Holly Gibney
After I was severely disappointed with Stephen King’s Never Flinch (2025), the most recent Holly Gibney novel (badly written, racist, sexist, transphobic), I have recently been rereading his previous books about her, which had had not stuck very well in my memory. Holly was originally a secondary character in the Bill Hodges trilogy, which began as straight crime fiction and then veered into the supernatural, and has since been the main character of four more books, which have continued to go back and forth between mundane and otherworldly murder:
Bill Hodges trilogy:
- Mr. Mercedes (2014)
- Finders Keepers (2015)
- End of Watch (2016)
Holly Gibney series:
- The Outsider (2018)
- If It Bleeds (2020)
- Holly (2023)
- Never Flinch (2025)
I skipped Mr. Mercedes, because I still remember the story pretty well (though probably from the TV show more than the book), and started with Finders Keepers, which is excellent crime fiction but also an interesting meditation on the meaning of literature in the life of a reader. Not unlike Misery (1987), but without the low meanspiritedness of that novel. End of Watch, on the other hand, was disappointing, and not worth rereading, though it is still far, far better than Never Flinch.
The Outsider starts off very strong; the first third or even half may be some of King’s best. It tapers off after that, a particular irritant being his embarrassing inability to write anyone that isn’t lily white (in this case, a Mexican American that cannot stop sprinkling beginner-level Spanish words like amigo and ese into his English; in much of the rest of the series, Black people, who are often described as “jiving”, to give just a hint of the tone).
If It Bleeds is fine, about as compelling as the latter half of The Outsider. It is the title novella of a collection, which also contains three shorter stories: Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, The Life of Chuck, and Rat. None of these is exceptional, but they each pursue an interesting idea, and are well executed. The first two especially are unique and memorable (more so than any of the Bill Hodges/Holly Gibney stories, in my opinion).
I have yet to reread Holly (which I remember as being decent), and will never go back to Never Flinch, so in closing, a few thoughts on TV/movie adaptations:
- Mr. Mercedes (2017), which adapts not just the eponymous novel but the whole Bill Hodges trilogy in its three seasons, gives many characters depth that they lack in the books, but above all, it takes the unremarkable lesbian stock character, Fred Linklater, and turns her into my favorite character of the show, Lou Linklatter. Unfortunately, King himself can’t seem to write a woman that is both meaningfully queer and a full human being. (Fred is an unpleasant dyke stereotype, of a type that recurs in his work; the lesbians in Elevation (2018) and Later (2021), on the other hand, are ‘normal people’ who simply happen to be gay.)
- I haven’t seen The Life of Chuck (2024) yet, though I hope to soon. I think Mike Flanagan generally gets King’s sentimentality right, though the trailer felt a little too saccharine.
- Mr. Harrigan’s Phone (2022) was tedious to watch: it faithfully reproduces the sequence of events of the story, but it offers nothing to make up for the lack of first-person narration and introspection that made it meaningful. Consequently, the whole procession seems hollowed out; we are given no particular reason why these things are being shown to us one after another, and not something else more interesting.
- I feel similarly about The Outsider (2020), or at least about episode 1, which compresses the best parts of the novel into a single hour, preserving the main plot events while sacrificing any sense of gravity by moving along so hastily. The inner lives of the characters, which are the heart of King’s writing, are painfully absent, replaced by lingering shots and brooding music that fail to communicate anything more than “this is very serious”. Of course, it could be that the next 9 episodes will go somewhere else that is interesting in its own right, and that the beginning simply had to be gotten out of the way, but I have my doubts. So far, it just feels insubstantial.
Lou Linklatter (Breeda Wool) in Mr. Mercedes