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    Holly
    Holly
    Holly
    Ebook566 pages10 hours

    Holly

    By Stephen King

    4/5

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    #1 New York Times Bestseller * A New York Times Notable Book * An NPR Best Book of the Year

    Holly Gibney, one of Stephen King’s most compelling and resourceful characters, returns in this chilling “exploration of grief and delusion, just pure undistilled evil” (New York magazine) as she uncovers the truth behind multiple disappearances in a midwestern town.

    When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency, hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly Gibney is reluctant to accept the case. Her partner, Pete, has Covid. Her (very complicated) mother has just passed away. And Holly is meant to be on leave. But something in Penny’s desperate voice makes it impossible to turn her down.

    Meanwhile, mere blocks from where Bonnie Dahl disappeared live Professors Rodney and Emily Harris. They are the picture of bourgeois respectability: married octogenarians, devoted to each other, and semi-retired lifelong academics. But they are also harboring a shocking, unholy secret in the basement of their well-kept, book-lined home, one that may be related to Bonnie’s disappearance. And it will prove nearly impossible to discover what they are up to…for they are savvy, they are patient, and they are ruthless. Now Holly must summon all of her formidable talents to outthink and outmaneuver these unimaginably depraved and brilliantly disguised adversaries in this chilling and unforgettable masterwork from Stephen King.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateSep 5, 2023
    ISBN9781668014950
    Author

    Stephen King

    Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Never Flinch (May 2025), the short story collection You Like It Darker (a New York Times Book Review top ten horror book of 2024), Holly (a New York Times Notable Book of 2023), Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. 

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    Reviews for Holly

    4/5

    411 ratings34 reviews

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    • 4/5
      despite being a Holly fan I didn't think I'd end up liking this as much as I did by the end. Minus the covid stuff I think most Holly fans will like this.
    • 1/5
      Stephen King has always been my favorite author until now. He really should keep politics and personal opinions out of his stories. This one was so poorly written I believe someone else actually wrote some of it. He has lost a fan.
    • 5/5
      Can’t wait to read more about Holly and her adventures. Stephen King created such a lovable character.
    • 5/5
      Very memorable and thrilling story. Can’t wait to see the show
    • 4/5
      Starting with a disturbing hook, this book has all the elements that make Stephen King a great author: compellingly likable protagonists, an unsettling mystery to be solved, and an easy to read style.

      The first half of the book skips back and forth in time as it follows the storyline of the protagonists vs. antagonists, but I didn't find either storyline boring or unnecessary, unlike some other books that misuse the technique.

      The main negative aspect of this book is Stephen King's blatant preachiness concerning mask mandates and vaccines related to the coronavirus (he admits as much in the book's epilogue). I am completely pro-vaccine, but even I got tired of the exaggerated virus-related aspects of the book (e.g. everyone in the book who gets the virus ends up hospitalized).
    • 3/5
      This is the latest entry in the Mr. Mercedes crime series. I loved the first book, but after that the series began to drift into the supernatural and horror elements King is usually associated with and which I don't like, I decided I was not going to read on with the series. However, when this installment was published, several LTers who read it clarified that it incorporated nothing supernatural and was a pure crime/mystery novel. So, I decided to read it, and I'm glad I did, although whether it veers into horror may depend on your view of cannibalism. And though it is part of a series, it can very definitely be read as a stand-alone.

      This is a decent mystery novel featuring a serial killer on the loose. Holly Gibney, who we were introduced to in Mr. Mercedes, is now running her own small P.I. firm. When the book opens, Holly's mother has just died from covid, and Holly is not sure she will be taking on any cases for a while. However, when she is approached by Penny Dale whose daughter has gone missing on the way home from work, she finds herself unable to turn down Penny's pleas for help. As Holly begins to investigate she discovers there have been other mysterious disappearances that remain unsolved. These disappearances occurred over widely separated time periods, so they had not previously been thought to be connected.Holly sees similarities in the circumstances of these disappearances, and her investigation takes off in search of what she fears is a serial killer.

      About this book, Stephen King said, "I could never let Holly Gibney go. She was supposed to be a walk-on character in Mr. Mercedes and she just kind of stole the book and stole my heart." Holly is indeed an engaging character, and I'm glad King chose to place her in a "starring" role in this book. And of course King's great story-telling skills, pacing, characterizations, etc. shine through.
      Recommended.
    • 5/5
      LOVED this book!!! Very happy with it—I read it way faster than usual! It was amazing! King never lets me down!
    • 3/5
      Not one of SKs best for sure. This seemed forced. All of his worst writing traits were here. Cutesy dialogue, progressive speak in characters, and an overwritten build up. The finale was good but it went quickly and the ending I don't quite remember. There was no depth in this. which is sad because Billy Summers was so good.
    • 5/5
      This was a grisly one even by Mr King’s standards. But I love Holly and this was definitely her book!
    • 3/5
      This book was perhaps too long by about 100 pages. It plodded along very slowly in the beginning, and I wondered why we needed to know every single thing Holly Gibney did, said or thought on any given day - it was boring. It picked up near the end, and I liked the way King took time to wind everything down, rather than ending the story abruptly the way so many authors do. Stephen King, though, is just not the exciting writer that he used to be.
    • 4/5
      Holly tracks down serial killers (their identity is immediately disclosed to the reader). This was interesting for refusing some of the obvious (cliched) next moves but then immediately suggesting other, also refused possibilities. It’s also interesting for being set during 2021, and covid precautions function as defining personality and setting the context just as much as King’s past and ongoing use of brand names. (He even has an author’s note about it, as if he himself wondered.) I wonder if other novelists will also do this or whether it will be like the flu pandemic was, with authors writing around it.
    • 2/5
      Right, this is my final final final notice: I am definitely done with Stephen King. He went off the boil a long time ago - a lot like the crazy old oxygen thieves in this story - and his attempts to write about current events and relatable characters are laughable. I even borrowed rather than bought a copy, knowing full well I would be wasting my money, and boy, were my (low) expectations met.

      First off, I don't care about 'soapboxing' in fiction when the ranting is relevant, but nothing dates a novel like Covid and Donald Trump (apart from maybe Minidisc players and iPods) - nobody cares or wants to read about the Lost Years now, and all the elbow bumping and 'are you vaxxed?' reverse nostalgia was even more cringeworthy than King's obsession with the 1950s.

      Secondly, both the eponymous Holly and the undead oldies eating the neighbours were deeply fucking annoying. Holly with her 'poopy' aversion to swearing - just say the F-word, you'll feel better - and her weird exclamation of 'oough' grated on my nerves even before she started in with her warped health issues. She wishes someone dead at one point because they don't have Covid, which killed her mother - and that was actually a blessing in disguise - but then this throwaway line really pissed me off: 'Hearing of a non-smoker who's died of lung cancer always makes Holly feel a little better about her own [chain-smoking] habit.' Yes, that does make you a shitty person, Holly. I discovered after I started reading that there are two or three other books in the series, but I will not be filling in the gaps in this lifetime.

      Lastly, the plot is ridiculous. I can understand the plot bunnies that King cobbled together to form the story but the execution - pardon the pun - requires more suspension of disbelief than I am apparently capable of. I would have welcomed a scene where they followed the 'process' through to the end, because I cannot believe it's that easy to dismember and dispose of a human body. 'Feed 'em through the woodchipper' is a lazy cop out. Also, why should we believe that the crazy old pair want to live forever - because they're college professors? Because they wuv each other? Anyone decaying at that rate absolutely should shuffle off the mortal coil.

      Finally - does King have grandchildren, or even great grandchildren? Because kids haven't behaved or talked like that since the 90s at the latest. Even the fact that Barbara is called Barbara in 2021 is bad enough. Stop now, old man, you're embarrassing yourself.
    • 3/5
      Holly Gibney, the obsessive-compulsive, shy and reclusive character we first met in Stephen King’s Finders Keepers trilogy has come a long way since those early days, and now she is the protagonist of a novel focused solely on her: she has inherited the investigative agency Finders Keepers from Bill Hodges, who befriended her and started her on her journey of self-reliance, she is moderately successful in her chosen career and has made a few friends who support and understand her quirky personality.

      As the novel starts, she is attending her mother’s funeral via Zoom: it’s 2021 and the height of the Covid pandemic, which would be a good reason for the agency to scale down its activities, but when Holly receives the impassioned request of Penny Dahl, whose daughter disappeared after leaving a cryptic message on her bike, she decides to investigate - if nothing else, to avoid dealing with the discovery that her overbearing mother and uncle had concocted a sort of financial fraud to try and keep her under their thumbs and deny her the new-found independence she’s come to appreciate.

      As Holly starts her investigation she finds out that Bonnie Dahl is not the only person who disappeared in mysterious circumstances and that there might be a serial killer on the prowl: in this respect, King does not keep his readers in the dark for long because he reveals early on the identity of the killer - or better, killers - focusing rather on Holly’s search for clues and on her slow but constant reach for the truth, which in this case is totally devoid of supernatural elements, but instead sheds light on the horrors that twisted human nature can visit on others. King is not new to this more… mundane approach to horror, and in this case injects it with an added layer of dread thanks to the dichotomy represented by the outward appearance of the two aged professors-turned-killers on one side, and their twisted, appalling motivation for kidnapping and murdering those hapless victims on the other - a bone-chilling folie à deux carried on with gleeful casualness.

      From my point of view, Holly turned out to be a story of two halves: on one side the narrative and character exploration half that worked quite well, and on the other what I labeled as the “King’s Manifesto” portion, which did not turn out quite as great. Holly’s journey toward independence and self-assertiveness continues here showing us that she keeps becoming her own person with every passing day: of course the shadow of her mother still peeks from the sidelines now and then, but Holly succumbs less and less to her smothering influence. Of course a big help comes from the discovery that she’s been lied to for a long time about the family’s financial situation, in an attempt to lure her back into the fold: the anger that comes on the heels of this revelation feels like a healthy reaction, and I liked to see how Holly manages to process it all on her own, since this time she is removed from her usual support group, given that both Robinson siblings are very wrapped up in their own affairs and her partner Pete is in isolation because of Covid.

      Granted, her insecurities are still there under the surface, and they are expressed in some of her obsessive-compulsive habits, including the chain smoking that made me cringe every time she lighted a cigarette, but it’s encouraging to see her so at ease in her investigative work, so determined to get to the bottom of the mystery that looks even deeper and more gruesome than what she initially thought. Even in her most harrowing, most desperate moments, when it looks that she might become a victim herself, Holly keeps hold of some inner core of strength - and gallows humor - that shows she is not the timid, mouse-like creature that Bill Hodges encountered a few years back, not anymore. And it’s a very encouraging discovery, one that might hopefully lead to more stories about her.

      Sadly, the novel’s background did not work for me as well as the personal journeys, mainly because I don’t enjoy any reminders of the Covid times: we all endured those days and that memory is still too fresh for it not to become bothersome - I believe we need some distance, some perspective, before we are able to look at those times with a modicum of equanimity. And then there is what I call the “King’s Manifesto”: we can all agree that the Covid epidemic, like many worldwide occurrences, brought to the fore the best and the worst of humanity, and that it exasperated the polarized stances that have become endemic in our present society. Portraying those opposite attitudes as part of the story’s background did certainly add the necessary depth to the main narrative, but in my opinion it would have worked better if the author had done so with a few, well-placed brush strokes: he decided instead to throw whole bucketfuls of paint to the canvas, so to speak, and did it repeatedly, as if in doubt of his audience’s power of understanding, and that proved quite annoying in the long run, and distracting, while all I wanted was to focus on Holly’s investigation and her search for justice for the victims.

      Maybe Stephen King badly needed to vent and took the opportunity to do so here, but I hope that he’s done with the preaching (which never works in favor of good stories…) and will revert back to the bone-chilling storytelling he’s better known for.
    • 4/5
      While I enjoy most of Kings books this one was a little disappointing to me; King has a strong dislike for President Trump and he lets it show in the book. I read fiction to get a break from "the real world", so to have Trump constantly brought up in the book was a HUGE disappointment. I realize as the author King can work President Trump into his story line all he wants but that doesn't mean I have to like or support it. King should stick to fiction writing and leave politics out.
    • 5/5
      If you think of the bad in Stephen King you think of Randall Flagg and if you think of the good only one name can truly inspire loyalty in the reader and that is Holly Gibney. Holly came to the notice of Bill Hodges, who gave her belief in herself, and she soon became an intricate part of the Finders Keepers detective agency......."Holly has come a long way from the shy introvert Bill Hodges met lurking outside a funeral home all those years ago, but that woman still lives inside her and always will".......
      Now as sole proprieter of the agency she is investigating a number of seemingly unconnected disappearances, years apart.......what devilish little piece of storytelling has Mr King got in store to delight and horrify us. It becomes apparent very quickly who the perpetrators are and the reasoning behind their murderous acts is what makes "Holly" a brilliant novel. It seems that as the author ages his writing just gets better and better and this is a brilliant tale to delight and horrify in equal measure.
    • 5/5
      Holly By Stephen King

      Intesne and compelling, moving at a steady pace builing up chilling suspense along the way. Set in 2021 during COVID added more obsticles in the already complicated investigation. Holly is very likable, the crimes unthinkable.

      Overall I found Holly very enjoyable. I was up late into the night engrossed in this thought-provoking story. A must read for Stephen King fans and those who love (shocking) crime thrillers.
    • 4/5
      The first chapter was titled "October 17, 2012." Awesome, I like knowing the date in stories. I was surprised the next section jumped to 2021. Ok, I can deal. It is first story I have read where Covid was around and masks and vaccines were part of the plot. Then something I hate while reading occurred: we go back in time: 2015. Why can't the story just start in 2012, make its way to 2015, and then happily (or scarily in a Stephen King book) end up in 2021? I kept going along but eventually I skipped through the book reading the material in chronological order. I hate spoilers but also hate a story that thinks it can create suspense from something that has already happened. Television shows that start with a scene, and then has "24 hours (or whatever) earlier," is, as Holly would say, poopy!
      980 members;3.86 average raring; 1/7/2024
    • 5/5
      As always, King has presented us with yet another masterpiece that no matter how long the book, you burn through it because you don't want to put it down!

      I literally read myself to sleep as I was fighting to stay awake to read it, several times, and when I did finally fall asleep I was dreaming about the book!

      As the title implies, this one is all about Holly Gibney, who I know is one of Stephen King's personal favourite characters as well as being a fan favourite, so it only feels right that she should take front and centre stage with her own book.

      We have seen Holly transform from the timid, shy little mouse in the Bill Hodges trilogy of novels Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch, to a main character in The Outsider, with her new found inner badass, without loosing her personal little quirks that make her her and such a fan favourite.

      Now in her own book she has to dig deep as she takes on a missing person's case all on her own because her partner of Finders Keepers detective agency, Pete is off work due to covid.

      This book is set during covid so King had had to make some tweeks to the storyline because the novella, If It Bleeds, was before covid, but if he hadn't wrote this at the end of the book, I probably wouldn't have noticed!

      As Holly begins her investigation into a missing young girl, the more she diggs up, the more skelingtons she finds in some of the most unlikely of places.

      Both Jerome, and his sister Barbara are back in this book, but with Jerome out of state and Barbara who is also tied up in projects of their own, neither of them can help Holly on this case as much as they'd all like.

      As Holly begins to start to see a pattern between her case and the disappearances of people before in similar cercomstances she needs to walk a fine line between investigating and becoming a missing person herself!

      There are no supernatural elements to this book, this is a normal detective novel with what becomes a not so normal, stomach churning case!

      This is a definite must read for all of Kings fans as well as fans of good murder mysteries, crime and thriller novels and anyone who enjoys a really great story!

      You certainly don't need to be a horror fan as this isn't a horror book. The only horror is in the crimed themselves, so please don't just pass this book over because it's a Stephen King book and his reputation of the master of horror, this is a book for anyone who loves a really well written 'who done it'!
    • 3/5
      [3.25] About one-third of the way through King’s latest book, I was reminded why it had been so long — at least eight years — since I read a work from the acclaimed “Master of Horror.” His storytelling technique reminds of a late, great relative who had many meaningful life stories to share, but would spin them in such excruciating detail and at such a plodding pace that even riveting tales were undermined. “Holly” is built on a bone-chilling premise and showcases a cast of intriguing characters, including Holly Gibney, one of King’s best-known protagonists. I also admired how the author skillfully integrated contemporary political and social issues into the story. But my interest waned in a half-dozen spots. “Holly” would have been a solid 4-star read if the narrative had been trimmed a bit.
    • 4/5
      I love these characters and the way Stephen King writes. This book sees Holly investigating a missing woman as she struggles with the death of her mother and the challenges of COVID.
    • 5/5
      I am an avid Stephen King fan! I have all of his books and have read them all. And, once again, I sat down to see how this book and read it straight through! Holly Gibney, once a shy recluse in Mr. Mercedes, then a partner with Bill Hodges in Finders Keepers is now on her own and up against a pair of depraved killers in a disguise no one would possibly suspect.
    • 4/5
      I have not read any previous novels with Holly in them, and I found this to be a perfectly accessible and satisfying standalone.
    • 5/5
      A terrific mystery story minus Stephen King's usual supernatural twists. I enjoyed it immensely seeing how Holly Gibney tracks down the disappearance of Bonnie Dahl and the horrific reason why periodically people have gone missing. Loved it.
    • 4/5
      I've really enjoyed Stephen King's detective novels, even though he sometimes veers back into horror. He's set up a solid series with Holly Gibney, a socially awkward middle-aged woman, running the Finders Keepers agency, working with Pete, a retired cop, and with part-time assistance from Jerome and Barbara Robinson, teenage prodigies. This installment centers firmly on Holly, with Pete out of action with covid and the Robinson siblings helping out, but preoccupied with their own lives.

      King lets readers know from the beginning who the bad guys are, yet keeps the suspense level high as Holly slowly pieces together the clues, missing a few, finding some red herrings along the way. This novel isn't horror, although there is plenty of horrible events along the path to solving this one. I enjoyed this novel and love King's foray into a genre I love and how he has set things up for this to be a solid series. At this point, King is guaranteed a bestseller slot for every book he writes and it's to his credit that he is continuing to write with such energy and imagination.
    • 5/5
      This is truly memorable story-telling, narrated from several perspectives: the criminal and a detective, as well as the hunted and their hunter. The telling is fuelled by a strong plot and several vivid characters, set against a background of suspense and dread. The sheer ordinariness of evil is highlighted. It's not a story for those with a weak stomach, though in the style of a cozy (this is not one of those), most of the grisly stuff takes place off stage.

      The covid "through-line" anchors the story in time, but as time passes, may come to date it.

      I was left with a deep sense of regret and melancholia, best described by the police detective to Holly upon her discovery of the crime scene:

      "This case has taught me a lesson, Gibney. Just when you think you've seen the worst human beings have to offer, you find out you're wrong. There's no end to evil."

      All in all, it's a remarkable story to read and think about.
    • 4/5
      Holly is the latest novel by Stephen King, and it follows one of my favorite characters from his Mr. Mercedes series. I will also say it is probably one of his darkest stories in recent years because there is nothing otherworldly about it. In Holly, the villains are human, albeit despicable, vile ones.

      One of the things I loved about Holly is the fact that while Holly Gibney is the hero, and she is a recurring character, you could consider it to be a standalone novel. While there are references to the goings-on of the Mr. Mercedes series and the other two novels that make up the Holly Gibney series, it has nothing to do with what is happening in this story. In other words, you don't miss anything by not understanding those references.

      I was not prepared for Holly to be as gruesome as it was. There is one particular scene that nauseated me, and I usually have an iron stomach when it comes to disgusting scenes. The odd thing is that it isn't a particularly bloody scene either. It's just that Mr. King does an excellent job describing in detail exactly what the character is experiencing, and it is anything but pleasant.

      Holly takes place during the pandemic, just after the world started opening back up and people were questioning whether we should continue masking or not. It still feels surreal to read stories set during 2020 - 2021 because it was such a weird time. However, it is a comfort to recognize that the characters also feel odd about the entire situation - much like we all did then.

      For the audiobook, Simon & Schuster Audio and Stephen King opted to have Justine Lupe narrate Holly. Since she is the actress who played Holly Gibney in the Mr. Mercedes television series, it is the perfect choice. While not everyone can make the transition to audio narration, Ms. Lupe has no such issues. She brings to her performance the same anxiety and self-doubt that are Holly's biggest faults. In many ways, Ms. Lupe's performance is a welcome homecoming to such a lovable character.
    • 3/5
      The Short of It:

      Fans of the Bill Hodges trilogy will enjoy spending time with one of King’s most beloved characters.

      The Rest of It:

      But, this one felt a little different. Holly is hired to investigate a missing woman, but as she investigates the disappearance she realizes that more is at play when a string of missing persons all lead to the same neighborhood. A serial killer? Could it be?

      The story that King created is quite dark, but also laced with a little bit of ridiculousness. I found myself pausing many times because it didn’t feel “King-like”. Plus, it’s also set during the pandemic so there are plenty of political jabs made at our former President. I am not a Trump fan but I grew tired of it.

      Without giving the plot away, it’s just dark enough to keep you reading and there’s plenty of time spent with Holly to get your Gibney fix but for me, Holly truly shines when she interacts with the two other characters, Jerome and Barbara Robinson. There wasn’t too much of that in this installment.

      To keep this brief. I enjoyed Holly but it didn’t hold me captive like King’s other books. I highly recommend reading the other books in this series before picking up Holly. King does a stellar job of giving you what you need to know but the entire series is just great.

      For more reviews, visit my blog: Book Chatter.
    • 4/5
      As a mystery it works fairly well and the deterioration of the baddies (you know who they are from the beginning) is drawn well. Holly, while not my favorite character, is a good investigator and her methodology and conclusions appear solid. She gets there in the end in many ways. Barbara & Jerome are great as usual, there is more Barbara in this one as another potential victim - that's how it runs; will they get her or Holly? The Covid theme plays large and however you traversed that particular challenge, it feels realistic enough.

      There are references to his other books/movies - Misery, Carrie & It. During the whole wheelchair/van set up, King knows we know and we know he knows we know (references to Al Bundy and Silence of the Lambs which took his technique) and it's like a secret language. Only King does this for me.

      Ok...was workshed a deliberate thing as well? Who says this other than E.D. fans?

      The lack of a cell phone at the end reminds me of older books where instant communication would solve everything, but it doesn't exist. Here it just bodes doom.

      I assume there will be more books from the ending and some dangling secondary plot threads (Holly's mom) and I will gladly read them. Was pretty happy about this one remaining "terrestrial" rather than supernatural in nature although the true evil was possibly more chilling than without it.
    • 4/5
      I've read most of King's books and, while much of his early and middle works are scary and entertaining, I find his more recent work much more satisfying. Part of this is personal preference - I enjoy mysteries and thrillers more than pure horror - but it's also that he's embraced his ability to build characters and frame his plots around those characters rather than twisting the characters to fit the plot. The difference in this integration is particularly evident if you compare a book like Insomnia to one like Holly. Insomnia is a masterful piece of character-driven storytelling. The horror elements, though, are forced. The story would actually be better without them. But in Holly, the horror element takes its shape from the characters. It's still coherent with King's evolution of Lovecraftian horror, but it fits better in the story. In many ways, that makes it more frightening because it's more believable.

      The antagonists in Holly are truly disturbing and strangely familiar - not so much in what they do (which is no crazier than the actions of real-life serial killers), but in the way they think, which is merely an extension of a lot of the rhetoric we all get to hear these days.

      I've seen complaints about King's "political agenda" in Holly. King makes no secret of his political and social views, as anyone with access to the platform formerly known as Twitter knows. More importantly, though, nothing he writes here is imposed on the story. If anything, he's reporting the conditions during the pandemic as they were. In an era when wearing a mask was (still is?) seen as a political statement, everyday public interactions inevitably touched on political topics. And frankly, King portrays characters on the other side of the political spectrum with remarkable kindness. The bad guys, of course, are the extreme logical extension of certain current political beliefs, and are not likeable at all, but even there, King shows them as people who can be both loving and cruel, not one-dimensional comic book villains.

      Holly herself is the best part of the book, of course. I've complained in the past about King's ability to write women, but here he's created a really believable female protagonist who is rounded and whole and imperfect and deeply appealing. Perhaps I'm partial to Holly because the damage she must navigate to live is familiar, perhaps because that damage manifests in ways similar to the experience of being on the spectrum. I don't know if KIng meant to write an autistic character, but he succeeded. It's nice to see a character like this who isn't presented as being too disabled to function in the world, but whose difficulties are not downplayed.

      Like most of King's work, Holly is the sort of book you shouldn't pick up unless you have a lot of time in the next day or two. When the audiobook came up in my Libby queue, I set aside my current reading to start it, thinking I'd dip in and out over the next week. That was less than twenty-four hours ago. I've had next to no sleep. I bought the physical book this morning so I could read it during my down time and listen to the audiobook from the library while I drove and did chores. It's not even noon of the second day and I've finished. I've no regrets about buying the book, though, as I will have to reread it more carefully. This reading was a gulp, lol.
    • 4/5
      Very minor spoiler alert: At the end of the book, King, speaking through his protagonist Holly, says that the killers here were even scarier than some of the others she has encountered in her career because unlike the others who were possessed by supernatural manifestations of pure evil, these were just normal humans doing evil things and that makes them even scarier. My response to that is, no, Steve. No, that doesn't really make them scarier. Kind of the opposite.

      This book was okay. I read it because I'm invested in Holly's ongoing story and I will probably read more of her story if he writes more. But it wasn't one of his better books. (Although it beat Billy Summers by a mile, imo.)

    Book preview

    Holly - Stephen King

    October 17, 2012

    1

    It’s an old city, and no longer in very good shape, nor is the lake beside which it has been built, but there are parts of it that are still pretty nice. Longtime residents would probably agree that the nicest section is Sugar Heights, and the nicest street running through it is Ridge Road, which makes a gentle downhill curve from Bell College of Arts and Sciences to Deerfield Park, two miles below. On its way, Ridge Road passes many fine houses, some of which belong to college faculty and some to the city’s more successful businesspeople—doctors, lawyers, bankers, and top-of-the-pyramid business executives. Most of these homes are Victorians, with impeccable paintjobs, bow windows, and lots of gingerbread trim.

    The park where Ridge Road terminates isn’t as big as the one that sits splat in the middle of Manhattan, but close. Deerfield is the city’s pride, and a platoon of gardeners keep it looking fabulous. Oh, there’s the unkempt west side near Red Bank Avenue, known as the Thickets, where those seeking or selling drugs can sometimes be found after dark, and where there’s the occasional mugging, but the Thickets is only three acres of 740. The rest are grassy, flowery, and threaded with paths where lovers stroll and benches where old men read newspapers (more and more often on electronic devices these days) and women chat, sometimes while rocking their babies back and forth in expensive prams. There are two ponds, and sometimes you’ll see men or boys sailing remote-controlled boats on one of them. In the other, swans and ducks glide back and forth. There’s a playground for the kiddies, too. Everything, in fact, except a public pool; every now and then the city council discusses the idea, but it keeps getting tabled. The expense, you know.

    This night in October is warm for the time of year, but a fine drizzle has kept all but a single dedicated runner inside. That would be Jorge Castro, who has a gig teaching creative writing and Latin American Lit at the college. Despite his specialty, he’s American born and bred; Jorge likes to tell people he’s as American as pie de manzana.

    He turned forty in July and can no longer kid himself that he is still the young lion who had momentary bestseller success with his first novel. Forty is when you have to stop kidding yourself that you’re still a young anything. If you don’t—if you subscribe to such self-actualizing bullshit as forty is the new twenty-five—you’re going to find yourself starting to slide. Just a little at first, but then a little more, and all at once you’re fifty with a belly poking out your belt buckle and cholesterol-busters in the medicine cabinet. At twenty, the body forgives. At forty, forgiveness is provisional at best. Jorge Castro doesn’t want to turn fifty and discover he’s become just another American manslob.

    You have to start taking care of yourself when you’re forty. You have to maintain the machinery, because there’s no trade-in option. So Jorge drinks orange juice in the morning (potassium) followed most days by oatmeal (antioxidants), and keeps red meat to once a week. When he wants a snack, he’s apt to open a can of sardines. They’re rich in Omega 3s. (Also tasty!) He does simple exercises in the morning and runs in the evening, not overdoing it but aerating those forty-year-old lungs and giving his forty-year-old heart a chance to strut its stuff (resting heart rate: 63). Jorge wants to look and feel forty when he gets to fifty, but fate is a joker. Jorge Castro isn’t even going to see forty-one.

    2

    His routine, which holds even on a night of fine drizzle, is to run from the house he shares with Freddy (theirs, at least, for as long as the writer-in-residence gig lasts), half a mile down from the college, to the park. There he’ll stretch his back, drink some of the Vitaminwater stored in his fanny pack, and jog back home. The drizzle is actually invigorating, and there are no other runners, walkers, or bicyclists to weave his way through. The bicyclists are the worst, with their insistence that they have every right to ride on the sidewalk instead of in the street, even though there’s a bike lane. This evening he has the sidewalk all to himself. He doesn’t even have to wave to people who might be taking the night air on their grand old shaded porches; the weather has kept them inside.

    All but one: the old poet. She’s bundled up in a parka even though it’s still in the mid-fifties at eight o’clock, because she’s down to a hundred and ten pounds (her doctor routinely scolds her about her weight) and she feels the cold. Even more than the cold, she feels the damp. Yet she stays, because there’s a poem to be had tonight, if she can just get her fingers under its lid and open it up. She hasn’t written one since midsummer and she needs to get something going before the rust sets in. She needs to represent, as her students sometimes say. More importantly, this could be a good poem. Maybe even a necessary poem.

    It needs to begin with the way the mist revolves around the streetlights across from her and then progress to what she thinks of as the mystery. Which is everything. The mist makes slowly moving halos, silvery and beautiful. She doesn’t want to use halos, because that’s the expected word, the lazy word. Almost a cliché. Silvery, though… or maybe just silver…

    Her train of thought derails long enough to observe a young man (at eighty-nine, forty seems very young) go slap-slapping by on the other side of the road. She knows who he is; the resident writer who thinks Gabriel García Márquez hung the moon. With his long dark hair and little pussy-tickler of a mustache, he reminds the old poet of a charming character in The Princess Bride: My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die. He’s wearing a yellow jacket with a reflective stripe running down the back and ridiculously tight running pants. He’s going like a house afire, the old poet’s mother might have said. Or like the clappers.

    Clappers makes her think of bells, and her gaze returns to the streetlight directly across from her. She thinks, The runner doesn’t hear silver above him / These bells don’t ring.

    It’s wrong because it’s prosy, but it’s a start. She has managed to get her fingers under the lid of the poem. She needs to go inside, get her notebook, and start scratching. She sits a few moments longer, though, watching the silver circles revolve around the streetlights. Halos, she thinks. I can’t use that word, but that’s what they look like, goddammit.

    There is a final glimpse of the runner’s yellow jacket, then he’s gone into the dark. The old poet struggles to her feet, wincing at the pain in her hips, and shuffles into her house.

    3

    Jorge Castro kicks it up a bit. He’s got his second wind now, lungs taking in more air, endorphins lit up. Just ahead is the park, scattered with old-fashioned lamps that give off a mystic yellow glow. There’s a small parking lot in front of the deserted playground, now empty except for a passenger van with its side door open and a ramp sticking out onto the wet asphalt. Near its foot is an elderly man in a wheelchair and an elderly woman down on one knee, fussing with it.

    Jorge pulls up for a moment, bending over, hands grasping his legs just above the knees, getting his breath back and checking out the van. The blue and white license plate on the back has a wheelchair logo on it.

    The woman, who is wearing a quilted coat and a kerchief, looks over at him. At first Jorge isn’t sure he knows her—the light in this small auxiliary parking lot isn’t that good. Hello! Got a problem?

    She stands up. The old guy in the wheelchair, dressed in a button-up sweater and flat cap, gives a feeble wave.

    The battery died, the woman says. It’s Mr. Castro, isn’t it? Jorge?

    Now he recognizes her. It’s Professor Emily Harris, who teaches English literature… or did; she might now be emerita. And that’s her husband, also a teacher. He didn’t realize Harris was disabled, hasn’t seen him around campus much, different department in a different building, but believes the last time he did, the old guy was walking. Jorge sees her quite often at various faculty get-togethers and culture-vulture events. Jorge has an idea he’s not one of her favorite people, especially after the departmental meeting about the now-defunct Poetry Workshop. That one got a little contentious.

    Yes, it’s me, he says. I’m assuming you two would like to get home and dry off.

    That would be nice, Mr. Harris says. Or maybe he’s also a professor. His sweater is thin and he’s shivering a little. Think you could push me up that ramp, kiddo? He coughs, clears his throat, coughs again. His wife, so crisp and authoritative in department meetings, looks a bit lost and bedraggled. Forlorn. Jorge wonders how long they’ve been out here, and why she didn’t call someone for help. Maybe she doesn’t have a phone, he thinks. Or left it at home. Old people can be forgetful about such things. Although she can’t be much more than seventy. Her husband in the wheelchair looks older.

    I think I can help with that. Brake off?

    Yes, certainly, Emily Harris says, and stands back when Jorge grabs the handles and swings the wheelchair around so it faces the ramp. He rolls it back ten feet, wanting to get a running start. Motorized wheelchairs can be heavy. The last thing he wants is to get it halfway up only to lose momentum and have it roll back. Or, God forbid, tip over the side and spill the old guy on the pavement.

    Here we go, Mr. Harris. Hang on, there may be a bump.

    Harris grasps the side-rails, and Jorge notices how broad his shoulders are. They look muscular beneath the sweater. He guesses that people who lose the use of their legs compensate in other ways. Jorge speeds at the ramp.

    Hi-yo Silver! Mr. Harris cries cheerfully.

    The first half of the ramp is easy, but then the chair starts to lose momentum. Jorge bends, puts his back into it, and keeps it rolling. As he does this neighborly chore, an odd thought comes to him: this state’s license plates are red and white, and although the Harrises live on Ridge Road just like he does (he often sees Emily Harris out in her garden), the plates on their van are blue and white, like those of the neighboring state to the west. Something else that’s strange: he can’t remember ever seeing this van on the street before, although he’s seen Emily sitting ramrod straight behind the wheel of a trim little Subaru with an Obama sticker on the back bum—

    As he reaches the top of the ramp, bent almost horizontal now, arms outstretched and running shoes flexed, a bug stings the back of his neck. Feels like a big one from the way heat is spreading out from the source, maybe a wasp, and he’s having a reaction. Never had one before but there’s a first time for everything and all at once his vision is blurring and the strength is going out of his arms. His shoes slip on the wet ramp and he goes to one knee.

    Wheelchair’s going to backroll right on top of me—

    But it doesn’t. Rodney Harris flips a switch and the wheelchair rolls inside with a contented hum. Harris hops out, steps spryly around it, and looks down at the man kneeling on the ramp with his hair plastered to his forehead and drizzle wetting his cheeks like sweat. Then Jorge collapses on his face.

    Look at that! Emily cries softly. Perfect!

    Help me, Rodney says.

    His wife, wearing her own running shoes, takes Jorge’s ankles. Her husband takes his arms. They haul him inside. The ramp retracts. Rodney (who really is also Professor Harris, as it happens) slides into the leftside captain’s chair. Emily kneels and zip-ties Jorge’s wrists together, although this is probably a needless precaution. Jorge is out like a light (a simile of which the old poet would surely disapprove) and snoring heavily.

    All good? asks Rodney Harris, he of the Bell College Life Sciences Department.

    All good! Emily’s voice is cracking with excitement. We did it, Roddy! We caught the son of a bitch!

    Language, dear, Rodney says. Then he smiles. But yes. Indeed we did. He pulls out of the parking lot and starts up the hill.

    The old poet looks up from her work notebook, which has a picture of a tiny red wheelbarrow on the front, sees the van pass, and bends back to her poem.

    The van turns in at 93 Ridge Road, home of the Harrises for almost twenty-five years. It belongs to them, not the college. One of the two garage doors goes up; the van enters the bay on the left; the garage door closes; all is once more still on Ridge Road. Mist revolves around the streetlights.

    Like halos.

    4

    Jorge regains consciousness by slow degrees. His head is splitting, his mouth is dry, his stomach is sudsing. He has no idea how much he drank, but it must have been plenty to have a hangover this horrible. And where did he drink it? A faculty party? A writing seminar get-together where he unwisely decided to imbibe like the student he once was? Did he get drunk after the latest argument with Freddy? None of those things seem right.

    He opens his eyes, ready for morning glare that will send another blast of pain through his poor abused head, but the light is soft. Kind light, considering his current state of distress. He seems to be lying on a futon or yoga mat. There’s a bucket beside it, a plastic floorbucket that could have come from Walmart or Dollar Tree. He knows what it’s there for, and all at once he also knows what Pavlov’s dogs must have felt like when the bell rang, because he only has to look at that bucket for his belly to go into spasm. He gets on his knees and throws up violently. There’s a pause, long enough to take a couple of breaths, and then he does it again.

    His stomach settles, but for a moment his head aches so fiercely he thinks it will split open and fall in two pieces to the floor. He closes his watering eyes and waits for the pain to subside. Eventually it does, but the taste of vomit in his mouth and nose is rancid. Eyes still closed, he fumbles for the bucket and spits into it until his mouth is at least partially clear.

    He opens his eyes again, raises his head (cautiously), and sees bars. He’s in a cage. It’s roomy, but it’s a cage, all right. Beyond it is a long room. The overhead lights must be on a rheostat, because the room is dim. He sees a concrete floor that looks clean enough to eat off of—not that he feels like eating. The half of the room in front of the cage is empty. In the middle is a flight of stairs. There’s a push broom leaning against them. Beyond the stairs is a well-equipped workshop with tools hung on pegs and a bandsaw table. There’s also a compound miter saw—nice tool, not cheap. Several hedge trimmers and clippers. An array of wrenches, carefully hung from biggest to smallest. A line of chrome sockets on a worktable beside a door going… somewhere. All the usual home handyman shit, and everything looking well-maintained.

    There’s no sawdust under the bandsaw table. Beyond it is a piece of machinery he’s never seen before: big and yellow and boxy, almost the size of an industrial HVAC unit. Jorge decides that’s what it must be, because there’s a rubber hose going through one paneled wall, but he’s never seen one like it. If there’s a brand name, it’s on the side he can’t see.

    He looks around the cage, and what he sees scares him. It isn’t so much the bottles of Dasani water standing on an orange crate serving as a table. It’s the blue plastic box squatting in the corner, beneath the sloping ceiling. That’s a Porta-John, the kind invalids use when they can still get out of bed but aren’t able to make it all the way to the nearest bathroom.

    Jorge doesn’t feel capable of standing yet, so he crawls to it and lifts the lid. He sees blue water in the bowl and gets a whiff of disinfectant strong enough to make his eyes start watering again. He closes it and knee-walks back to the futon. Even in his current fucked-up state, he knows what the Porta-John means: someone intends for him to be here awhile. He has been kidnapped. Not by one of the cartels, as in his novel, Catalepsy, and not in Mexico or Colombia, either. Crazy as it seems, he has been kidnapped by a couple of elderly professors, one of them a colleague. And if this is their basement, he’s not far from his own house, where Freddy would be reading in the living room and having a cup of—

    But no. Freddy is gone, at least for now. Left after the latest argument, in his usual huff.

    He examines the crisscrossed bars. They are steel, and neatly welded. It must be a job done in this very workshop—there’s certainly no Jail Cells R Us that such an item could be ordered from—but the bars look solid enough. He grabs one in both hands and shakes it. No give.

    He looks at the ceiling and sees white panels drilled with small holes. Soundproofing. He sees something else, too: a glass eye peering down. Jorge turns his face up to it.

    Are you there? What do you want?

    Nothing. He considers shouting to be let out, but what would that accomplish? Do you put someone in a basement cage (it must be the basement) with a puke bucket and a Porta-John if you mean to come running down the stairs at the first shout, saying Sorry, sorry, big mistake?

    He needs to pee—his back teeth are floating. He gets to his feet, helping his legs by holding onto the bars. Another bolt of pain goes through his head, but not quite as bad as the ones he felt when he swam back to consciousness. He shuffles to the Porta-John, lifts the lid, unzips, and tries to go. At first he can’t, no matter how bad the need. Jorge has always been private about his bathroom functions, avoids herd urinals when he goes to the ballpark, and he keeps thinking of that glass eye staring at him. His back is turned, and that helps a little but not enough. He counts how many days are left in this month, then how many days until Christmas, good old feliz navidad, and that does the trick. He pisses for almost a full minute, then grabs one of the Dasani bottles. He swirls the first mouthful around and spits it into the disinfected water, then gulps the rest.

    He goes back to the bars and looks across the long room: the vacant half just beyond the cage, the stairs, then the workshop. It’s the bandsaw and the miter saw his eyes keep coming back to. Maybe not nice tools for a caged man to be contemplating, but hard not to look at them. Hard not to think of the high whine a bandsaw like that makes when it’s chewing through pine or cedar: YRRRROWWWWW.

    He remembers his run through the misty drizzle. He remembers Emily and her husband. He remembers how they deked him and then shot him up with something. After that there’s nothing but a swatch of black until he woke up here.

    Why? Why would they do a thing like that?

    Do you want to talk? he calls to the glass eye. I’m ready when you are. Just tell me what you want!

    Nothing. The room is dead silent except for the shuffle of his feet and the tink-tink of the wedding ring he wears against one of the bars. Not his ring; he and Freddy aren’t married. At least not yet, and maybe never, the way things are going. Jorge slipped the ring off his father’s finger in the hospital, minutes after Papi died. He has worn it ever since.

    How long has he been here? He looks at his watch, but that’s no good; it’s a wind-up, another remembrance he took when his father died, and it has stopped at one-fifteen. AM or PM, he doesn’t know. And he can’t remember the last time he wound it.

    The Harrises. Emily and Ronald. Or is it Robert? He knows who they are, and that’s kind of ominous, isn’t it?

    It might be ominous, he tells himself.

    Since there’s no sense shouting or screaming in a soundproof room—and it would bring his headache back, raving—he sits down on the futon and waits for something to happen. For someone to come and explain what the fuck.

    5

    The stuff they shot him up with must still be floating around in his head because Jorge falls into a doze, head down and spittle slipping from one corner of his mouth. Sometime later—still one-fifteen according to his Papi’s watch—a door opens up above and someone starts down the stairs. Jorge raises his head (another bolt of pain, but not so bad) and sees black lowtop sneakers, ankle socks, trim brown pants, then a flowered apron. It’s Emily Harris. With a tray.

    Jorge stands up. What is going on here?

    She doesn’t answer, only sets the tray down about two feet from the cage. On it is a bulgy brown envelope stuck into the top of a big plastic go-cup, the kind you fill with coffee for a long drive. Next to it is a plate with something nasty on it: a slab of dark red meat floating in even darker red liquid. Just looking at it makes Jorge feel like vomiting again.

    If you think I’m going to eat that, Emily, think again.

    She makes no reply, only takes the broom and pushes the tray along the concrete. There’s a hinged flap in the bottom of the cage (they’ve been planning this, Jorge thinks). The go-cup falls over when it hits the top of the flap, which is only four inches or so high, then the tray goes through. The flap claps shut when she pulls the broom back. The meat swimming in the puddle of blood looks to be uncooked liver. Emily Harris straightens up, puts the broom back, turns… and gives him a smile. As if they are at a fucking cocktail party, or something.

    I’m not going to eat that, Jorge repeats.

    You will, she says.

    With that she goes back up the stairs. He hears a door close, followed by a snapping sound that’s probably a bolt being run.

    Looking at the raw liver makes Jorge feel like yurking some more, but he takes the envelope out of the go-cup. It’s something called Ka’Chava. According to the label, the powder inside makes a nutrient-dense drink that fuels your adventures.

    Jorge feels he’s had enough adventures in the last however-long to last a lifetime. He puts the packet back in the go-cup and sits on the futon. He pushes the tray to one side without looking at it. He closes his eyes.

    6

    He dozes, wakes, dozes again, then wakes for real. The headache is almost gone and his stomach has settled. He winds Papi’s watch and sets it for noon. Or maybe for midnight. Doesn’t matter; at least he can keep track of how long he’s here. Eventually, someone—maybe the male half of this crazy professor combo—will tell him why he’s here and what he has to do to get out. Jorge guesses it won’t make a whole lot of sense, because these two are obviously loco. Lots of professors are loco, he’s been in enough schools on the writer-in-residence circuit to know that—but the Harrises take it to a whole other level.

    Eventually he plucks the packet of Ka’Chava from the go-cup, which is obviously meant for mixing the stuff up with the remaining bottle of Dasani. The cup is from Dillon’s, a truck stop in Redlund where Jorge and Freddy sometimes have breakfast. He would like to be there now. He’d like to be in Ayers Chapel, listening to one of Reverend Gallatin’s boring-ass sermons. He’d like to be in a doctor’s office, waiting for a proctological exam. He would like to be anywhere but here.

    He has no reason to trust anything the crazy Harrises give him, but now that the nausea’s worn off, he’s hungry. He always eats light before running, saving a heavier caloric intake for when he comes back. The envelope is sealed, which means it’s probably okay, but he looks it over carefully for pinpricks (hypo pricks) before tearing it open and pouring it into the go-cup. He adds water, closes the lid, and shakes well, as the instructions say. He tastes, then chugs. He doubts very much if it has been inspired by ancient wisdom, as the label says, but it’s fairly tasty. Chocolate. Like a frappé, if frappés were plant-based.

    When it’s gone, he looks at the raw liver again. He tries pushing the tray back out through the flap, but at first he can’t, because the flap only swings in. He works his fingernails under the bottom and pulls it up. He shoves the tray out.

    Hey! he shouts at the glass eye peering down at him. Hey, what do you want? Let’s talk! Let’s work this out!

    Nothing.

    7

    Six hours pass.

    This time it’s the male Harris who descends the stairs. He’s in pajamas and slippers. His shoulders are broad but he’s skinny the rest of the way down, and the pajamas—decorated with firetrucks, like a child’s—flap on him. Just looking at this old dude gives Jorge Castro a sense of unreality—can this really be happening?

    What do you want?

    Harris makes no reply, only looks at the rejected tray on the concrete floor. He looks at the flap, then back to the tray. A couple more times for good measure: tray, flap, flap, tray. Then he goes to the broom and pushes it back in.

    Jorge has had enough. He holds the flap and shoves the tray back out. The blood-puddle splashes one cuff of Harris’s PJ bottoms. Harris lowers the broom to push it back, then decides that would be a zero-sum game. He leans the broom against the side of the stairs again and prepares to mount them. There’s not much to him below those broad shoulders, but the deceitful motherfucker looks agile enough.

    Come back, Jorge says. Let’s talk about this man to man.

    Harris looks at him and gives the sigh of a longsuffering parent dealing with a recalcitrant toddler. You can get the tray when you want it, he says. I believe we’ve established that.

    I’m not eating it, I already told your wife. Besides being raw, it’s been sitting at room temperature for… He looks at Papi’s watch. Over six hours.

    The crazy professor makes no reply to this, only climbs the stairs. The door shuts. The bolt runs. Snap.

    8

    It’s ten o’clock by Papi’s watch when Emily comes down. She’s swapped the trim brown pants for a floral wrapper and her own pair of slippers. Can it be the next night? Jorge thinks. Is that possible? How long did that shot put me out? Somehow the loss of time is even more upsetting than looking at that congealing glob of meat. Losing time is hard to get used to. But there’s something else he can’t get used to.

    She looks at the tray. Looks at him. Smiles. Turns to go.

    Hey, he says. Emily.

    She doesn’t turn around, but she stops at the foot of the stairs, listening.

    I need some more water. I drank one bottle and used the other to mix that shake with. It was pretty good, by the way.

    No more water until you eat your dinner, she says, and climbs the stairs.

    9

    Time passes. Four hours. His thirst is becoming very bad. He’s not dying of it or anything, but there’s no doubt he’s dehydrated from vomiting, and that shake… he can feel it coating the sides of his throat. A drink of water would wash that away. Even just a sip or two.

    He looks at the Porta-John, but he’s a long way from trying to drink disinfected water. Which I have now pissed in twice, he thinks.

    He looks up at the lens. Let’s talk, okay? Please. He hesitates, then says, I’m begging you. He hears a crack in his voice. A dry crack.

    Nothing.

    10

    Two more hours.

    Now the thirst is all he can think about. He’s read stories about how men adrift on the ocean finally start drinking what they’re floating on, even though drinking seawater is a quick trip to madness. That’s the story, anyway, and whether it’s true or false doesn’t matter in his current situation because there’s no ocean for almost a thousand miles. There’s nothing here but the poison in the Porta-John.

    At last Jorge gives in. He works his fingers under the flap, props himself on one arm, and reaches for the tray. At first he can’t quite grasp it because the edge is slippery with juice. Instead of pulling it toward him, he only succeeds in pushing it a little further out on the concrete. He strains and finally pinches a grip. He pulls the tray through the flap. He looks at the meat, as red as raw muscle, then closes his eyes and picks it up. It flops against his wrists, cold. Eyes still closed, he takes a bite. His gorge starts to spasm.

    Don’t think about it, he tells himself. Just chew and swallow.

    It goes down like a raw oyster. Or a mouthful of phlegm. He opens his eyes and looks up at the glass lens. It’s blurry because he’s crying. Is that enough?

    Nothing. And it really wasn’t a bite, only a nibble. There’s so much left.

    "Why? he shouts. Why would you? What purpose?"

    Nothing. Maybe there’s no speaker, but Jorge doesn’t believe that. He thinks they can hear him as well as see him, and if they can hear him, they can reply.

    I can’t, he says, crying harder. "I would if I could, but I fucking can’t."

    Yet he discovers that he can. Bite by bite, he eats the raw liver. The gag reflex is bad at first, but eventually it goes away.

    Only that’s not right, Jorge thinks as he looks at the puddle of congealing red jelly on the otherwise empty plate. It didn’t go away, I beat it into submission.

    He holds the plate up to the glass eye. At first there’s more nothing, then the door to the upstairs world opens and the woman descends. Her hair is in rollers. There’s some sort of night cream on her face. In one hand she holds a bottle of Dasani water. She puts it down on the concrete, out of Jorge’s reach, then grabs the broom.

    Drink the juice, she says.

    Please, Jorge whispers. Please don’t. Please stop.

    Professor Emily Harris of the English Department—perhaps now emerita, just teaching the occasional class or seminar as well as attending departmental meetings—says nothing. The calm in her eyes is, for Jorge, the convincer. It’s like the old blues song says: cryin and pleadin don’t do no good.

    He tilts the plate and slides the jellied juice into his mouth. A few drops splash onto his shirt, but most of the blood goes down his throat. It’s salty and makes his thirst worse. He shows her the plate, empty except for a few red smears. He expects her to tell him to eat that, too—to scoop it up with his finger and suck it like a clot lollipop—but she doesn’t. She tips the bottle of Dasani on its side and uses the push broom to roll it to the flap and through. Jorge seizes it, twists the cap, and drinks half in a series of gulps.

    Ecstasy!

    She leans the broom back against the side of the stairs and starts up.

    What do you want? Tell me what you want and I’ll do it! Swear to God!

    She pauses for a moment, long enough to say a single word: "Maricon." Then she continues up the stairs. The door shuts. The lock snaps.

    July 22, 2021

    1

    Zoom has gotten sophisticated since the advent of Covid-19. When Holly started using it—in February of 2020, which seems much longer than seventeen months ago—it was apt to drop the connection if you so much as looked at it crosseyed. Sometimes you could see your fellow Zoomers; sometimes you couldn’t; sometimes they flickered back and forth in a headache-inducing frenzy.

    Quite the movie fan is Holly Gibney (although she hasn’t been in an actual theater since the previous spring), and she enjoys Hollywood tentpole movies every bit as much as art films. One of her faves from the eighties is Conan the Barbarian, and her favorite line from that film is spoken by a minor character. Two or three years ago, the peddler says of Set and his followers, they were just another snake cult. Now they’re everywhere.

    Zoom is sort of like that. In 2019 it was just another app, struggling for breathing room with competitors like FaceTime and GoTo Meeting. Now, thanks to Covid, Zoom is as ubiquitous as the Snake Cult of Set. It’s not just the tech that’s improved, either. Production values have, as well. The Zoom funeral Holly is attending could almost be a scene in a TV drama. The focus is on each speaker eulogizing the dear departed, of course, but there are also occasional cuts to various grieving mourners in their homes.

    Not to Holly, though. She’s blocked her video. She’s a better, stronger person than she once was, but she’s still a deeply private person. She knows it’s okay for people to be sad at funerals, to cry and choke up, but she doesn’t want anyone to see her that way, especially not her business partner or her friends. She doesn’t want them to see her red eyes, her tangled hair, or her shaking hands as she reads her own eulogy, which is both short and as honest as she could make it. Most of all she doesn’t want them to see her smoking a cigarette—after seventeen months of Covid, she’s fallen off the wagon.

    Now, at the end of the service, her screen begins showing a kinescope featuring the dear departed in various poses at various locations while Frank Sinatra sings Thanks for the Memory. Holly can’t stand it and clicks LEAVE. She takes one more drag on her cigarette, and as she’s butting it out, her phone rings.

    She doesn’t want to talk to anyone, but it’s Barbara Robinson, and that’s a call she has to take.

    You left, Barbara says. Not even a black square with your name on it.

    I’ve never cared for that particular song. And it was over, anyway.

    But you’re okay, right?

    Yes. Not exactly true; Holly doesn’t know if she’s okay or not. But right now, I need to… What’s the word that Barbara will accept? That will enable Holly to end this call before she breaks down? I need to process.

    Understood, Barbara says. I’ll come over in a heartbeat if you want, lockdown or no lockdown.

    It’s a de facto lockdown instead of a real one, and they both know it; their governor is determined to protect individual freedoms no matter how many thousands have to sicken or die to support the idea. Most people are taking precautions anyway, thank God.

    No need for that.

    Okay. I know this is bad, Hols—a bad time—but hang in there. We’ve been through worse. Maybe—almost certainly—thinking about Chet Ondowsky, who took a short and lethal trip down an elevator shaft late last year. And booster vaccines are coming. First for people with bad immune systems and people over sixty-five, but I’m hearing at school that by fall it’ll be everyone.

    That sounds right, Holly says.

    And bonus! Trump’s gone.

    Leaving behind a country at war with itself, Holly thinks. And who’s to say he won’t reappear in 2024? She thinks of Arnie’s promise from The Terminator: I’ll be back.

    Hols? You there?

    I am. Just thinking. Thinking about another cigarette, as it happens. Now that she’s started again she can’t seem to get enough of them.

    Okay. I love you, and I understand you need your space, but if you don’t call back tonight or tomorrow I’ll call you again. Fair warning.

    Roger that, Holly says, and ends the call.

    She reaches for her cigarettes, then pushes them away and puts her head down on her crossed arms and begins to cry. She’s cried so much lately. Tears of relief after Biden won the election. Tears of horror and belated reaction after Chet Ondowsky, a monster pretending to be human, went down the elevator shaft. She cried during and after the Capitol riot—those were tears of rage. Today, tears of grief and loss. Except they are also tears of relief. That’s awful, but she supposes it’s also human.

    In March of 2020, Covid swept through almost all of the nursing homes in the state where Holly grew up and can’t seem to leave. That wasn’t a problem for Holly’s Uncle Henry, because at that time he was still living with Holly’s mother in Meadowbrook Estates. Even then Uncle Henry had been losing his marbles, a fact of which Holly had been blissfully unaware. He’d seemed pretty much okay on her occasional visits, and Charlotte Gibney kept her own concerns about her brother strictly to herself, following one of the great unspoken rules of that lady’s life: if you don’t talk about something, if you don’t acknowledge it, it isn’t there. Holly supposes that’s why her mother never sat her down and had The Conversation with her when she was thirteen and started to develop breasts.

    By December of last year Charlotte was no longer able to ignore the elephant in the room, which was no elephant but her gaga older brother. Around the time Holly was beginning to suspect Chet Ondowsky might be something more than a local TV reporter, Charlotte enlisted her daughter and her daughter’s friend Jerome to help her transport Uncle Henry to the Rolling Hills Elder Care facility. This was around the time the first cases of the so-called Delta variant began to appear in the United States.

    A Rolling Hills orderly tested positive for this new and more communicable version of Covid. The orderly had refused the vaccinations, claiming they contained bits of fetal tissue from aborted babies—he had read this on the Internet. He was sent home, but the damage was done. Delta was loose in Rolling Hills, and soon over forty of the oldies were suffering various degrees of the illness. A dozen died. Holly’s Uncle Henry wasn’t one of them. He didn’t even get sick. He had been double-vaxxed—Charlotte protested but Holly insisted—and although he tested positive, he never got so much as the sniffles.

    It was Charlotte who died.

    An avid Trump supporter—a fact she trumpeted to her daughter at every opportunity—she refused to get the vaccinations or even to wear a mask. (Except, that was, at Kroger and her local bank branch, where they were required. The one Charlotte kept for those occasions was a bright red, with MAGA stamped on it.)

    On July 4th, Charlotte attended an anti-mask rally in the state capital, waving a sign reading MY BODY MY CHOICE (a sentiment that did not keep her from being adamantly anti-abortion). On July 7th, she lost her sense of smell and gained a cough. On the 10th, she was admitted to Mercy Hospital, nine short blocks from Rolling Hills Elder Care, where her brother was doing fine… physically, at least. On the 15th, she was placed on a ventilator.

    During Charlotte’s final, brutally short illness, Holly visited via Zoom. To the very end Charlotte continued to claim that the Coronavirus was a hoax, and she just had a bad case of the flu. She died on the 20th, and only strings pulled by Holly’s partner, Pete Huntley, prevented her body being stored in the refrigerated truck that was serving as an adjunct to the morgue. She was taken to the Crossman Funeral Home instead, where the funeral director had quickly arranged the Zoom funeral. A year and a half into the pandemic, he had plenty of experience in such televised final rites.

    Holly finally cries herself out. She thinks about watching a movie, but the idea has no appeal, which is a rarity. She thinks about lying down, but she’s slept a lot since Charlotte died. She supposes that’s how her mind is dealing with grief. She doesn’t want to read a book, either. She doubts if she could keep track of the words.

    There’s a hole where her mother used to be, it’s as simple as that. The two of them had a difficult relationship which only got worse when Holly started to pull away. Her success in doing that was largely down to Bill Hodges. Holly’s grief was bad when Bill passed—pancreatic cancer—but the grief she feels now is somehow deeper, more complicated, because Charlotte Gibney was, tell the truth and shame the devil, a woman who specialized in smotherlove. At least when it came to her daughter. Their estrangement only got worse with Charlotte’s wholehearted embrace of the ex-president. There had been few face-to-face visits in the last two years, the final one on the previous Christmas, when Charlotte cooked all of what she imagined were Holly’s favorite foods, every one of which reminded Holly of her unhappy, lonely childhood.

    She has two phones on her desk, her personal and her business. Finders Keepers has been busy during the time of the pandemic, although investigations have become rather tricky. The firm is shut down now, with messages on her office phone and Pete Huntley’s saying the agency will be closed until August 1st. She considered adding because of a death in the family and decided that was no one’s business. When she checks the office phone now, it’s only because she’s on autopilot for the time being.

    She sees she’s gotten four calls during the forty minutes while she was attending her mother’s funeral. All from the same number. The caller has also left four voicemails. Holly thinks briefly of simply erasing them, she has no more desire to take on a case than she has to watch a movie or read a book, but she can’t do that any more than she can leave a picture hanging crooked or her bed unmade.

    Listening doesn’t render an obligation to call back, she tells herself, and pushes play for the first VM. It came in at 1:02 PM, just about the time the last Charlotte Gibney Show got going.

    "Hello, this is Penelope Dahl. I know you’re closed, but this is very important. An emergency, in fact. I hope you’ll call me back

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