Holly by Stephen King

“Gifts are fragile. You must never entrust yours to people who might break it.”

Holly by Stephen King

Holly by Stephen King is a book that I have been waiting for since the moment Stephen King mentioned he was writing it. I love Holly Gibney, she first appears in the Bill Hodges trilogy, then in The Outsider and finally in the collection If It Bleeds. I find myself always wanting more of Holly. Watching her grow as a character, as a person, an investigator from the beginning to now has been an incredible journey. And I’d go on another and another with her if I could.  

Holly is admittedly terrifying. When I read the first chapter of this book, I put it down and turned to my husband and said, “I don’t know if I can read this one.” It immediately got under my skin and rattled me. But it has Holly. So of course I kept reading, and I am so glad I did. Stephen King has a way of writing in that his stories tend to scare me but comfort me in the same moment. It’s hard to explain, but if you know, you know. That being said, the last book of his that creeped me out to this level was Misery. Just like Misery, Holly gave me nightmares, but let me be clear, this book was so much more than scary. 

It’s absolute perfection.

Holly is set during the Covid pandemic. Holly has just lost her mother to Covid. Her mother didn’t believe the virus was real, didn’t get vaccinated and then got sick and died. Still reeling from her mother’s death, and with her partner, Pete also sick with Covid (but who got vaccinated), Finders Keepers is closed. That is until Holly gets a desperate call from Penny Dahl, begging Holly to help her find her daughter, Bonnie, who has gone missing. 

Holly takes the case because she is curious and immediately things don’t add up. The more she investigates, the more she unearths about other possible disappearances. And as she begins to put the pieces together, she realizes she is up against something truly evil, indeed. 

Watching Holly invesitgate and string her conclusions and theories together, while navigating the ups and downs of her personal life and her own insecurities is amazing. I think what makes Holly so special is that she is afraid but tries anyway. She is so incredibly brave, even if she doubts herself on occasion. I find her so relatable and wonderful. She really is a marvel, and I can’t say enough about how much I loved her and this book.

But what I wasn’t expecting, and what I also loved about this book was Barbara Robinson’s storyline. Barbara and Jerome are friends of Holly’s who often help her with her investigations. Seeing them again was fabulous, but Barbara had such an amazing story in this book. While Jerome just finished a book and is in the process of getting it published, Barbara has a writing dream of her own. She loves to write poetry, and she meets and works with Olivia Kingsbury, a renowned poet to become better and grow however she can. And yet, it is the way that Stephen King talks about the creative process of poetry that fueled me. I loved it. King is always someone who speaks about creativity and the art of creating in the best way. Duma Key is one of my favorite books for this reason. But Holly came to me at a time when I had taken a few months off writing, really struggling to find my voice and figure out what words to put on the page next. And then I read Holly, and suddenly I wanted to write again. And books like this become so special to me. They transcend just a story, they become so much more than that, opening doorways and corridors of our mind that we had long ago locked. Long ago thrown away the key to.

I wanted to take one more moment to discuss something I have seen come up in a lot of other reviews of this novel, particularly the negative ones. People are calling this Stephen King’s most political novel to date, and I think it’s so interesting people are seeing this that way. This book is set during the height of Covid, and all I saw reflected on its pages were the reality of the time. Covid was terrifying, people didn’t take it seriously and a lot of people died. It’s not a time to have taken lightly. It’s not something that can just be brushed over, like it didn’t happen. A lot of the world and the US especially, became particularly divided. Covid was a pandemic that became very political in itself, and even in my own family, the effects were widely apparent. So in that sense, I honestly have to say, to me, this story was just set and told in the world exactly as it was at the time. Maybe some people won’t like being reminded of that time, but history is full of the good and the bad, and it’s just life to have them both. 

Holly is brilliant. I highly recommend it, but do yourself a favor and read all the books she appears in first. You’ll appreciate this book so much more. I’ll always be ready to go on another journey with Holly. And if there are no more, I’ll circle back to the beginning. I am a Constant Reader, after all.