, same with post rape trauma, same with social injustice, etc.
So, I think the thick dense paste of a liberal agenda in “Holly” is not artistically justified whatsoever. It was another one of those novels Stephen King must have produced when he was overexcited or something and “had his liberal hat on”. Which is a shame because it always does his works injustice.
4 понравилось
