The bosses set him up in a modest high-rise across from the court where his fellow hired gun will be making an appearance after being extradited on a murder charge. We find him accepting his final job at the start of the book, killing another hitman, entering deep-cover as a novelist looking for a bit of quiet in a small city. The titular character, a hitman who only kills “bad people,” is an avid reader who often plays dumb to lull his bosses into a false sense of security. King has a long history of writing books with plots about writing or starring writers, and, despite being essentially a rip-roaring heist novel, Billy Summers is no different. And little by little, the story started to spin out from that.” “I started to ask myself, ‘How is he going to do that?’ And I put myself to sleep, many a night, thinking about different possibilities, different ways that that might work. “I started to think about this problem, of a who had to take a shot and get away from the fifth floor, or the high floor, of a building,” he tells Rolling Stone. Stephen King lit upon the idea for his new book, Billy Summers, while telling himself bedtime stories. It’s also very much a part of ours as well, with a few Donald Trump references and a foreshadowing of the COVID-19 crisis as Billy hunkers down and has to watch life go by outside, less because of a pandemic and more because of his morally questionable chosen profession.

Those worried he’s gone full Raymond Chandler, never fear: King makes it clear that Billy Summers very much exists in his creepily familiar world. King’s known for his literary villains, yet in creating his killer title protagonist, he exquisitely gets into the mind of a hitman and roots around in there to figure out what kind of person would do wetwork, the loneliness involved for those who choose that as a career path and the effect it would have on friends and loved ones. Actually is as good at the hard-boiled prose – in this case, the tale of an extremely effective assassin trying to get out after one last job – as he is the scary stuff.

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