But the references do crop up on a fair few pages, and they're detailed enough to make them worth breaking down a little. Harrigan's Phone, The Life of Chuck, Rat Stephen King 26,891 Hardcover 15.69 Holly Stephen King Hardcover 27. They feature in passing, something the main characters stumble across mid-way through their journey. Stephen King 3,105 Paperback 6.23 This item: Billy Summers Stephen King 50,712 Paperback 14.68 The Outsider: A Novel Stephen King 33,866 Paperback 10.99 Elevation Stephen King 13,430 Hardcover 11.07 If It Bleeds: Mr. The first thing worth mentioning is that the events of The Shining don't play a key role in the plot of Billy Summers. How does The Shining feature in Billy Summers?

Unlike many of King's books it's a fairly straight thriller without any overt supernatural elements - but hidden among the disguises and the shootouts is a hat-tip to King's horror roots, and it comes in the form of an Easter egg anyone familiar with The Shining will recognise straight away. Stephen King's latest novel, Billy Summers, is a story about an assassin on one final job. The evil building that facilitated Jack Torrance's infamous axe wielding burned down at the conclusion of Stephen King's 1977 novel The Shining, only to get another mention (this time as an absence rather than a presence) in the 2013 sequel Doctor Sleep.Īnd now, eight years later, it's back again.

The Overlook Hotel may be gone, but its monstrous legacy lives on. (Aug.Warning: Contains mild spoilers for Stephen King's novel, Billy Summers. Agent: Chuck Verrill, Darhansoff & Verrill. King meticulously lays out the details of Billy’s trade, his Houdini-style escapes, and his act to look simpler than he is, but the novel’s main strength is a story within a story: as he preps for months in the small town “east of the Mississippi and just south of the Mason-Dixon Line” where the hit will happen, Billy, masquerading as a novelist, writes his lightly fictionalized autobiography, which grows more candid as it inches closer to current events and illustrates a line he remembers from a Tim O’Brien interview that fiction “was the way to the truth.” This is another outstanding outing from a writer who consistently delivers more than his readers expect. Matters get complicated when a rape victim whose life he saves becomes his confidante and a participant in his plans to get even. But he rightly smells something fishy in the promised $2 million payout and runs rogue when things go south with his employers. Ex-Army sniper turned hit man Billy Summers, the protagonist of this tripwire-taut thriller from MWA Grand Master King ( Later), who views himself as “a garbageman with a gun,” decides his 18th assassination will be his last.

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