Killer and Writer: Stephen Kin: “Billy Summers”. Review. – Culture

Billy Summers sits waiting in the hotel lobby and has a comic book in front of him, from the series “Archie’s Pals and Gals”, but only for disguise, his mind is on “Thérèse Raquin”, the third novel by Émile Zola. It’s Friday lunchtime and he’s supposed to take on a new job for two million, the last coup, then he wants to retire. Billy is in his forties, he was an excellent sniper in the Marines, in the Iraq war, in the fight in Fallujah. Zola’s novel is a young man’s book, he thinks.

Billy likes to play the naive and simple-minded towards others, but he knows very well about fake accounts, surveillance software, wigs or buckled artificial bellies – with all the tricks to make yourself invisible in modern society. Billy Summers is a professional hit man, and for survival in this profession it is important that he keeps his world in order, in an individual way, sensitive and open to everything. An American intellectual, pragmatic and influenced by American culture, a playful reflection of the author Stephen King. Zola’s book, he thinks, is like crossing a novel by James M. Cain with an EC comic from the fifties. The evening after he accepted the new assignment and found out about the victim on the Internet, he watches “Asphalt Jungle”, a “bewitched” film of the last coup. You know the end of stories like this.

Stephen King tells of Billy Summers with cautious precision, sometimes with unheard-of naivety – in which the obvious is always very complex and the underground is a matter of course. The charm of the book comes from its comfort, also in terms of morality. Billy only kills bad people. He despises the super-rich and corrupt, all of them lousy, unscrupulous philistines. His work mainly consists of waiting for the exact moment for the fatal shot. And the narrator Stephen King is a master of procrastination, the passage of time and the still lifes it produces. The days are long, the summer is passing by.

American paternalism can be immensely infantile

Billy poses as a writer, moves into an office in a tower in the city of Red Bluff, from a window there he has the best view of the entrance to the courthouse – on the steps in front of it he is supposed to find an accused murderer when he is going to his trial will do with one shot. While he waits, he builds up fake normal-middle-class livelihoods, he goes by the names David and Dalton, comes into contact with the families in the neighborhood, there are garden parties, Monopoly with the children, lots of Feelgood. Also: sex with a young employee from the office tower. On the outskirts he secretly rents a basement apartment to go into hiding after the shot and the excitement it will cause, and here he finally takes over the supervision of Daphne and Walter, a green lily and a hard-working Lieschen, when a neighbor couple has to travel.

On the street in front of this basement apartment, three guys dump an unconscious girl, Alice, raped three times on a rainy night. Billy brings her into the house and takes care of her, helps her through the nightmares of the nights, together they sing “A man stands in the forest …” He takes revenge for her, on the three guys. American paternalism can be extremely infantile – there is always a shadow of impotence over its striving for protection. Billy could not prevent the death of his little sister, nine years old, when he was a child. Her stepfather brutally killed her.

As a writer, Billy begins to tell his life, childhood in the trailer, youth home, first love, training with the Marines, the bloody commandos in the Iraq war. For the true crime story of the sister’s death, he chooses a literary mode of simplicity. “The man who was with my mom came home with a broken arm … my sister wanted to bake cookies, but they were totally burned … He killed my sister and I don’t even know his name.” Young Billy takes the man’s gun from his soldier’s chest and shoots him right in the chest. Billy calls this story “The Story of Benjy Compson”; the literary model is the first part of William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”. At some point in the course of the writing he will replace the names, Benjy with Billy, Compson with Summers.

King has written about the madness of writing before

Lost and found, a novel about getting lost and about the pain it causes to be found again, about stagnation and about lockdown. The story is located in a strange timelessness, it is full of porous, mysterious places where an inexplicable menace is echoed. “Like everyone else, neither of them knows that a dangerous virus will shut down life in America and around the world in six months …”

There has been the madness of writing with Stephen King before, with the writ-blocked Jack Torrance in “The Shining”. On their escape, Billy and Alice find shelter with Billy’s best friend, whose mountain hut is near the ruins of a burned-down hotel – ghosts are said to roam there, which will also shape Billy’s letter in its final phase.

A love story that remains in the balance, will only come true when it is told, in a diffuse creative process. A book about realism and fatalism, and whether they are not the same in the end. If there is a god, Billy ponders sarcastically on the drive, then he’s doing his job totally shitty. Alice, who woke up in the passenger seat, argues: If there is a god, then he created that. Her gaze fell on the Rocky Mountains for the first time.