Holly

Holly (2023) by Stephen King

Genre: Horror story in which the only characters that aren’t extremely cringe are the ones that are scary (but they are indeed quite scary)

Recommended For: Someone who is not a scaredy pants. In fact, they crave reading something that will freak them out and they don’t want to turn the page if they might not get a shiver down their spine.

Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

Writing certainly seems like something you can age into gracefully, and to be fair, there are plenty of examples of writers doing extraordinary work into old age.

So, I don’t know what Stephen King’s excuse is. I never read any of his most acclaimed work from decade’s past, so I’m going to leave it to you King diehards to tell me straight: Was the dialogue in his books always this goddamn embarrassing?

This is a guy who has written so many books that they started asking him to write books on How To Write. Each character in Holly is so intensely one-dimensional in the way they talk and are described (barring a twist that really has more to do with plot development than dialogue or character description).

I could do a long personal preamble in my review of this book, but I’m not sure it really deserves it because my jaw just about hit the floor every time a Black character spoke or was described. Anyone under 60 years old finishes reading about 20 specific paragraphs in this book and thinks, “We get it, they’re Black, Jesus Christ.” Imagining King siting at his laptop and writing what he considers Black slang for an adolescent boy makes me wonder if that boy’s eventual fate of getting eaten by human cannibals was actually less offensive.

His neurotic characters never cease to communicate their neuroticism. His hard-edged characters are predictably trying to do the right thing but are just tired of the world and its confusing contours. Each character is written how I imagine a boomer would describe interpersonal relationships, except that I think most boomers would also hate this book and find it completely unrewarding.

All that being said, do you know which characters aren’t unbearably cringe? The ones that are terrifying. When King isn’t projecting and shoehorning pesonalities onto normal people who he doesn’t know how to make interesting, he can do what he does best: push forward a horror tale. The characters he can write are the ones where there aren’t blanks to fill in with normalcy. Psychopaths can be whatever you tell us they are. We are a prisoner to their perverse motivations. And the freaks in Holly are true freaks; geriatrics that catch and eat humans because they believe it solves the ailments that come with aging.

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Repetition and practice are important. But there’s this Gladwellian myth that people get masterfully good at something once they’ve done it enough times, despite the obvious possibility that you can repeat bad habits enough times to engrain them into your process and become resistant to the notion that you need to take steps back and unlearn some things.

If you can only write monsters, you’re missing a pretty essential part about being a writer. If you can only push plot forward, you’re missing out on why I read: the ways people can live within in a story.

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