Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

 STEPHEN KING – BILLY SUMMERS – 2021

 https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/let-king-snipe-your-mind-e1d5ab543284

You will of course recognize some of the references to or recollections of other works by Stephen King. The most important one is probably The Shining since in the mountain-refuge the story comes to Bill and Alice can go on a short walk and come to a bluff overlooking a valley and on the other side they can see the place where The Overlook hotel used to be, a hotel that burned down to the ground in the old novel, or at least we can assume it did, and a painting of some the hedge or garden animals carved in some evergreens are represented in that refuge, in the outer summer-lodge, as a framed picture, and this painting seems of course haunted with a lion that seems to be advancing. That’s the only surreal or supernatural element in this novel that is, in fact, a story that wants to be extremely realistic.

 

The second element is the fact that Billy Summers is a veteran of the war in Iraq where he was a sniper. And this veteran is cast into the character of a writer in order to be, in due time, the shooter who will kill some other hitman for a serious amount of money. The novel here contains a detailed description of his mission or missions in Iraq and what came afterward, how he became a hitman for some criminals. He pretends he only shoots bad people, but that does not change the fact he is a hitman and as such has no ethical dimension at all. He has no reason to take justice in his own hands, even if in Iraq he just did that in his uniform, with many others as if it were teamwork – though it is purely colonial imperialism – under the US flag and the authority of the Commander in Chief.

 

The war in Iraq was a mistake and a catastrophe and a complete defeat. The book was written in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, and before the escape from Afghanistan in 2021, a debacle, a complete defeat since those they ousted came back into power even before the US troops and other personnel were out. The story about Iraq is that of a brutal, totally unjustified and unjustifiable invasion, with daily actions that were resented as imperialistic and traumatic systematic mass killings. It is summarized in one word, lalafallujah, from the Fallujah neighborhood in Baghdad the Americans literally destroyed, and this lalafallujah is set in parallel with LA-LA-Los Angeles, and thus, is just reduced to a bloody cinematographic long-lasting film that becomes military propaganda in the USA and that is military extermination for the Iraqis.

 

When you have digested this enormous crime against humanity, you may understand why some veterans become completely corrugated and berserk with PTSS or PTSD or paranoid schizophrenia, or any kind of drug addiction or any sort of psychosis. Bill summers who transformed his sniper’s talent into a real vocational and professional talent and competence is a rare case of sanity. He remains sane in his murderous profession, even if he is considered by some of his “employers” as simple-minded if not retarded, a simple person, not highly intelligent, not swift at all, and in no way – except his sniping – competent at any social or intellectual or thoughtful mental work. In fact, this dumb surface is a game, a disguise that enables Billy Summers to anticipate the moves of his employers, and that becomes important with the last mission of his because the order-giving client has decided to get rid of him as soon as his mission is fulfilled.

 

That’s the next level. How Billy Summers is extremely flexible and thus able to integrate any community under a fake identity with a fake profession, etc., for several months. He is intelligent enough to consider that getting out after the completion of the mission is his own responsibility and to organize it secretly as his alternative to the plan of his order-giving client because he considers that is not this client’s responsibility and thus there must be something fishy cooking under this piece of rock. Stephen King uses, in fact, overuses, this deductive power with some allusions to the use of the Internet, even the black Internet, and some acquaintances in the criminal world, to find out what is the real plan of the client. He thus is able to escape the client’s plans, to then disappear, and later on go back up the chain of command, clean up all levels that were not clean in the order given by the client to get rid of Billy Summers as soon as the mission was fulfilled. And that will lead him to the real client.

 

 

That’s where the story is well told but is not really logical. He had practically no time with Nick, the casino criminal of Las Vegas who was the go-between with the client, and yet he tells later on a whole long and detailed explanation about the client, who he was, what he did, the orders he gave, etc. Billy was not able to get all that from Nick, which makes the whole section where he tells Alice about it artificial and in many ways unfounded in the story itself. It is not because it is logical that it justifies it in the story as such and as told.

 

Along the same line, it is amazing how Nick was not really protected in Las Vegas against Billy’s invasion. He only had six people to protect (one to serve) him. And even worse the client, Klerke, is, in fact, living alone with only one security person in his enormous estate somewhere in New York. These top elite criminals normally have more bodyguards, security personnel, and furthermore servants, than a king or a queen in some European kingdom.

 

The end of the story, the fake one, told or written by Alice, as well as the real one told afterward by Alice again, save these weak shortcomings because these two endings are absolutely and amazingly emotional and humanly powerful. And yet something is missing in this novel and Stephen King is trapped by his own desire to teach a lesson – to whom indeed apart from Alice – about how to write a story. He certainly has it right when he says that the story itself is total truth and if it is the telling of real events, what the story tells about these events is the truth within the story, provided it is logical and consistent. The real existential and experiential truth within the events themselves for the people who took part in them is totally evanescent, inconsistent, and unnecessary because in the story only the characters have to be right within their own characterization. Stephen King does not teach us a lot about this, far from it. Any good reader knows that since it is the basis of the cathartic power of any work of fiction.

 

Another and last element I was kept dissatisfied about in the whole novel is the reference to Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin because apart from the title and the author, this fundamental novel of late 19^th century’s French literature is not really specified enough for the readers to see how it may find its place in this novel. The Guardian proposes (excerpt) a brief summary of the plot: “Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1867) is a story of lust, madness, and destruction set within the dingy backstreets of Paris. The eponymous protagonist – a repressed and silently resentful young woman – is married off according to her aunt's wishes to her sickly cousin Camille. When Thérèse meets Camille's robust and earthy friend Laurent, a turbulent passion is unleashed that drives them ultimately to violence and murder.” (August 1, 2010[1]) It obviously has nothing to do with the situations experienced by the main characters. It’s not because Thérèse Raquin and her lover become criminals that it brings any meaning to Stephen King’s story in which the people who become criminals are, in fact, highly successful elite businessmen in the USA and even the world; or the victims of war like Iraq and Afghanistan, and no war of this type occurred in Zola’s lifetime; or the victims are made criminals by disrupted families. As far as I know, in Thérèse Raquin there is no kid of seven to ten years of age shooting cold-dead the violent lover of his mother after this lover has trampled the sister of the young boy to death. Some other references are more justified, especially those coming from the English or Anglo-Saxon tradition, like music for example. But Stephen King should get some advisor on French literature. The fact there is no connection between this reference in the first and the last paragraphs of the novel and the plot of this novel explains why there is no effort to expand this reference to some dramatic dimension.

 

But of course, Stephen King’s storytelling is so good that these shortcomings do not prevent you from or even slow you down in reading on from the beginning to the end, turning the pages so fast you may create a hurricane in your mind or Colorado.

 

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU