Billy Summers and the Many Writers of Stephen King

Billy Summers 
On its surface, King’s latest novel is about a hired gun with a moral compass working one last job before retiring. The story is intense, and the action is thrilling for sure, but this book is really a writer’s journey, both literally and figuratively. Billy Summers, a veteran sniper with a shocking and sad backstory, poses as a writer working on his memoir while he waits for the day he can hit his last target. At a certain point, though, he’s no longer posing as a writer but becoming one in his own right. Billy Summers uses the story within a story literary device to well, tell the real story of our hero, which is so much deeper and interesting than what readers may initially think. Along the way, he meets a girl named Alice and shares his story with her while they travel across the country, through towns from iconic King stories including Las Vegas, Hemingford Home (The Stand) and Sidewinder (The Shining, Misery, Doctor Sleep). Ultimately, Alice decides to take up the craft herself. In a particularly striking moment toward the end of the novel, she says, “When I was writing, I forgot to be sad. I forgot to worry about the future. I forgot where I was. I didn’t know that could happen. […] Did you know that you could sit in front of a screen or a pad of paper and change the world? It doesn’t last, the world always comes back, but before it does, it’s awesome. It’s everything.”

Misery 
Paul Sheldon, author of a popular romance series, has just killed off his main character. Big mistake, huge! As readers, we all know how it feels when authors kill our favorite characters, and most of us are emotionally equipped to deal with such a loss. Unfortunately, Paul isn’t so lucky. He’s out driving during a blizzard in Sidewinder, Colorado (there it is again), and he crashes his car, shattering his legs. His “number one fan” Annie Wilkes rescues him, bringing him to her isolated farmhouse and vows to nurse him back to health. Except there’s just one tiny issue: she is absolutely incensed that he dared to kill off her favorite character, and if he expects her to continue caring for him, he’d better get to work on a new novel and bring Misery back to life. There are a few reasons this story has remained popular with Stephen King’s readers all these years, and yes, one of them does involve a certain infamous scene with an axe, but mostly it resonates because this is a horrifying story of gaslighting, torture, and ultimately, desperation. Can writers and creators tell the stories they want to tell, or do they exist at the mercy of their fans?

It 
It has captured the imaginations (and nightmares) of kids and adults alike for over 30 years. The story kicks off in 1957 when little Georgie Denbrough goes outside to play during a rainstorm. We all know what happens next. From that day on, Georgie’s big brother Bill is riddled with guilt, and the more he and the other children of Derry, Maine, run into the horror known as IT, the more determined he is to stop it. As an adult, he turns this trauma into a successful career as a writer of horror novels, but it takes a while to get there. As a student at the University of Maine, he faces criticism from his professor and peers for writing what they see as pulp — a criticism King himself often gets. Still, there’s something in him compelling him to write: “he feels a holy exaltation as he goes about the business of writing this story; he even feels that he is not so much telling the story as he is allowing the story to flow through him. At one point he puts his pen down and takes his hot and aching hand out into ten-degree December cold where it nearly smokes from the temperature change. He walks around, green cut-off boots squeaking in the snow like tiny shutter-hinges which need oil, and his head seems to bulge with the story; it is a little scary, the way it needs to get out. He feels that if it cannot escape by way of his racing hand that it will pop his eyes out on its urgency to escape and be concrete.”

Bag of Bones 
Bag of Bones is a haunting yet moving story of grief and loss. Like Misery, this novel’s protagonist is a bestselling author. Four years after the sudden death of this wife, Mike Noonan hasn’t written a single word, not that his editor necessarily knows that since he’s been pulling manuscripts out of his safe deposit box to meet deadlines. He is haunted by her passing, haunted by her memory, and haunted by the prospect of a child that never was — shortly before her brain aneurysm, she purchased a pregnancy test and never got the chance to tell him the results. Soon, he is plagued by vivid nightmares, so he decides a change of scenery is in order. He goes to their isolated lake house in the woods (what’s with these people going to isolated houses? Don’t they know that’s where the scary stuff happens?) to reset and maybe start writing again. Instead, he finds himself involved in the legal drama of the child custody dispute of a new friend and becomes wrapped up in another kind of haunting: that of a long-dead woman and her lost child where his lake house stands. Despite all of this — and the increasingly frightening nightmares — it’s actually pretty good for writing. “This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time.”

The Shining 
All roads lead back to the Overlook. Unfortunately, actual ghosts aren’t as conducive to writing for recovering alcoholic and aspiring writer Jack Torrance as they are for Mike Noonan. After getting fired from his job as an English teacher, Jack moves his family to Sidewinder, Colorado, to work as the winter groundskeeper of the Overlook Hotel during its off season. He tells his reluctant wife — and himself — the move will be good for them. Their family will have a chance to heal and bond in this picturesque setting! He’ll finally get around to writing that book and achieving his dream of becoming an author! Alas, some dreams just won’t ever come to fruition, especially if the place you choose to reset your life is a haunted hotel that feeds on the misery and despair of its inhabitants. After all, “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” The Shining is classic King, filled with ghosts and even more terrifying bouts of rage and fears of being emasculated, made only more unsettling when you find out that King realized years later that he basically wrote the book about himself in “a kind of self-psychoanalysis.”  Side note: when you read Billy Summers, keep an eye out for certain horrifying animal-shaped hedges.